Storm, and: Thoughts While Reading The Sand Reckoner

POETRY STORM / James Tate The snow visits us, taking little bits of us with it, to become part of the earth, an early death and an early return— like the filing of tax forms. And all you can say after adding up column after column: "I'm not myself." And all you can say after the long night of searching for one certain scrap of paper: "It never existed." And when all the lamps are lit and the smell of the stew has followed you upstairs and slipped under the door of your study: "The lute is telling the story of the life I might have lived, had I not—" In my study, which is without heat, in mid-January, in the hills of a northern province—only the thin white-haired volumes of poetry speak, quietly, like unfed birds on a night visit to a cat farm. And an airplane is lost in a storm of fitting pins. The snow falls, far into the interior. The Missouri Review · 9 THOUGHTS WHILE READING THE SAND RECKONER I James Tate What nourishes the polar star? That's a story I refuse to tell. Bellhops lacking a pineapple? Or the secret ingredient of bubblebath? Itself a derailed story. And still Stuntmen by the school are washed ashore. What would be inappropriate here is deepfried calamares, or the sound of a crossbow humming. I have been reading for hours, I am counting every little grain of sand. Saturday night in Amherst: Archimedes is my man. I drift toward nightfall, renaming all the recent immigrants from Antarctica ("We shall have a good voyage if God is willing."). Disconsolate bunglers, incalculable cloves, the Ship sang. Ginger scurvy. Then I took one of them around to see chlorophyll working in the meadow, and later bought him a pork pie hat. Night was coming on, hell, night had come and gone and I was still reading, reading my way through the library. Night had come and gone leaving not a trace except me and I, by necessity, had moved on and was by now reading Magellan's Voyage, a Narrative Account of the first Circumnavigation by Antonio Pigafetta. Poor mad Ferdinand died spectacularly at the hands of Filipino Warriors. Seventeen hundred years before a fellow named Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth to be 24,650 miles—not a bad guess, only two-hundred and twenty-five off. Well, I was reading about all these stargazers and felt this aching desire for a newer world when Adventures of a Red Sea Smuggler tumbled off the shelf, I love Henry De Monfreid for writing, "I went to see the pyramids. What a disappointment they were to me. . . ." 10 · The Missouri Review His reason: the majesty of the desert could not be obscured. Sunday morning in Amherst, I have spotted a water buffalo! Emily Dickinson has decided to purchase several mohair jackets, but it is Sunday and I regret to report she has not been a very good neighbor lately. "Tears are my angels now," she said to me around 4 a.m. "But are they interested in Cedar Rapids?" I asked. "Tm not qualified to say," was her sorry reply. And so it went, the sound of a crossbow humming, my own jungle fever. My weary and blossoming Soul was passed from hand to hand to hand. I was resting in the center of some huge pageant when a human standing next to me said: "There must be more," and set out to find it against all odds, against the known sum. And years later, either came back or didn't, was the biggest fool ever, or shines there on the horizon, like a newly minted coin of hope. And those who stayed and mocked, and those who merely read about it later—the grains of untrammelled sand fall through their brains long after the sojourner has begun to snore. James Tate The Missouri Review · 11 ...