I don’t want to say that a traveling sprinkler is the best way to water a lawn, because it isn’t. The best way to water a lawn is to live in a place where there’s enough rain, and when there are hot, dry months the lawn just stops growing and gets dusty. That’s how you should water a lawn. But if you want to have a big garden party and you want really green grass for it — say you want to have a wedding or a game of badminton and you want the grass to be very healthy and strong to hold up under all those happy, playful feet — then you lay out the hose course. You make the track. It’s better than the Disney Monorail. It’s better than the water slide made of plastic.
You lay that hose out like you’re squirting icing on a coffee cake, in a big set of repeating S’s. You can’t make the turns too sharp — nothing can be abrupt or “discontinuous,” as they say in Algebra II. The brilliance of the whole thing comes in its ability to ride its source of power. It’s a serious cast-iron machine.
When we first got together, Roz had wanted to have a baby, and like the selfish dumbass I was I’d said, “Not now”—which meant not ever.
• • •
I’M LISTENING to a song called “Jacuzzi Games,” by Loco Dice. There are no words. A woman makes soft but unfeigned-sounding murmurs and purrs of sexual pleasure over a good beat, with some added echo. The bassline doesn’t change. I’ve been working on my traveling sprinkler poem. When I’m fiddling with a poem it’s better not to have any words coming in the headphones. But then I sometimes reach a point when I’m totally absorbed. Then I can play any song at all, words or not. I don’t hear the words as words. Those are the best times. I can be listening to Springsteen singing “Pink Cadillac” in a shady spot on Inigo Road and be writing about sitting in a treehouse reading William Cullen Bryant’s poem “A Hymn of the Sea” while smoking a huge, nasty cigar from Federal Cigar, as I did yesterday. “A Hymn of the Sea” is in an ornate edition with a hundred engravings and my grandfather’s name written in pencil in the front. He wanted to be a poet and didn’t quite make it. My great-grandfather wrote light verse. I come from a long line of extremely minor poets.
My grandfather smoked pipes. Stéphane Mallarmé smoked cigars. Both of them died of throat cancer. Yesterday I went into Federal Cigar and I said to the man at the register that I needed a really good powerful cigar — a cigar that would help me finish a book of poems. “You want something full-bodied,” he said. He led me into the silent humidor room with its wall of dense brown cigars in boxes looking like old leather-bound books of unread sermons in a historic house in the Yorkshire moors, and he said, “Do you want strong but smooth, or do you want something that will really—” He trailed off.
“I want something that blows my head off,” I said. “Something that really mops the floor with me.”
He nodded and handed me a Fausto Esteli. “This’ll do it,” he said.
I bought two Faustos, a Viaje Summerfest, a Fuente Opus X, and a sampler pack of five miscellaneous cigars in a plastic bag.
• • •
BEFORE I BEGAN driving around in my car last year, I stopped writing poems altogether for a little while. I think I know the reason why. It’s not because I’m “blocked.” What a misleading term, “writer’s block,” based as it is on a false physical analogy. No, it’s because my anthology, Only Rhyme, was actually selling. Not selling hugely well, but selling fairly well in a steady sort of way. It’s used as a textbook in some big southwestern universities, who — I’m just guessing — employ it for their own reactionary purposes. And that is a very good thing for me, because life is expensive. The IRS isn’t happy with me. I took the first royalty check and spent it right away and made no estimated payments. I gave a hundred dollars to the War Resisters League and fifty dollars to Common Dreams.
But the minor success of Only Rhyme meant that whenever I thought about a poem I was working on, part of me looked at it with a jaundiced eye, the way a professional anthologist would. I asked myself, Is what I have made today good enough to anthologize somewhere? And no, of course it wasn’t. Most poems aren’t anthologizable. Most poems are just poems.
So I had to learn to forget. I eventually did, more or less. I’m not an anthologist, I am a free man!
• • •
SECOND THOUGHTS about the title. I called my editor back. “Sorry to bother you, Gene,” I said. “It’s just that I sensed you weren’t crazy about Misery Hat. Am I right?”
Gene said, “To be perfectly honest, the word ‘misery’ stops me. It isn’t exactly the sellingest word to put on the cover of a book. Stephen King did it, but I’m not sure it’s the right move for you.”
I told him that I’d been writing a lot in my car. Maybe the book could be called Car Poems?
He said, “Hmm, maybe, maybe.” I could tell he didn’t like Car Poems much, either.
“How about Listen to the Warm? I’m joking, that’s a book by Rod McKuen.”
“Don’t fret yourself over the title,” Gene said. “We can get to that later. Just write the poems.”
I moaned and said, “Honestly, and I shouldn’t tell you this, but I’m not much of a poet these days. I was sitting in Quaker meeting the other day and I realized I didn’t want to write sad complicated poems, I wanted to write sad simple songs. In other words, I want to write sad poems that are made happier by being singable.”
“Well then, write them, sing them,” Gene said. “Sad simple poems are perfectly acceptable. Come on, now.”
“You’re right. Thanks, Gene.”
“And don’t be afraid of putting a little sex in them, the way you used to. That always spices things up. Chastity is for whores.”
• • •
PEOPLE OFTEN CONFUSE the words “bassoon” and “oboe,” as Tim did. I think it’s because the word “oboe” sounds sort of like a sound emanating from a bassoon: oboe. But the two instruments look very different. The oboe is small and black and your eyes pop out staringly when you play it, and it’s used all the time in movie soundtracks during plaintive moments, whereas the bassoon is a brown snorkel that pokes up at an angle above the orchestra. You almost feel you could play it underwater while the violists and oboists gasp and splutter.
I used to really want to be a snorkler. I had black swim fins, and my grandparents took us on a cruise of some Greek islands — oh, forget it. Not now.
I’m down to the nub end of this Fausto cigar. I actually singed an eyebrow hair relighting it, if that’s possible. Sometimes a cigar is just a bassoon.
When you played a long tone on the bassoon, the veins would come out in your neck and in your forehead, and your hands would feel thick with an oversupply of blood, but still you would keep playing the note, pumping it fuller and fuller, because the note was everything — this hump-shaped swell of non-music was all that you were aiming to achieve. It was premusical music. It taught control. Control was everything. I was determined to become the greatest bassoonist that the state of New Hampshire, that the world, had ever known. I was very ambitious back then.
Billy Brown always knew the weeks when I had concentrated on long tones, because those were the weeks in which I sounded especially bad. The practicing broke me and exhausted me and hurt my jaw. I was completely devoted to this expensive folded cylinder of maplewood with the metal U-turn at the bottom. The spit gathered there like a noxious underground lake where a spit Kraken lived. It was a postwar Heckel, made in Wiesbaden, Germany. It came in a wooden crate, like a plain coffin, with the word FRAGILE stenciled on it.