Hubris and Humility
Something is wrong and I do not know how to fix it.
*
A gurgling inside the wall
between the kitchen and the bath;
the next day, no kitchen, no bath;
a blossom of methane
swelling on a dark tide in the tub.
*
This is the fifth blockage. I have plunged and augured. I have switched to Scott single-ply paper. I have installed the excellent American Standard toilet, advertised as the commode that will flush golf balls.
*
For more than fifty years I have relied on the synchronicity of poetry and physical work.
*
But humility squats
in the shadows
of the crawl-space.
When I imagine T.S. Eliot
writing “I should
have been a pair
of ragged claws,
scuttling
across the floors of silent seas,”
he is not in Munich,
but sitting on my toilet.
*
Mr. Rooter arrives in a tall, red truck. His name is Graves. Thursday, the third time he’s snaked my line. When he runs his camera inside my system, and parses the 25 feet of sump and the separation near the junction plumbers call the spiderweb, he says, “My boss will want to re-pipe this. $20,000.”
*
This is why, Friday,
I kneel and squirm
into the crawl space.
As I plumb the line
with a tape measure
and spirit level,
I am William Blake
writing “I see the Past,
Present & Future existing
all at once before me.”
*
Then again doubting, I lie under the central joist of the house. Consider the greed of corporate plumbers who refuse to go under the house. Think of Kafka envisioning injustice in the first doors of The Trial; think of le mot juste, a name I saw today on a tombstone, Lawless Love; think how long since I have looked at the sky.
*
How know the true
poem from the fraud?
In her last letter, C.D.
wrote she was looking
for something hairy.
*
Etheridge said he met
his workshop in a bar
and told his poets
when they were reading
their poems out loud,
should a drunk,
stumbling to the john,
ever stop and listen,
there draw a star
for that is your good shit.
*
What is it with America’s indifference to poetry? My translator Giuliana Pala writes from Padua to say that last year when Carmen Gallo edited a new translation of “The Waste Land” she translated waste not as desolata but devastata and Italy is still talking about it.
*
My greatest discovery:
I am under the kitchen
unscrewing the cap
of a leaky clean-out
when a spate of foul-smelling,
coffee-tinted water gushes out.
When it subsides, I run
my gloved hand into the pipe
and, feeling something
adamant and unforgiving,
draw out a number
of pearly chunks
of the hardened resin
of dish soap, grease
and fatty scraps
scraped from skillets
and tied together by
locks of my own hair.
Five feet of sludge — is that my Rilkean angel — the moment I know it chokes the airway to the roof vent. What is poetry that will not go down, reach deep, and grab hold? When I get all I can with my hand and drag out the rest with the line guides of my old Shakespeare, fiber glass fishing rod, I tape the threads of the clean-out and wrench the cap tight in the main line.
*
And gather all my tools,
my slime bucket and stinking towels,
and crawl back
out of the dark into the light,
saying what I will repeat
in the house I have been under
when I test it with a flush,
Fuck Yes and Holy Shit!
Soon it will be three years
and still it has not broken.