Traveling Sprinkler (16 page)

I
SANG MYSELF HOARSE THIS MORNING,
working for two hours on the harmonies in “Marry Me.” I had that strange mental clarity you get sometimes when you haven't had a shower and you haven't had enough sleep. Right now it's noon and very hot and I'm parked in a bit of shade at the edge of the hospital parking lot. Roz is probably in surgery at this moment. This is awful. The only thing I can compare this to is scenes in old movies where men are waiting to hear that their wife has had a baby. But we're not having a baby. That's just the way it is.

You hear a lot about the poet's voice. Swinburne's voice as opposed to Wallace Stevens's voice, as opposed to Hopkins's voice, as opposed to, say, Tony Hoagland's voice. There's an anthology called
The Voice of the Sea
, filled with sea poems. But what does it mean to say you have a voice when you're a poet? When you have deliberately melted away your voice, and you're left with nothing but the wire armature? All the wax, all the bones and muscle of the sound, are gone. There's a moment in
The Fly
, David Cronenberg's movie, toward the end, where the big humanoid fly squirts some acid on a man's arm. It burns away the man's arm down to the bone.

That's what happens when you write down a sentence, or a stanza. When you think of it, you imagine it in all its fleshed-out, full-voiced spoken plenitude. It's a fat, healthy living thing that comes out of a throat, made up of movements of tongue and mouth and jaw. And tiny meetings of flesh. The little vagina in the throat clenches, and air comes pushing up through it, and oooh! There it goes, up into the mouth, where it's manipulated by the lips and tongue, the way a balloon is twisted into funny shapes by a clown at a children's birthday party.

So it comes into being as an audible phrase, as a living heavy healthy plump fleshy thing. For instance, Yeats: “Oh cruel death, give three things back / Sang a bone upon the shore.” And then a strange thing happens that the poet does, and I'm not sure it's a good thing. The poet says, No, thanks, I don't want the flesh, I want the bones. I want only the words. Because there's this nifty notation system that we've developed, and it's quite sophisticated. It uses twenty-six symbols, and those symbols are able to record each word that I'm speaking, and even to record, in a crude way, with the help of commas and semicolons and periods, some of the nuances of the pauses between my words. So I'm going to roll it all out as bones. I'm going to take this living thing and I'm going to render it, boil it down. Once there was sound, and now there are words on a page.

So then you publish your poem, all boiled down, all white bones. And readers come along years later and say that the interesting thing about so-and-so's “voice” is X. Even though they may never have heard the poet's voice. What they've done is they have extrapolated. They've supplied their own guesses about how a person like this poet would speak, and they have managed to reclothe, or reincarnate, that printed skeleton in flesh. And of course I'm fine with that. It has to happen, and there are good things about it because the eye is a bullet train and can read quickly. It's easier to read with the eye than to listen to somebody speak. But there are also losses, because your reconstruction of the poet's voice may be all wrong.

An anthropologist will take a few surviving pieces of a Neanderthal's skull—a cheekbone and a bit of jawbone—and he'll build out a whole skull from that, and he'll use modeling clay to flesh out the extrapolated skull with sinews and muscles and cheeks, and when he's done he thinks he is looking at the face of a Neanderthal. He doesn't know if he's right. He thinks he is. We want to believe him. But he's never seen a Neanderthal.

He could be completely wrong. If you go to Planet Fitness and study the differences in the way flesh hangs off people's bodies, you know that he is almost certainly somewhat wrong. Was it a fat Neanderthal? Or “Neandertal,” with a hard
t
? There's no way to know. Presumably there were a few overweight Neanderthals. All it takes is some dead mammoths at the foot of a cliff and an interest in eating.

So there are losses incurred when you go from the spoken universe of sound envelopes that start and stop and die away, that can be looked at on an oscilloscope, to this whole other universe, which is hooks and eyes of code on some sort of page or screen. The page or screen is white, and the shapes on it are black—or vice versa, if you invert the colors for night reading, as I do. We learned to read the code sometime around the age of six, and we're pretty good at it, and eventually we stop moving our lips. We think of the denatured words as the distillation of everything essential. We embrace the denaturing, and we develop prose styles that are so conventionalized, so depersonalized, that they fit well with the fact that all the sound flesh has been melted off.

Take the journalistic style of
The New York Times
, on its front page. It uses stock phrases like “said yesterday,” and you really can't tell one writer from another. If you talked to each of the reporters who wrote articles for the front page, you'd realize immediately that they are very different, intelligent people. Some of them you'd like quite a lot, and some of them you might like less. You would know a great deal about them, if you talked to each of them for a minute, or if you heard them explaining what they were writing about in their articles. All that voicedness is gone—each of their “today”s is exactly the same. Everyone says “today” or “yesterday” the same on the page, because it is the same number of letters, the same typestyle. And yet each of those reporters says “yesterday,” and understands yesterday, differently. There are a thousand different ways to say “hello,” but there's only one way to say it in print. That's what we're losing.

