into their day, gleaming automatic doors
sliding open to the freshly manicured wing
of hedge flagging the hospital’s
brick facade where an early spring’s late morning lilts
into music, scattered chirpings
rising from the green.
RIVER HORSE (HIPPOPOTAMUS AMPHIBIUS), OKAVANGO DELTA
What seemed a scattering of grass-torn seeds clarifies
as levitation, my lap’s notebook
dusted with wings—midges both paper
and ink, breath and alphabet, as Shadrach releases us
from shore, poling the mokoro-trafficked clear-cut
Recalling the fossil of your longing
for elsewhere, what golden orb spiders, reed
to reed, have veiled with webs I can’t help
but raze, my face both bow and blade,
an unhoused spider’s dark filigree of amber pearls
briefly jeweling my hand. What’s lost
most remains: Each spindled shadow’s the stain
of a long-gone season’s deeper green
fringing these waters my twenty-years-ago husband
scrubbed his wedding ring away to
with a frying pan’s grit, only our guide urging return
to sift the shifting sand of those sweet shallows we’d
long since decamped. This much
I’ve learned—what’s rinsed in flow
roots in sand; what rises from flood dries still
to a bristling hiss. Hippo grass, your food
and your shelter, can grow so rich it starves
the channel, and so itself, though
however beautifully balanced to clot
your every need, even the most perfect lagoon you’ll
eventually abandon. Invisible,
mute, the current I trail my fingers to braids
an elaborate calligraphy: Lily stems snarled
to drowned bouquets beneath a leaf-fanned surface
undulating with midge-drenched blooms
as Shadrach names each aquatic grass
and flower—Vein Ink, Bullrush, Riverbed Tea, Magic
Quarri—before landing a half-swamped island
for game walking, a pack lunch we share, cigarettes he swears
he’s giving up. No animals in sight, he names me
the trees—Jackal Berry, Leadwood, Rain—that fashioned a history
we both remember: dugouts his boat only mimics now
in fiberglass, no longer to feed the diminishing
of trees long lost to the shoulders
of tomorrow’s sand road, white tarmac ashen as the view
I’ll abandon, a room’s mosquito net wound
to a gauze chandelier hovering above a still
made-up bed. Ashen as the museum’s
glassed remains: Hippopotamus amphibius, fetus
decades bleaching. How far you’ve traveled, River
Horse, from Herodotus, from Job’s Behemoth, the first
of the works of God, to this doll-perfect
stall, a half-formed smile’s unlit wick
clipped before the first flare
of breath, before a single letting go
to sink to the safety of sand, river bottom you would
have so deftly run. Animated here only
in freeze: a diorama’s painted background for birds
dangling in faux flight—Fishing Eagle,
Orange Hornbill, Red-Eyed Dove
whose call Shadrach echoed so I might know it
after, alone—when I would hear it, still unshored
by memory, his hand on my shoulder
to turn me not to him but
to you, River Horse, finally skating the pooled horizon
as if all you needed of world was water
and sky: not the halo of blood sweat that saves you
from burn; not the failing sun, the golden noose
of late afternoon light you rose through, that immersion
in warmth the ghost of a palm too briefly
lingering—Shadrach, the one who entered the flame
in faith, who embraced the fire,
who was not consumed.
STILL LIFE WITH ADOLESCENT POSSUM AND MIDLIFE CRISIS
Midnight’s staccato, the dog’s warning bark, heralded
your backyard debut: bayed to the chain-
link curtain, in my flashlight’s
spotlight, you, a perfect tableau
the dog’s eager breath fogged but failed
to dampen, your throat sporting
the fur stole of its costumed
unbreathing, your limp tail’s pink curl nearly
noosing your skull’s bone Mohawk—sagittal crest
in spectacular stasis a nod
to your larger-than-life predecessor, role first
created by stone. Your unblinking eyes, a gold scrim—bourbon
and ground glass. A dream
artist’s model, how you could hold
to gesture: You survived by convincing
survival was beyond you, death a diversion
you cued from your pores I’d chase
with drugstore perfumes.
