Had I a Hundred Mouths (8 page)

A “Visiting Poet” is what I am. Walking around an ancient university with a hole in my breast. And not even on the faculty of this venerable institution. Visiting. Being an “invited” poet keeps me from belonging to any staff. I am a wanderer-visitor to various seats of learning, sitting in a temporary Chair. A One-Year Chair, a One-Term Chair. An academic year here, a semester there. Worst of all—surprise!—I'm not even a functioning poet. I have not produced a poem for some years. The flow has—temporarily, one hopes—frozen, shall we say. I just can't for the time being—give. Yet I go on, in the company of beginner poets in classrooms, speaking of what I can't do. Impotence instructing love. What has frozen the juices, stopped the flow in the Poet-in-Residence with the hole in his breast? You ask? Should I have an answer? If I had an answer I might go to work on it. Maybe a loss of faith? I don't know. Something's stopped. The battery fell out somewhere along the way. Where's the power? Also I became grubby. The shine gone. I felt molty. The flower off me. I felt dry. Love! Love unreturned. Do you know,
est-ce que vous savez
, you who took me from the icebound hothouse and now “detain” me, are you acquainted with fouled love? You will answer that that is a sentimental question, even unscrupulous under the circumstances. “Unscrupulous” indeed! Well, that's
your
word, not mine. I'm not trying to work up pity; nor am I trying to build up a case of self-pity, God forbid. But a poet is a person of love, whether he's producing, at the moment, or not; a person with love to give. He's also somebody who needs to get love back—for Christ's sake. You back there who the hell did you think I was, somebody giving all that passion and not getting anything back? How long did you think I could go on like that? I must admit it was my choice to go on like that. I kept hoping you'd change. That you'd come to me. Give me
something back
. And so I went on; giving, giving; went on too far, went into a territory where I couldn't turn back, where I was lost; a territory that was dark and where I felt dark feelings toward you, resentment and hate. My God, I who could love you so much. I, torn lover, who wanted to put you together with tender hands and wanted to tear you apart with the hands of a savage. Love not got back! You somewhere! Perverter! Spoiler! Perverting what was beautiful, fouling what was beautiful. Fouler! Fouler! Fouler! I don't know what kept me from striking you in those days. Because of your fear, your little lack of courage, your selfish little fear. And I keep walking around with a hole in my breast. I could have talked to the Nurseryman about this. We could have had conversations in the deepest nights and in the veiled and humid morning twilights in the healing flower-hung bloom-graced grottos and little primrose bowers, Wisteria arbors of the Nursery. He might have taken my sorrow, smoothed a little my anger, given me some of the wisdom of a gardener, helped me understand the fouling of passion, the spoiling of love. I might have shown him the photographs, the letters, even some of my early poems written in the gone days of my passion and tender love, while they were still pure feeling in me, poetry, before I found a fouling object. Love indeed! Poem-crusher! Poetry-robber! I could have spoken of betrayal, of the knife-cut of tepid love, the stabbing dagger of half-baked feeling. The Nurseryman might have begun to drink less whiskey. He might have felt needed, of service beyond the watering of mute blooms, the feeding of dumb stalks. Does nobody give a penny in Hell for another's woes? If he did not, if the gardener-Nurseryman did not, and put concern and caring for his brothers into the bottle, at least he could have allowed me the company of flowers, passing blooms for a passing visitor. Well he didn't. Even so. He'd probably have annoyed me with drunken slobberings, baby speech. And he couldn't have heard me or would've half-heard me ringing with booze like doorbells in his ears. But I don't know anything and this is all only conjecture. And it doesn't matter now.

