From Mahoney’s Life: A Poetry Sequence

Mosquito Net

As with anything else supposedly significant they’re tricky—to use one can get complicated. Hope that in some place faraway you never find said insect bearing the potential malarial message trapped inside

the yellowing gauze—just one, whiningly gnawing at you— while on all fours you crawl around the bed the entire sweating night (Caracas? Hyderabad?) and try to clap it bloodily dead—a futile, exhausting applause.

And don’t be as stupid as to attempt making love under one (years ago, a girl in the Peace Corps with me in Cameroon, a girl with dirty toes and a big blond braid, together we learned—laughing, tangled in it—all about that;

I got a letter from her mother last month saying she died unexpectedly while . . . well, you know that old story). In bed, alone, tuck it in tight around the mattress’s edge in the strange country, the stranger room; lie down slow

and don’t move a bit in the dark night even if the insomnia rattles you to the very skeleton. Most importantly, never attempt dreaming under one; whisper a traveler’s patent lies, like “Home” or “Family,”

and patiently wait for the rooster-gargling dawn.

Mesilla de Noche

I will admit I draw an airy blank on whatever Spanish I learned in one semester of study in eleventh grade. (After I flunked French II, I heard Spanish was easy; I gave it a valiant try.) But for some reason I do remember the term for “night table,” which is maybe all I need, and to this day, I say, if you put me in Argentina I could stroll into a cantina of guitars and golden, wheaty beer, I could manfully growl “Mesilla de noche,” and all the tough cowboys would know, deep down, what I really mean. Or if I knelt in front of one of those blue-dreamt El Greco murals at the altar of a Toledo chapel, I would have to do nothing more there than whisper that lilting, gentle, purest of prayers: “Mesilla de noche, mesilla de noche”— I bless myself slowly—“mesilla de noche.”