And that's what music is all about. Music is about the idea that one cellist's A is going to sound slightly different from another cellist's A, and if you have six or seven or twelve cellos in a row, they're going to sound different from six trombones in a row. Donald Sutherland used to do the voiceovers for Volvo commercials. We never saw his face, but we knew it was Sutherland—he said “airbags” differently from anyone else. Marvin Gaye sings “ooh” differently from the way Keri Noble sings “ooh.” Paul McCartney's “Yesterday” is very different from Boyz II Men's “Yesterday.” My “Marry me” is different from Cary Grant's “Marry me.”

•   •   •

A
T FOUR
I
SAW LUCY
leave from the main exit with Harris—I was certain it was Harris because I'd studied his picture on the
Medicine Ball
website. He was smiling. The two of them shook hands and drove away in separate cars. My cellphone plinked. It was Lucy. “Everything went well,” she said. “She's very groggy but she's doing fine. She's sleeping now.”

“Oh good, that's good, that's good,” I said. I took a deep breath and drove to RiverRun Books—they've relocated to a smaller space—and bought a copy of Mary Oliver's
New and Selected Poems, Volume Two
to give to Roz when she got home. A woman who works there runs a blog called
Write Place, Write Time
where writers send in photographs of their work areas and describe them. I keep hoping she'll ask me to contribute so that I can take a picture of my car, but she hasn't yet.

I ordered the Enchiladas Banderas at Margarita's—no meat in honor of Roz—and then I went to Planet Fitness. On the way home I was stopped by a cop because I didn't use my left-turn signal at a deserted intersection. His siren yipped once and I saw the flashing. I whispered, “What the fuck did I do? What, you dick-fucking shitasser?”

I heard a door thump closed. I put on my hazard lights and unrolled the window all the way. I considered hurriedly wiping my face, so I wouldn't look sweaty, but thought it might seem suspicious.

“Do you know why I stopped you?” the cop said, shining a flashlight.

“No,” I said. The cop was about twenty-three, trying to be authoritative and professional. Newly trained.

He said, “You didn't signal when you turned left. Also you were driving slowly.”

“Oh gee, I'm sorry, Officer.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“No, not recently.”

“Please get out of the car.”

The cop offered me a seat on his front bumper, where there was a little black ledge, and he spent a while checking my license and registration. Then he came out holding a ballpoint pen. He pointed his flashlight at my face and moved the ballpoint pen back and forth. “I'm going to ask you to keep your head still and follow the tip of the pen with your eyes,” he said.

I watched the ballpoint go back and forth, sometimes eclipsing the flashlight. It was a Pilot G-2 fine-point pen. I felt shifty, like the corner-glancing cherub in the Christmas card.

“That's the kind of pen I use,” I said.

“Hm,” he said.

He moved the pen way over to the left and I strained to follow it. My eyeballs wobbled. “You're exceeding the limits of my vision,” I said. “I feel like Richard Nixon at the optometrist.”

“I know, that's how it works,” he said. “Are you sure you haven't been drinking?”

“Yes, I'm sure. I would remember. I spent most of today at the hospital. A friend of mine just had a hysterectomy.”

“Is she all right?”

“Yes, she is.” He passed the pen back and forth again, and then he gave me a long look. “You can go back to your car now.” I got up and he walked with me. He said, “Can you please tell me why you have a bottle of beer near your seat?”

“What bottle of beer?” I said, puzzled. I opened the door and saw what he'd seen. “It's Pellegrino,” I said, pulling it out. “Sparkling water. I drink it after I go to Planet Fitness.”

“All right,” he said, shining his flashlight on it. He handed me a ticket. “I'm giving you a warning for making a left turn without signaling.”

“Okay, thanks, sorry.”

“Have a good evening, and remember your turn signals. People need to know where you're going.”

“I will. Thanks again.”

I drove away. I lit a Fausto, puffed it, and cackled.

I
'VE TALKED TO LUCY—
who has, by the way, red hair and a faint midwestern accent. Roz is home from the hospital and she's sleeping a lot. I'm going to call her tomorrow to say hello.

I spent all afternoon playing Logic's Steinway Hall Piano. I didn't use any other instruments. By playing slowly and then speeding it up, and by adding one line over another, I could sound a little like Glenn Gould, which is a powerful feeling. After that I experimented with some slow ninth chords, and I got something going that I liked, and I put some words to the chords: “I saw you / I heard your voice / And then one day I knew / I loved you.” Another love song. At around noon, the Axiom keyboard developed a problem: Middle C wouldn't play. I looked up “Axiom silent key” on some discussion forums. Apparently it's a known problem. There's a loose connection somewhere, and a key, often middle C, will just stop speaking. This is frustrating if you're trying to compose a piece of music with a middle C. I thought I was going to have to drive back to Best Buy and return the keyboard. Then I found a video in which someone posted a solution: You squeeze hard on the two sides of the plastic near the mod wheel. I tried it and it worked perfectly. I'm overjoyed, because I really like this keyboard. Just give it a squeeze.