But what was between those two, Nurseryman and dead girl, beautiful figure laid out almost obscenely in the leaves and blooms? And why was this sight chosen for me to see, why was I selected as a witness to it? I, no more than a passerby, enchanted by a glowing hothouse in the frozen winter, somehow possessed by a drunken Nurseryman who denied me hospitality when I most needed welcome. Or was there nothing between the two, were they strangers? And therefore was it a murder? Murder in the Biology Lab and at daybreak and the body hurled below, into the greenhouse. There was no stab wound on the perfect body; no prints of a squeezing hand on the fair throat. The classic mound that swelled gently from the bottom of the belly seemed chaste. The fair beautiful body seemed whole and perfect, had fallen, even through glass, whole and perfect, like fruit unbruised—plucked rather than fallen fruit. Was there a sign of struggle in the Laboratory? Paraphernalia overturned? Did Somebody in the heat of quarrel push her through the window? Was there a face of horror at the window when the body fell? Now I saw what passion burned in the Nurseryman's heart. Like a heaving bull. Panting and groaning, he fell upon the naked girl and clutching her to his body rolled and wallowed on the hothouse floor. If she had not already been dead, he might have killed her with his very body. Until the figure of the man and girl, combined into one strange being, half-clothed, with one head of wild and furious hair, lay still under the palms. I managed to take steps, but it was as though each step would draw up the very ground with it, as though my feet were magnets. I dragged closer and knelt to look upon this figure of violence. I saw surely that the Nurseryman was dead. I could not bring myself to touch him to see if he was breathing, but I saw no signs of breathing, heard no breath. The Nurseryman of the cold
No!
, the gardener of the icebound hothouse, had died of passion. I opened my mouth but I could not say any word. Could I have spoken, would I have greeted, at last, the Nurseryman now joined to the body of my admitter to the hothouse? The odd still figure, lasciviously spent, beautiful with white buttocks and tressed with flowing hair, and terrible, too, like a slain beast upon the floor come from the wilds into this fragile garden of poetry and blooming summer, this figure was mine. As though I had created it.

I do not know why I picked up a little spade and slid it as if I were scooping something from the softest part of the flesh of the Nurseryman where his heart hung in the dark of his breast. The spade no doubt dug his heartless heart half out. Had I withdrawn the little scoop it might have spooned out the enigmatic heart to me, like a boiled egg. I wanted the No-man's heart, now not so much in vengeance as in calm curiosity. Almost scientifically. The heart images! I imagined his heart might look like a bell. A bell aloft in the tower of his lungs. A bulb, buried in the depth of his root-veined breast. Testicles, that hung under the shaft of his neck. My God the images. Violence has brought me images. I craved the heart of the dead Nurseryman. They dug out Shelley's heart. They fought on the shore for Shelley's heart. O gardener of this garden, O lost nurse of this Nursery, unhappy and inhospitable host of the icebound greenhouse, what would your heart be like?

And there, shrouded in the warm gathering fog, I sat down with this figure, settled, now, in some kind of understanding far beyond anything I could utter, of the fallen naked girl and the passion-stilled, heart-spaded Nurseryman, and in some kind of joining of them; for strangely I felt the third, we were, somehow, beyond anything I could explain if even I had words, a trio, our experience together and one with the other would never be known but had brought us together in this union, dark brother, wild sister. And there I remained until someone would come. I felt the killing cold creeping in upon the hothouse, and the fog was wrapping us around.

But what could I have to say to those who, hearing the dawn crash, arrived to behold this vision under the palms? And, sleep-thickened, wondered of me what had happened? I was as dumb and as frozen as the gardener had been, I could have been a statue there among the steaming palms. Some did, however, when they got their senses back, recognize the young woman—a sophomore biology student from a neighboring state. The two bodies were so clenched together that they removed them as one, covered with a blanket and carried out into the cold. The little spade made a tent of the blanket as they carried the figure of violence out into the morning cold.

As they took me out of the greenhouse, a chilling vapor rose from the sodden ground. Outside I turned and saw the ruined hothouse. The blooming colors were darkened and already the leaves were blackening in poisonous blotches as if some acid had burned them, and it had only been the winter cold that had touched them. The Nursery was fouled.

My throat felt of iron; my tongue was like a club. I gargled to the questions asked of me. But my case in my head was that the girl stabbed with the spade the violating Nurseryman as I passed by and I'd broken in to be of help. This is a lie I now confess, albeit a lie never told. How can I explain what happened? You expect me to, you, my Captors. But I am afraid and speechless and have no knowledge of anything; I need a friend, someone to help me. I knew I was done for and, without words, I crowed and crooned like a baby and rocked my head No! No! when you came to tell me of my fingerprints on the spade that must have left a moon-shaped scar in the heart of the Nurseryman. The old moon in the new moon's arms. I had never thought of the heart as a moon. Moon in my breast! O moon of my heart! Maybe my old wild poetry will come again to me.