Oh stacked vials of pills, oh sweet
rescue, razors beneath the tongue—melodrama
melded us but for your act’s
one fatal flaw: youth
you hung to, thin hiss you couldn’t resist
as I held you too close to breast
and bone, lifting your towel-swaddled, stiffened body
to safety’s wreath
of long grass. What revived you to the serial
scatter of your kind wasn’t
my light’s lost audience, turning my back
to drag inside the dog now wildly
flinging himself at the gate
closed between you; any new moon
center-staging you, and you’d
hit asphalt, haunting the highway whose shoulder you live
to scavenge—dotted white line basting the abandoned
to away, fastest way out to the next
best thing. Your eyes’ green-gold plates flashing
whose lonely headlights
this time, far from this yard’s blackened
apron and the dog still
raking the fence for any
bitter lingering, dog I’m left calling
and calling from midnight’s tar, your starry rain.
A Semi-Prehensile Lip
Edward Carey
THE MAN CALLED PAUL BUTTERBRODT filled his chair completely, which was a sofa. It was a giltwood sofa with double cane back and sides, and pale pink silk upholstery. Everything was oversized about Paul Butterbrodt—his boots, his breeches, his jacket, his cuffs, even his buttons. He had very thick hair that sat upon the top of his head like thatch. He was a very sensitive man, he cried often, at happy things as at sad. When he ate, his little fingers would stick out. He put seven lumps of sugar in his licorice water and stirred it with a long spoon, all the time kissing the air. He sometimes woke in a bad mood and on such days he spoke very little. Sometimes the wallpaper in his room disturbed him, it was of peacocks. All those eyes, from every corner, watching. He supposed, in his dark moods, that the peacocks might come to life, that there would be a terrible screeching, that he would be found on the floor scratched and pecked at, and the walls, once so colored with those birds and their staring feathers, would now be utterly blank, undecorated, they should have all flown away. Some days he did not like to be left alone, on other days he wished to see no one, and must be coaxed out at great effort.
Apart from the sofa, there were about the room, keeping him company, pieces of furniture of extraordinary delicacy and refinement, fragile, rare things, like him. There was a small writing desk of oak veneer and tulipwood, with Sèvres plaques. There was a D-shaped commode in carved walnut and two flanking side cabinets. An ebony Japanese la
cquer secretary with a white marble top. There were twelve chestnut stools with needlepoint covers in two rows of six facing his sofa, which perhaps might originally have been an alcove bed. These stools were for his visitors.
Every evening, before the great unrest began, he would be seen in his excellently decorated room for six hours. Tickets were available at the door at a cost of three livres per person for a half-hour visit; elsewhere in the city Vaucanson’s mechanical duck was two livres, Nicolet’s tightrope walkers five. There were allowed to be twelve in his room at any time, but no more. The visitors were permitted to ask him questions but, typically, at least at first, they only looked. Everything he did was very novel to them. They viewed him as if he were not of their own species but some strange new animal gotten from far away, where perhaps all the natives were so excessive. As they looked at Paul Butterbrodt, the visitors considered size. They considered how some of us are very small and some not so, how some noses are grown considerable and some chins barely feature at all. Paul Butterbrodt made people think, some brains that were not accustomed to much deep thinking were jolted into activity at the sight of Paul Butterbrodt. He filled so much space, this one man, and they wondered, after a while, if that hurt him. They wondered which rooms, which doorways he would fit into, they wondered if he would fit into their familiar doorways and rooms, they wondered if he would fit into their lives. Generally they concluded that there was not room.
Since the visitors were sometimes too shy or too stunned before this titan to utter words themselves—whilst on contrary occasions they voiced rough and crude observations without a hint of shyness—he had learned to speak to them as they came in. He had discovered that for best results he should take the initiative. He greeted his visitors, no matter their looks or gestures, very graciously. Hoping it might be of interest to them, he told them about himself. And when he spoke, they considered, perhaps for the first time, what a miracle speech was, they were certainly a little impressed that this great achievement of flesh could talk, it was even shocking to them that he had a quiet, pleasant voice. His voice, they supposed, should have been as extraordinary as his body; it was disturbing to them that this great thing that had so much otherness about him should also have some sameness.
“Please do come in,” he would say, “I am very glad to see you. My name is Paul Butterbrodt, how do you do? May I tell you, if it interests, if you were wondering, that I weigh 238 kilos. Do you care for hard facts? Or shall I tell you about an aunt I had who was fond of handkerchiefs? How are you all? How good of you to come to me. Indeed, perhaps you would not mind if I told you a little of myself. I hope you won’t. Do, yes, do please sit down. Thank you so much.”
