Traveling Sprinkler

by Nicholson Baker

  Well, yes, it was boring. But I was undeterred, and I sent it to fifteen places, and Bird Effort published it, and after that I wrote much shorter poems.

  I’ve written three more poems about clouds since then. I can’t get enough of them. I am drawn to describe them even though I know it’s futile. They’re different every day. Debussy liked clouds. The first movement of his Nocturnes is called “Nuages.” He also liked sunken cathedrals. He died when he was fifty-five.

  • • •

  I’M PARKED by the salt pile now. It sits here all summer, waiting for winter, when it will be dribbled out onto the roads and sometimes poison the roots of the trees.

  All systems go. Boink. I’m ready. Thanks. Good.

  Greetings, this is Chowder’s Poetry Slurp, and I’m here to welcome you to another show in which we talk about the world of freelance hydroponics. I’m Paul Chowder, your harbormaster, confidant, and co-conspirator. And I hope that you will sit back and close your eyes and just let the poetry wash over you. Just let it pass over you in a lethal tide of poetical merriment. You are the sunken cathedral, my friend. This is PRI, Public Radio International.

  “The Sunken Cathedral” is the name of a piece for solo piano by Claude Debussy. The experts say that it is based on a Breton folktale about the lost cathedral city of Ys—rhymes with “cease”—which allegedly sank beneath the waves one day when a woman stole the key to the seawall and the floodgates opened. But the experts don’t know what they’re talking about in this case. They’re making it up. I’ve found this to be true over and over—the experts often don’t know anything useful, really. First all women should have breast X-rays once a year and then, no, that’s bad. First women should take hormone pills after menopause, then no. First we should eat eggs. Then, no, eggs are bad because they have cholesterol. Then, no, eggs are good because they give you good cholesterol. And the advice is offered with such arrogant assurance. Roz’s radio show is undermining some of that arrogance, and that’s a good thing.

  I talked to Gene, my editor, today, and when he asked I told him that I was making steady progress on my book of prosaic plums and that I now had a title for it: Misery Hat. I’ve sat on that poem all these years. It hurt that Peter Davison rejected it, and I turned against it and forgot about it. But I read it recently and thought it had some reasonably good turns, S-turns. Dryden has a nice passage about the French way of praising the turns in Virgil and Ovid: “Delicat et bien tourné are the highest commendation which they bestow on somewhat which they think a masterpiece.”

  Forget it, never mind, it doesn’t matter.

  “Misery Hat,” said my editor. “Interesting title.” I knew he didn’t like it. I could hear that slight catch in his voice. But he’s happy with me right now because Only Rhyme is still selling.

  • • •

  YOU THINK this is all a game, don’t you? Well, it isn’t. It’s serious. I helped my dog Smacko into the car—he resists getting in the back seat and he’s a little stiff these days—and I drove to Fort McClary with my music on shuffle. The Gap Band came on, singing “Early in the Morning.” I hadn’t really listened to the words before. For years, bizarrely, I paid almost no attention to the words in pop songs, even in Beatles songs. I heard them, and I could sometimes recite them, but I didn’t care what they were about—they were just semi-random vocalizations over a chordal groove that I could move my head to like a wobble-headed figure on a cabbie’s dashboard. Now I pay attention to the words. “Got to get up early in the morning, to find me another lover.”

  Then Fountains of Wayne came on, playing “All Kinds of Time.” Holy shit, is that a good song. What a great undulating guitar thing in the middle. Shit! Apparently Collingwood, one of the songwriting pair of fountains, has or had a drinking problem—well, who wouldn’t after singing a song as good as this one? He managed to catch the moment nobody has ever caught, the suspended hopeful moment as the quarterback is looking for a receiver, the most poignant and killing moment in football. There are some great chords, and Collingwood is able to control his falsetto notes, and the whole thing is just total genius. The quarterback knows that no one can touch him now. He’s strangely at ease. The play is going to end in a sack—we realize it, gathered around the wide-screen TV—and then this slow wavy-gravy warble of a guitar solo comes on that is like the look of a football in flight—the football that he hasn’t yet thrown—and it’s totally mystical and soul-shaking. Power pop is the name given to Fountains of Wayne’s style of music, it seems—but whatever it’s called, they are great songwriters and they deserve thanks.

  Roz’s old blue Corolla was in the parking lot when I got to Fort McClary. She was sitting inside reading a new New Yorker. All those years of New Yorkers that came when we were living together. She would read the articles. I flipped through, checking out the poems and laughing at the cartoons—some of the cartoons. And meanwhile the magazine got thinner. There was that terrible period a few years ago, after the crash, when there were almost no ads. Monsanto was on the back cover for a while—Monsanto, for goodness’ sake, who wanted to inject cows with growth hormones so that their bony overtaxed bodies would rev up and create ungodly udderfuls of milk until they mooed to the skies for relief and their hooves rotted in the muck of their tight stalls. Monsanto actually had the gall to sue a dairy up in Portland, Maine—Oakhurst Dairy—to stop them from saying on the label that Oakhurst milk had no artificial bovine growth hormones, even though it was just a fact. Monsanto is evil, truly evil.

  Roz hugged me and hugged our dog—it was our dog for a while, now it’s my dog again—and she said happy birthday. She was wearing a light cotton sweatery thing I hadn’t seen before, and a soft scarf that I knew from way back. I asked her how she was doing. “Okay, how about you?”