I want to go home! That house rises before me, built once more. Again on the pit floor of my life, it blows into shape before me. That house. It seemed perfect in its simplicity. Its quietness within itself. The humility of it, resting there shady under the trees; the dirt yard, the noble footworn steps. It seemed my last innocence and one of the few beautiful things of openness and plainness that I knew—the woodfire's throbbing glow rosying the room where I slept with my mother while the wind crackled the frozen branches at the window; the peaceful woodfirelight-blessed room, the warmth of the simple room in that strong sure house. Surely it led me to poetry, for it had given me early deep feeling, mornings of unnameable feelings in the silver air, nights of visions after stories told by the lamplight. But oh I see that it held a shadowed life. Even at the best of times the light in that life was contending with a shadow that came back and back and back. “I can never quite get this little handmirror clear,” my mother said, “that was my mother's—and her mother's. Out of a lot of lost stuff, or broken, this little mirror has come through. But there's always been a faint little cast on it that I can never get off, can clean and clean; can hardly see it but it's there; you can wipe it off and look back at it later and there it is, come back, that cast, just right there, there in the left-hand corner, see it? Wonder what it is, guess it's in the very glass.”

On the frosted frontdoor pane was the figure of a mysterious rider with a plumed hat astride a phantom horse the color of a cloud, silver-gray, with plumed cloud-colored mane and plumed silver tail—a Prince? a Knight? But why, I wonder now, was he rearing back as if startled by the knocker at the door, challenging the arriver at the door, “Who are you and why have you come here?” Who put the rider there? Who of my ancestors put the rider there? Why, there were warm stories told at night, loving as often as fearful, as often gay as melancholy. Who among the old dwellers of these rooms was dark? Who put the dark host at the door, rearing suspicious horse and suspicious plumed dark rider shying back from the homeless traveler, from the guest half-welcome? Even for me when sometimes I returned and came, once more, to that door, tired and wanting home. Even there. Even then. O rider I am done for, the brothers in me have for the last time fought, the dark one won, darkness prevailed, O rider why did I ever come to this university, O why did I not resign when I saw the emptiness of this school, the failed professors, these classes in poetry, these students, this town, the depth of my loneliness and hunger?

T
ONGUES
OF
M
EN
AND
OF
A
NGELS

I started out to tell about what became of two cousins and their uncle who loved them, according to what the older cousin told me. But some of their kinfolks' lives would have to be told if you're going to talk at all about the cousins and their uncle. So what I have to tell about first is all one family, what I heard told to me and what I watched happen. I have been here in this family's town longer than any of the family, and have in my long time noted—and wonder if you have, ever—the turning around of some people's lives, as if some force moved in them against their will: runaways suddenly arrived back, to the place they fled; berserk possessed people come serene; apparently Godblessed people overnight fall under malediction.

J
OE
P
ARRISH

Blanch, Louetta's mother, ran away from everybody—mama, papa, husband, child—with a good young Mexican that had worked on the East Texas place, named Juan Melendrez from the Rio Grande Valley. Blanch's husband, Louetta's father, named Joe Parrish, went
loco
at this. He was found lying in the mud of the pigpen, sockeyed and slobbering from what was thought to be a stroke, staring up at the mudcaked pigs grunting over him. And again, some fishermen came upon him prostrate in the steaming weeds of the river. Cottonmouth water moccasins glided all around him yet no snake bothered him. He's gone crazy, said the town, and tried to persuade Blanch's folks to put him in the insane asylum, but they would not. A black woman was brought by Kansas Tate to pull out the devils that had taken hold of Joe Parrish, but she said that they were deeper into him than any she had ever witnessed. She told how devils put roots into a person that thread around his liver and his lights and rope his heart and grow thorns into his lungs. This is why he foams and screams and pants for breath. But then Joe Parrish quieted for a while and sat on the porch, calm. Until one night he was missing. He was gone, leaving Louetta a tragic orphan in her grandparents' house at fourteen.