He had been an eating prodigy since he was a baby, he had had a little sister who had not lasted, she had withered away, she was like a twist of sugar paper, so easily crumpled. Some things do not last. His parents, being Viennese confectioners, sugared him through his childhood and early adulthood. What years those were of limeelderflower marzipan, of hazel krokant, of chamomile chocolate, how years later he would close his eyes and try very hard to recall the particular pleasure of a nougat waffle or rum bonfect, how he would love to place in his mouth a chocolate cat’s tongue and as it dissolved feel the shades and tastes of his departed youth. The fatter he was the happier his parents were, the only way to keep him safe, they thought, was to endlessly feed him, but when the father had been blinded by an exploding vat of molasses and when his mother slipped on iced cherries and broke her head open upon the flagstones, poor Paul had fallen into new company. His girth being commented upon wherever he went, he at last came to the attention of traveling showmen.
“What do I have to do?” he asked.
“Eat,” they said, “just eat. A good deal of eating.”
Tearfully, he left his homeland forever. He toured then, he visited Prague, Lyon, Milan, Vilna, Riga, he had even seen the Coliseum of Rome—indeed he had been positioned in a tent outside it. He was not always well cared for, sometimes his clothes were not changed, but always he was fed. Paul would say, rubbing his eyes with his pudgy fists, “I am always very hungry, I am never full. The more I travel from home, the hungrier I feel. Nothing, no amount, can ever satisfy. When shall the hungry feeling leave?”
He arrived one afternoon in Paris, and even upon the Boulevard du Temple, where the entertainers are based. Suffering from indigestion and a running sore upon his left leg after toppling from his booth onto a wooden stake, hot and shivery as he was, a new showman had successfully bargained for him, and he changed hands. This new man, Monsieur Tallier, shaped like an owl with thick eyebrows and round head, was not unkind. He kept also two albinos from Guadeloupe, young, wide-eyed men who stuck to their own company, whom Paul Butterbrodt saw very rarely. Tallier was a soothing presence, he was very encouraging and complimentary. He touched Paul very lightly on his thigh, inquiring daily into how he felt. Slowly, many mouthfuls later, he was brought back to health and full girth by kindness, by gentleness, and by taking him on outings to other boulevard attractions. It was during one such excursion that Paul Butterbrodt saw something he had never thought possible before, something that moved him very deeply.
The rhinoceros that lived upon the boulevard very quickly became his very favorite excursion. For that leathery, wrinkled creature, Paul Butterbrodt grew a great attachment. From the very beginning, from the intensity of its smell before he had even entered the beast’s tent—for no amount of fresh juniper, thyme, or rosemary could extinguish the potent, musky aroma of the creature—Paul felt a great shifting inside him. He did not know that such a thing ever could be. He came back every day. He brought small gifts with him—some oats, some fruit, some pastries. The keeper, an overdressed, overscented creature, was very happy for this man to feed his rhinoceros for free. Paul Butterbrodt took to singing the beast some songs he had learned as a child back in Vienna, such as the “Song of the Three Holy Kings” and “I’m Not Tired, I’m Not Sleepy,” and soon it seemed to him the animal reacted particularly when he appeared. In his turn, he heard the many noises of the rhinoceros. Paul Butterbrodt would say the great gray monster had a vocal range of considerable variety and mystery. Sometimes Louis, for that was the rhino’s name, let out a high screech as of an animal a tenth of its size. Sometimes he made deafening noises similar to the sawing of wood—sounds that filled the tent and could be a little frightening, for you felt your very soul was being cut into. Sometimes he made a very deep gurgling noise that sounded as if it came from the bottom of a well, a distant booming of a beautiful voice caught deep within. “A strange melancholic singing,” Paul called it. “Listen, Louis is singing back to me. It is such a song, a song of distant lands.”