Glenn Gould, you know, used to sing along while he played Bach. He was a hero of mine when I was in high school. I liked his clean staccato playing style. Later, when I got into Debussy's
Preludes
and Grieg's
Lyric Pieces
, I was less sure about him. He wrote a fugue called “So You Want to Write a Fugue.” It's got a funny title and good lyrics, but it isn't all that original a piece of music. Gould was a performer, not a creator. He was cold all the time. He took pills and he wore scarves and hats and coats indoors. The film about him,
Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
, begins with him standing on a windswept ice field. What was missing from Gould's art was very simple: love. His jumpy playing style showed that—or no, that's a cheap shot. He sat very low in front of the piano and did beautiful things to it.

Nowadays for Bach's keyboard music I like a pianist named András Schiff. He's also a bit of an eccentric, but he has a much more legato playing style—“legato” means “tied together.” One note hands things off in a bucket brigade to the next. Schiff doesn't believe in scales and Czerny études. He practices every day by playing the music he actually likes, for instance Bach's two-part inventions. He's a believer in silences. He said in an interview that when he gives a concert, he sometimes wishes that nobody would applaud. Play it, finish it, and let the music's close contrapuntal reasoning live on for a while in the audience's mind. Some of his Bach recordings begin with an unusually long silence.

You never applaud or say “Amen” after someone's spoken in Quaker meeting. You're not supposed to compliment someone after meeting is over, either. You're not supposed to say, “I liked your message,” although it's a very human urge and people do it. I did it myself after a woman talked about seeing two sparrows frolicking in her birdbath. She said she looked away and then looked back and there in place of the sparrows was a huge wild turkey. She talked about surprise and wild turkeys. Afterward, I said to her, “I liked your message.”

And now I want to show you a book. Here it is. It's a novel by Theodore Dreiser called
The Genius
. I have not read it. It's Roz's book. I saw her—I heard her voice—and then one day I knew I loved her. I've never been able to read novels the way she does, though. I get about three pages in and I say, Where's my Merwin? Where's my Kunitz? Where's my Debussy? I can happily read memoirs or diaries or collections of letters, but not novels. Roz has read hundreds of novels. It didn't bother her that I didn't read them, but maybe I should have tried.

I'm going to open this book. I'm going to pick a page at random, and I'm going to read a sentence. Here we go: “He wore an old hat which he had found in a closet at Mrs. Hibberdell's, a faded, crumpled memory of a soft tan-colored sombrero which he punched jauntily to a peak and wore over one ear.” Page 330. Of
The Genius
by Theodore Dreiser. Thank you. That is all.

•   •   •

“
H
I, SWEETIE,”
said Roz, when I called. Her voice was soft and perfect—one hundred percent Roz. I could hear her smiling. She said she was doing better. “They sent me home with Vicodin and it gave me some very lurid dreams and made me forget to breathe, so I'm not taking it anymore. The pain came back, but it's bearable and better than the not breathing. Lucy's taking very good care of me.”

“Good. When can I come see you?”

“Give me a few days. I need the fog to clear.”

“Take it very easy,” I said.

“I am,” she said. “It's so nice not to think about the show. They've got a new person who's covering for me.”

“That's good.”

“I'm going to sleep now.”

“Okay.”

It's been hot and dry this week, and I thought it was time to set up the traveling sprinkler and water Nan's tomatoes. I stood watching it chuff in its slow and steady tractorish way around her tomatoes as the chickens pecked under some rhubarb leaves, unconcerned about the strange Sears machine in their garden. I'd bought an extra hose at a garage sale—better that than anger the yellowjackets. The sprinkler sprays in steady sixteenth notes. You can whistle Rossini to it if you want. Maybe I should tell you more about it.

The traveling sprinkler is a heavy metal slow-motion techno-dance-trance device with two white cast-iron toothed rear wheels that dig into the turf, and a sort of baton or helicopter blade on top that spins. The hose screws in at the back. The hose water flows at full pressure into the tractor's anus, or rectum. Up through the tractor the water goes and out the little holes at the end of the spinning whirlies, flying in a glittering bagel of sinusoidal shapes out over the garden. From certain angles it makes a close-range rainbow, and that's all very nice. But here's where the wizard mind of the innovator comes in: The spinning rotates a central post fitted with a helical thread, or worm gear, that engages with the sprockets of a driving gear that pulls two floppy hooking levers forward against the teeth on the rear wheels. First one lever pulls the right wheel forward an inch, and then the other lever pulls the left wheel forward an inch, and in that way the tractor alternatingly propels itself slowly forward, like some sort of very deliberate water clock—or like Stanley Kunitz's tortoise, “ancient and crusty, more lonely than Bonaparte.”

