Gerstler - Dearest creature

Table of Contents

ALSO BY MY GERSTLER

The author gratefully acknowledges prior publication of some of the poems in this book in the following: American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry blog (http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/), Brooklyn Review, Burnside Review, CAB/NET, Coconut, Columbia Poetry Review, DMQ Review, Flight, Jacket, MiPOesias, No Tell Motel, Ocho, and TriQuarterly.

Special thanks to:

Brighde Mullins, Brian Tucker, Paul Slovak, Marnie Weber, Mimi Gerstler, Dinah Lenney, Tom Clark, Bernard Cooper, and David Lehman.

Did you know that boiling to death
was once a common punishment
in England and parts of Europe?
Its true. In 1542 Margaret Davy,
a servant, was boiled for poisoning
her employer. So says the encyclopedia.
Thats the way I like to start my day:
drinking hot black coffee and reading
the 1910 Encyclopdia Britannica.
Its pages are tissue thin and the covers
rub off on your hands in dirt-colored
crumbs (the kind a rubber eraser
makes), but the prose voice is all knowing
and incurably sure of itself. My 1956
World Book runs to 18 volumes and has red
pebbly covers. It begins at aardvark
and ends with zygote. I used to believe
you could learn everything youd ever
need by reading encyclopedias. Who
was E. B. Browning? How many Buddhists
in Burma? What is Byzantine art? Where
do bluebells grow? These days, I own five
sets of encyclopedias from various
eras. None of them ever breathed
a word about the fact that this humming,
aromatic, acid-flashback, pungent, tingly
fingered world is acted out differently
for each one of us by the puppet theater
of our senses. Some of us grow up doing
credible impressions of model citizens
(though sooner or later hairline
cracks appear in our faades). The rest
get dubbed eccentrics, unnerved and undone
by other peoples company, for which we
nevertheless pine. Curses, outbursts,
and distracting chants simmer all day
long in the Crock-Pots of our heads.
Encyclopedias contain no helpful entries
on conducting lifes business while the ruckus
in your skull keeps competing for your
attention; or on the tyranny of the word
normalits merciless sway over those
of us bedeviled and obsessed,
hopeless at school dances, repelled by
mothers suffocating hugs, yet entranced
by foul-smelling chemistry experiments,
or eager to pass sleepless nights seeking
rhymes for misspent and grimace.
Dear girl, your jolly blond one-year-old
brother, who adults adore, fits into
the happy category of souls mostly at home
in the world. He tosses a fully clothed doll
into the inflatable wading pool in your
backyard (splash!) and laughs maniacally
at his own comic genius. You sit alone,
twenty feet from everyone else, on a stone
bench under a commodious oak, reading aloud,
gripping your book like the steering wheel
of a race car youre learning to drive.
Complaints about you are already filtering
in. Youre not big on eye contact or smiling.
You prefer to play by yourself. You pitch fits.
Last week you refused to cut out and paste
paper shapes with the rest of the kids.
You told the kindergarten teacher you were
going to howl like a wolf instead, which you did
till they hauled you off to the principals
office. Ah, the undomesticated smell
of open rebellion! Your troublesome legacy,
and maybe part of your charm, is to shine
too hotly and brightly at times, to be lost
in a maze of sensations, to have
trouble switching gears, to be socially
clueless, to love books as living things,
and therefore to be much alone. If you like,
when I die, Ill leave you my encyclopedias.
Theyre wonderful company. Watching you
read aloud in your fathers garden, as if
declaiming a sermon for hedges, I recall
reading about Martin Luther this morning.
A religious reformer born in 1483, he nailed
his grievances, all 95 of them, to a German
church door. Fiery, impossible, untamable
girl, I bet you too will post your grievances
in a prominent place someday. Anyway,
back to boiling. The encyclopedia says
the worst offenders were boiled without
benefit of clergy, which I guess means
they were denied the right to speak
to a priest before being lowered into scalding
water and cooked like beets. Martin Luther
believed we human beings contain the inpoured
grace of God, as though grace were lemonade,
and we are tumblers brimful of it. Is grace
what we hold in without spilling a drop,
or is it an outflooding, a gush of messy,
befuddling loves? The encyclopedia never
explains why Margaret Davy poisoned her employer,
what harm he might have done her or whether
she dripped the fatal liquid on his pudding or sloshed
it into his sherry. Grievances and disagreements:
can they lead the way to grace? If our thoughts
and feelings were soup or stew, would they taste
of bile when were defeated and be flavored
faintly with grace on better days? I await the time
and place when you can tell me, little butter pear,
screeching monkey mind, wolf cub, curious furrowbrowed
mammal, what you think of all this.
Till then, your bookish old aunt sends you this missive,
a fumbling word of encouragement, a cockeyed letter
of welcome to the hallowed ranks of the nerds,
nailed up nowhere, and never sent, this written kiss.

If I end up an arid isle of desirelessness,
it will be 1,000% your fault. Why dont you
write? Why make me beg? Are you even
reading these letters? Werent we happy,
each in our own peculiar way, traversing
that rumpled no-mans-land, the Gobi desert
of our bed? Night of Too Many Body Fluids,
can we laugh about that now? And that tussle
in the motel tub when I accidentally knocked
you unconscious? A minor concussion.
Surely youve forgiven me. Its been
several decades. I was loving you so much
this morning, while brushing my teeth
and doing my hair. Remember that
abandoned car we found while hiking
in the middle of nowhere, tufts of grass
sprouting from the radio, gymnastic
acts we performed in its rusted-out chassis?
Im just trying to depress you. (Hah! ) How
am I doing? If you dont send me a letter soon,
Ill have to resort to forgery. Your white violets
have prospered and spread. Do you mind if I
go on a while longer? I have so many thoughts
zipping around my head and Im trying to fit
them all into words that will win you back
and thats why my handwriting rushes
and floods, which is also true of my speech,
chatter thats been known to reach
unintelligible and perhaps irritating
to-most-people speeds, though I always secretly