This is the kind of hardship I can fathom:
I was eating
oysters in the room with shadow and thin
children. Conspiring
to love them. Plotting
more than pleasure: asking the tongue
the thigh, the meaty breast, unshelled
belly of my desire if it wanted me.
I needed
more than music to feel
wanted. To feel craved. My victims
were children, sugar
was one disguise from death: I ate
I ate and let them watch me.
The table glowed yellow
jewels of fat, cut to stars by salt,
sluiced wet with butter.
I let their tongues hang.
I made them recite prayers. Insisted
one by one they recite the things in this world
for which they were thankful. I was a parent
in whom the child believes
all goodness. I was a thing
worth suffering, for suffering was the only way
to love. I wanted to be
the one they hungered for.
It was in a book called Rats,
Lice, and History that I learned how bodies
can be sick without relief. It was in a book
I read how to become an abductor.
In a child’s book I remembered, the pied piper also
had a strategy. Deception
was a song. The children wanted to drown. Death
pitched fear and ecstasy.
This is what I am: the piper
in the man, rat-king, the holy father with his kingdom
saying, look what you can have if you grow up. |
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A word from the poet about "A Book Called Rats"
Hélène Cixous writes that the experience of reading is an act of transgression. She says that we have to become children again to know what it means to read. Why? Because children read death. They dream it better than adults. They know we must steal, murder, become superhuman. When we read, we must see ourselves darkly, as thieves and tyrants. We must become them in order to believe in them. And yet we are children, we are innocents. We don’t yet understand what loss is. We haven’t yet suffered, not really. This is what the Greeks meant by katharsis. An imaginary blood washes clean the story of the real.
This is why the fairytale helps us. This is why someone like Italo Calvino, or Orhan Pamuk, or Gabriel García Márquez, is really a writer of books for children. Children are ready to face the dangers of reading, as if they were real and not imaginary. Children like to believe—more than the parents—in their own abduction. They have their own story of falling in love and dying for it, because they haven’t yet fallen in love or felt like they were dying. But they know what it is, what it really is—the hidden human songside—as if death were a song, and part of us is always singing it.
The voice is the danger in this poem, because it’s the voice of a child who has grown up out of fantasy and into the violence of the real, into the violence of History. Rats, Lice and History, a scientific study of the plague written by Hans Zissner, a professor of bacteriology and immunology at Harvard, and published in 1935, reminds us of two certain things: the human body’s affinity for disease and the destructive character of the human person. In 1931, Zissner befriended Hart Crane, Clive Fisher tells us in his marvelous biography of the turbulent young poet. Crane witnessed the drowning of six caged rats that Zissner had smuggled aboard the SS Orizaba, a steamer en route to Mexico, and later had to catapult from the ship. Later, on the return voyage, Crane would commit suicide by leaping overboard himself, as if in a trance, as if listening to that same cruel song.
Remember the fairytale, in which song was both relief and punishment. Poetry, too, is like this. Like music itself. We’re left wondering. We say we’d never do something like that, commit suicide, hurt a child. But history. But fairytale. But stories on the news. Romance is a lie—or is it that lying is a romance? The piper is a fiction that reminds us of a hidden part, the part of us that will drown children. The murderer part. The true, cruel part, the part that makes children hold their breath and dream. The part that as adults we alternately rationalize or demonize. As the first poem in the collection, “A Book Called Rats” is a kind of invitation to grow up, to know what hardship is.
But we are children, we are innocents. Listen, the piper says, I will show you where the mad rats died. Don’t you want to see them? Don’t you want to see where they died under the water, bathed in shadow and moonlight? You do. I know you do. Listen to this song. I will tell you what a terrible thing I have done. Listen.
It will be beautiful. |