But that isn't the really beautiful part of this invention, this three-part invention that Bach would have loved to water his Lutheran tomatoes with. The beautiful part comes in front, where there is a small, seemingly atrophied wheel. This wheel is curved so that it can fit over the hose. Thus the tractor, as it moves along, is compelled to follow the route of its own motive force. The hose becomes the guidance system. Consider for a moment the power and the glory of that.

You may say, well, obviously it's propelled by water, and obviously it follows the hose. But it wasn't so obvious in 1909, when Benjamin Sweney got a patent for his sprinkler. Sweney's sprinkler sprinkled and moved forward at the same time, but it didn't do anything with the hose except drag it behind. Not enough. Viggo Nielsen, an Australian, got his tractor sprinkler patent in 1933. It sprinkled and moved and it rolled the hose up on itself. Not quite right, either. Then came a Nebraskan freethinker, John Wilson. Wilson got two water sprinkler patents. His first sprinkler looked like an old-fashioned bicycle, with a large wheel in front and a small wheel in back. The large wheel was a gear, pushed by a pawl—a word later made famous by Richard Eberhart, in his poem “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment.” But Wilson wasn't satisfied. The second patent, applied for in September 1941, was for a sprinkler that looked the way the traveling sprinkler looks now. That's when it all came together. Just before World War II, Wilson disassembled a piece of dairy equipment called a cream separator and used a piece from it as the driving gear in the middle of his machine, while in front he put a small loose wheel that wanted to go wherever the hose went. Now the source of the sprinkler's power was the route it took: the link back to its past was also its future. You could buy more hose and make long twisty routes for it to follow, even up slight grades if you wanted. As long as you didn't set the hose up so that there was too sharp a turn, the sprinkler would go anywhere. It was the trustiest little hardworking machine. And if you got tired of watching it, and went inside after a while, as I used to do, to make a sandwich, the tractor, this Great American Invention, would finally arrive at the moment when the two universes of forward and backward time would collide at the faucet by the house.

National Walking Sprinkler of Nebraska made Wilson's machines, and they still do. They made them for Sears and that's where my father bought his. Everything about it is immediately understandable. It's what America did before it threw itself wholeheartedly into the making of weapons that kill everyone.

I have been trying to write a poem about this sprinkler for years, because I like it so much, and I've never managed to do it. What a joy now to wind it around Nan's tomatoes and watch it, in all its intuitive clumsy ungainly beauty, do some good.

•   •   •

R
AYMOND TURNED
in the driveway while I was standing watching the sprinkler. “Hey, hey,” he said. “That's a handy little machine.”

“Isn't it? I don't often get a chance to use it. I'm terribly sorry about your grandmother.”

“Oh, thanks. It's very sad.”

“How's your mother doing?”

“She's okay, I think.”

We looked at the sprinkler twirl. I asked him how his music was progressing.

“I've got a new song,” he said.

“Can I hear it?”

We went up to his room, which had a poster of Bob Marley on the wall and a corner filled with a multileveled shrine of musical machinery. There were two important-looking squarish studio speakers with yellow cones. Raymond played me his new track, called “Promises Burn.” He played it loud, but even so I couldn't make out all the lyrics, which went by fast. I heard the chorus, though: “Lips say words and promises burn, so can we.” It was a genuine brainworm, and I said so. I suspected that Raymond had been through some recent unhappiness with his girlfriend, but we didn't talk about it. He showed me how he'd used three vocoder tracks to mix pitched synthesizer sounds in with his singing, and he revealed a neat trick for reversing a piano note using a virtual guitar pedal, so that it plays backward: yeet, yeet, yit!

“There's so much to this software,” I said, shaking my head. I told him I'd been working on some dance songs, but they weren't finished. “If you ever want to try making a song together, just let me know.”

“Sure,” Raymond said. “You could email me some chords and I could email you some beats and we'll each work on what the other person began. How about that?”

I said that sounded good.

“If we end up with something usable, I'll play it at Stripe. I'm guest DJ'ing there next week. I'm going to drop some Diplo on them. ‘Shake it till it pops out.'”

“That sounds great. What's Stripe?”

“It's a dance club. It's on Chapel Street.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. Suddenly I remembered Nan's tomatoes. “Shoot, I better go check the sprinkler now.”

I went outside. My tractor had made almost the full circuit around the tomato bed. The chickens were flapping their wings just out of range of the spray. The rooster crowed.