Had I a Hundred Mouths Read online

  But why was I banned? Why did the Nurseryman say no to me; why did he turn me away when I waved to him, knocking at the bound door that was garlanded with flowers of ice? Why did he turn me away? At the first rejection, when he held up his rough Nurseryman’s hand, big as a spade yet gentle enough to touch a bluet without bruising it—when he raised his big hand before me saying no! no admittance to the hothouse, I stepped back surprised by the inhospitality—if not cruelty—of being turned away and with that old feeling of expulsion that stabbed me. But I tried again. And again. Each time that the Nurseryman repulsed me he grew more passionate, darker, more threatening—more desperate each day. Why? Each time he reeled more, swooned more. Sometimes his rubeate face would be close to the icy glass of the door and it wavered and glowered through the frozen water. His features were then distorted and a little monstrous. His eyes were dark shadows, his face fiery and forlorn; he seemed a man of sorrows. Sometimes he seemed almost ready to admit me, to open the frozen crystal door to the faery bower of the hothouse. O tender nurse of this forbidden garden, what have you to say?

  But what were my feelings as this strange denying relationship grew? At the beginning it was clear to me that I rankled because a figure of power had denied me. Defiance heated me. Rebellion dizzied me. I’d throw a stone through a window, climb to the top of the Biology Lab, which was on the top floor of a building that rose up beside the greenhouse, and drop something—hurl a chair—through the glass roof, and let in the freezing air and so burn the warm flowers, vandalizing the beautiful thing I was denied. Once because the first-grade class didn’t elect a boy to be the one to take home for the weekend the class goldfish—a dreaming delicate creature wafting on golden wings through a green waving paradise—but chose a girl, the boy reached into the bowl and squished the golden fish through his fingers like pudding. I felt like that—again—after all these years. Also—beauty denied. I defied those who had held back from me, who had given me the pain of feeling not-taken. Whatever their reason, I had fallen into states of rage and accusation. Not chosen, kept outside—these feelings gave me such heartbreak at first that I wanted to vanish and hide. So abandoned, I thought I’d die, and wished to. But I rose up in defiance.

  My next visit to the greenhouse was around midnight (the first had been at twilight). I had to get in. The cold was so bitter. Yet the icebound hothouse was glowing like a radiant stove. I felt that I was dying. My room in the Guest House was bleak with chill; the awful pictures of founders and donors were glaring with comfort and satisfaction. I had felt quite mad in that room of transients’ odors and early American pewter, those white curtains scalloped at the bay window, that chintz. If only the Nurseryman would let me in. From the freezing cold outside I saw him in the distance in a drunken trance, there by the sunny orange tree. Seeing me, his old enemy, he held fast for a moment and I thought he was about to come to me to give me, at last, welcome—in a split second a look of yielding, of need, of almost reaching out, had crossed his body. But in another moment up slowly came the awful interdicting hand. I only showed him, in my answer, my own face of need; and then I went away.

  The third time was in the early morning at daybreak. As I stood at the ice-veiled glass door, it happened. I saw it chute. Something like the rushing sound of wings drew my glance upwards. Whatever was falling from the top of the Biology Building in another second crashed through the glass roof of the hothouse. A plume of silver steam rose and floated over the broken greenhouse. Some pressure sprang open the frozen door like a miracle, and I entered, at last, the ripe heat of the Nursery. I was admitted. I was in. The smell of humid mulch and sticky seed was close to the smell of sex, genital and just used. I was for a moment almost overcome with the eroticness of it.

  And then the fog rose from the ground and from the very leaves and through the fog I saw the body. The body lay face up, flat on its back. It lay out like an anatomy lesson figure. Arms outstretched, legs spread. Who had leaped from the Biology Building into the frozen lake of the glass roof of the greenhouse? To crash and the among the ferns and blooming Oleander in the frozen month of January? And naked? My God this white body of marble skin and coal-black finest hair lying splashed among the curling ferns. Just as the diver must have envisioned it—if she had planned the leap and had not simply insanely hurled herself down. My door-opener, my admitter. She died for me, I thought.

  The drunken gardener edged out of the steaming gloom of a far corner. He shook all over and now could not move, frozen with fear in the hothouse, fixed to the ground near the Camellias. Did he think the body had dropped out of the sky? Fallen like a lavish blossom, some human-like blossom that had been torn loose by the Nurseryman’s jerking hand? When I came through the fog to him and we were face to face, the look between us showed how deep had been our knowledge of each other, and then he staggered free and began fidgeting mechanically about the greenhouse like a toy man. He simply bobbled and jacked round and round the greenhouse, in and out of corners and along green byways, a berserk fox-trotter. I saw the body of the young woman whole and unbroken except for a wisp of purplish blood in the corner of her pale-lipped mouth. Flesh among greengrowing things. Leaf and skin. It was the sound that I was still hearing in my ears. Flesh against glass. Stone, rock breaking through glass is different. Flesh and bone crashing through glass, as though against water—you know, without looking, that it is a body hitting the water.

  Gazing down upon the greenhouse in winter might have been a bewitching experience for somebody. Rosy in the black nighttime, it would glow below through the frosty glass like a sherbet, like a giant bouquet, like some centerpiece on the white snow table of the field it rested in. Such a delectable vision, such a faery confection of glass, ice, roseglow and bloom, might finally have drawn the gazer into it. Or did Nature? Was Nature arranging a still life (nature mort!) in the greenhouse? Adding flesh, skin, bone, hair. But there it lay, dazzling piece of mortality, delivered to the Nurseryman and me, ex machina.

  Now I saw the Nurseryman begin to shuffle slowly towards me and the fallen body. There he stood gazing down upon the figure for the longest time. He gazed and gazed, as the fog floated up from the freezing once-warm earth of the Nursery. Was it somebody come back? Returned to collect an old debt? Somebody leaving themselves on the Nurseryman’s doorstep… a self-delivered foundling? How to read the answer in the gardener’s eyes. Those eyes! The look of Cain was in those green orbs. I watched them change as they gazed on: now hazel, now blue, now palest green. Chameleon eyes hath the Nurseryman. Or at least half that murderer brother’s look—a look of horror and a look of madness—the brute look of the ages: killer’s brother. But I saw the other half of the Nurseryman’s look—the lover brother’s, the keeper’s, Abel’s look of brotherly tenderness. I, brother to each brother, one-time looker through the iced glass of the forbidden greenhouse, bundled in wool, booted feet grinding on ice, hooded with animal fur to my brow, outsider refused entry, had now arrived within.

  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.”