The history of the rhinoceros was well known. Louis had been taken from faraway Africa when only seven months old. He was to be presented to Louis XV from the Comte de Palet, who had hoped by this gift to return to court and to favor with his king, whom he had insulted by letting drop a careless remark about Madame de Pompadour. But Louis XV, unbeknownst to the crew of the Dufferin just set sail from the Côte d’Ivoire, bound for Bordeaux, had just been given a different rhinoceros by Monsieur Chevalier, the French governor of Chandernagor. When a second rhinoceros was offered, the king refused to accept. How many rhinoceroses did he need in his palace menagerie? Besides, it was said that the king did not like the beast, it seemed a caricature of himself, the Bourbon conk was mimicked in the creature’s large snout, its stockiness, its lack of grace too painfully reminded the king of his own thickening body, of his own mortality. He would not accept de Palet’s gift: One rhino was a splendid thing, two rhinos were a mockery. The Comte de Palet, his hopes of commissions in African diamond mines buried, his dreams of marble all broken, had staked his future and his fortune on the beast and regarding the animal now he saw how absurd and ugly, how preposterous and misshapen those hopes had been. For the rest of his life, in his dreams, in his waking moments, rotting away in his family’s sole surviving p
roperty in Normandy, little more than a piggery with a turret, he saw horned monsters everywhere. He died of heart failure brought on by terror, in the middle of the night, hiding in a cupboard. The spurned rhinoceros was bought by a boulevard entertainer and was named after the monarch he was intended for. So Louis grew up upon the boulevard, and came, after a time, to be visited every day by a considerable man with sweet gifts. It seemed to Paul that he and Louis understood one another very well. When he felt he could get close, he looked into an eye of the great beast, and he swore he could see Louis smiling at him. Sometimes, later on, when he offered the sweet things, Paul found he was able to touch a little piece of rhino skin, it was not as hard as he had thought, it was the surface, he said, of a beautiful map.
“Do you like odd-toed ungulates?” he would ask his visitors, and when the visitor looked confused, he would say authoritatively, “An odd-toed ungulate is a rhinoceros. A horned cow. The upper lip of a rhinoceros is semi-prehensile! There is a rhinoceros upon the boulevard only a few minutes’ walk from here. I cost very nearly as much to keep as the rhinoceros of the boulevard. The rhinoceros consumes twenty livres’ worth of bread, and fourteen buckets, each, of water and of beer every single day. Whereas I have two roast chickens, some veal or mutton, ten livres’ worth of bread, three bottles of wine, and five pints of beer. I am taken to him, once a day, we have a regular appointment with each other. He and I. We are great friends, we shouldn’t like a day to go by without seeing each other. We are the twin highlights of the boulevard.”
But then came the great terrifying changes in the country, and nothing for a long while was certain. From the very start, Paul Butterbrodt was inconvenienced. On the fourteenth of July 1789, the boulevard was closed, shutters were latched, doors were locked. Paul stayed in all day listening to the loud report of cannons, watching, he believed, the peacocks’ feathers rustling. Later he heard, very nearby, shouting and screaming. He hoped very much that Louis was all right. He could not visit him the entire day. He fretted so.
He found him the next day a little startled, needing some comfort. He bought a cone of almond and pistachio cream, it seemed, he thought, to help. Throughout the following weeks and months, Paul was able to bring less extravagant gifts than he liked, sometimes he came with lettuces, sometimes potatoes, a beetroot, a melon, some apples, some days-old bread, some straw, only straw. By then there were fewer objects in his room. One by one they had been taken away and sold—the writing desk, the commode, the secretary. Soon the twelve stools were no longer filled every evening. People across the city were finding different entertainment. Some of the stools were sold off. Monsieur Tallier, Paul’s manager, was worried for his future. He was not so kind as he used to be, he spent less time with Paul, and could be short-tempered. Soon there were only three stools in the room. Then one day Paul Butterbrodt had to fend for himself, the man who fed him was no longer there, he had left the city without a word, taking his albinos with him; the albinos were cheaper than Paul, though there were two of them. What hungry days followed. Paul had some savings with which he was able to keep his own room, for a while he remained open for visitors in the evenings, but very few came. The peacock wallpaper fell away in places. By then Paul Butterbrodt was no longer the impressive spectacle of former days. It depressed him that he weighed now only 180 kilos, at his peak he had been 238, the times had reduced him, he could no longer be fed so much. His days were filled with hunger, from the moment he woke up his hunger would be beside him, wherever he went his hunger followed, when he slept his hunger shifted against him, grinding its teeth, but that mounting pain was often lessened by a visit to Louis, where he sat, his stomach making furious grumbles. He was so much thinner a Paul Butterbrodt than he had used to be that people no longer stopped at the sight of him. He was becoming an ordinary-looking fellow, he did not stick out so much, his clothes billowed about him. He looked big still, certainly very large, but no longer improbable.
Menagerie Page 19