  “Doing fine,” I said. “The washing machine finally died, but I’ve kind of gotten into using the laundromat. Shall we clamber over the rocks? You know, the way we used to?” I gave it a Mick Jagger inflection and she smiled.

  We led Smacko down to the shore and smelled the seaweed and looked out at the boats for a while. There were some drops of rain. We were a bit awkward with each other, I have to say, or maybe it was that the stones were unusually slippery—we’d lost some of our wonted familiarity. She told me she was working on a show about synthetic thyroid pills. Then we went back and I invited her out of the rain into my superclean car. She got the sandwiches and I opened the picnic basket. She’d brought a demi bottle of champagne to celebrate, which was awfully nice of her. The cork blew out the open window and we took bites of her egg salad. It was the best egg salad sandwich ever, and I said so. She’d also made a lemony beets-and-greens creation. I offered her some carrots and she crunched one, making an enormous sound.

  “So what are you up to?” she asked.

  I told her I’d bought a guitar and was learning some chords. “I think I’m done with poems for the moment. I’m writing songs now.”

  “Can I hear one?”

  “Not yet. But I vacuumed the car in your honor.”

  She looked around. “Very nice. I have to say—” She hesitated. “It smells a tiny bit like smoke. Are you smoking cigarettes?”

  “No no no. Cigars.”

  “Oh, baby. Why?”

  “I tried a corncob pipe and it was no good for me. Before that, I tried a can of Skoal, and it made me ill. I’ve stopped drinking. No beer, no Yukon Jack, no Tyrconnell. I need some new tongue-loosening addiction.”

  “I can’t imagine you as a cigar smoker—I don’t want to imagine you as a cigar smoker.”

  “It’s just a phase. It’s my brown period.” I stuffed the plastic bag that my sandwich came in into the picnic basket. “Are you still on friendly terms with that doctor dude?”

  “Harris.” She nodded.

  “Isn’t ‘Harris’ kind of a needless encumbrance? Does he really know you and understand you?”

 
Roz gave me a look. “Progress is being made,” she said. “There are complications.”

  “Because I know you and I love you,” I said. “It’s my birthday and I can say that.”

  “Then what about that woman in Pennsylvania?”

  “You’d moved out, you were gone!” I said. “It was brief and fleeting and completely wrong in every way.” Several years ago I had an untidy interlude with a poet from Lehigh University, and I’d made the mistake of telling Roz, hoping it might make her jealous and bring her back.

  “I moved out because you were being impossible,” Roz said. “We had no money and you were singing in the barn all day long.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  She looked at her hands. I made a big sigh. Smack whimpered from the back and Roz gave him some of her sandwich.

  “Cigars,” she said. “Not good.”

  “I’ll stop smoking them if you move back in with me.”

  “Please, I’m serious. The show is so much work, and—I wasn’t going to tell you this—but I’m anemic. I’m very anemic. I have pica.”

  “Oh baby, how absolutely awful.” I moved the picnic basket clumsily so I could hold her hand. “What’s pica?”

  “Do you remember how I used to have those terrible periods that just went on and on?”

  I said I certainly did.

  “Well, they’re worse now,” Roz said. “They last more than a week and I go through boxes of ultra tampons. It’s a festival of gore every month. I haven’t been sleeping, because when you’re anemic you don’t sleep. You just sit up eating poppy seeds and anything crunchy. Sesame seeds—I eat tubs of sesame seeds. And dry oatmeal. Sometimes I want to eat the whole sidewalk. That’s what pica is. For instance.” She pointed. “See that big rock? To me it looks chewable. I want to eat that rock. That’s how messed up I am.”

  “Oh my goodness,” I said. “Are you taking iron pills?”

  “Yes, yes, but they don’t agree with me. I’ve been eating masses of collard greens, though.”

  “What does the gynecologist say?”

  “She says—” Roz started to cry.

  “Sweetie!” I said.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not cancer. But it sure is a pain.” She wiped her eyes with her napkin and took a breath. “I’ll be fine. I have to go now. I have to read a stack of research papers. We have a show coming up on colonoscopies. Harris thinks they’re a false religion, that most of them are unnecessary, and he’s pretty convincing.”

  “Good, because nobody’s going to be poking around in my bottom. A doctor snuck a thermometer in there when I was five years old and it was horrible. Humiliating.”

  Roz smiled. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.

  “Ah, don’t be, water under the bridge.”

  “Well, happy birthday, honey.” She kissed me on the cheek and drove off in her sporty battered car.

  Nine

  ROZ LOOKED PALE, now that I think of it. She’s working too hard. I sent her an email thanking her for the egg salad sandwich. “I’m worried about you,” I said. “Call me if I can do anything. Thank you for the picnic. Love -P. PS Forgot to say—great show on spinal fusion surgery! PPS I’m having problems writing lyrics. Only if you have time—can you think of some random three-word phrases, each using only one-syllable words?”

  When Roz first moved in with me, I dusted off the traveling sprinkler and showed her what it looked like. I showed her how it worked, how you hooked up the hose to its fundament and the water surged in and up through its bowels and out the two twirly wands and how you could adjust the angle of the spray that came from the rusted ends of the wands. She lifted it and remarked at how heavy it was. She was delighted by it in her good-natured way. “It’s so simple,” she said.

  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.