Dream Fox

Today's poem is by Jack Roberts. Jack Roberts’s poems appeared in Sites, Boulevard, Tar River Poetry Review, and the Occupation Wall Street Poetry Anthology, among other reviews and collections. His poem "The New Reforms" was selected by then Poet Laureate Mark Strand for Best American Poetry 1991. Another poem "Dream Fox" was featured as poem of the day in Verse Daily (verse.org). Then he was working exclusively on fiction. "The Watchman" won a prize for short story from Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. "Re: Bright Goddess, At Your Rising," another story, was selected for the Florida International University/Books & Books Conference Anthology (online). He died in April, 2012.


Dream Fox


Not the five tiny black birds that flew
out from behind the mirror  
over the washstand,

nor the raccoon that crept  
out of the hamper,

nor even the opossum that hung
from the ceiling fan

troubled me half so much as
the fox in the bathtub.

There's a wildness in our lives.
We need not look for it.

That's wrong too.
It finds us.

It finds us,
naked and alone,

in unfamiliar bathrooms,
wiping the grit from our eyes,

waiting for the first signs
that we're back among the living.

I catch him beneath his forelegs and lift.
"Don't bite me," I say. Says he, "I'll bite you."

Miklós Radnóti "Mint a halál" -- translated by Jon Roberts

Like Death

Quiet settles on my heart, envelops sullen darkness,
the frost softly rattles, snaps the woodland road
along the river whose nuzzling banks and surface
achingly stand still.

How long this winter lasts: the earth beneath
the bones of beautiful old loves freezes, splits.
Deep within a cavern, the shaggy bear groans,
a tiny roe-deer cries.

The small deer softly weeps, the winter sky's tin-sheathed,
clouds' fringe hangs down, cold dark breathes hard,
the moon flash-flickers, the snow-white ghost flitters
and quivers the trees.

The frost slowly struts, and, on the windowpane,
a delicate ice-flower cracks like solemn death -
you'd think it's only lace - and like sweat,
flows down heavily.

Now this verse of mine ambles along before you,
silently the word appears, rises, and swiftly falls
just like death. And then, whirring, unperturbed,
says nothing more.

Henry James and the US South in The American Scene

James’s criticism of the South and the American scene culminates in his description of Southern hotels and of the general American hotel-spirit they embody. He stays at hotels in Richmond and Charleston and finds the institution similar everywhere: the American hotel is great, shiny, and empty, as if the individual specimens were signposts of universal values from the North scattered about the South. In Florida the hotel life takes on a sudden intensity, as hotels dominate the holiday resorts, and in the clean Florida air the effect of hotels is quite spectacular. James compares this impression to the one he had had of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City not long before. The effect consist in the impression of the “perfect, the exquisite adjustability of the “national” life to the sublime hotel-spirit.” (439) Analyzing the relation of national life and the hotel spirit, James is content to make the hotel-spirit the stronger in the sense that it is full-blown and expert, and thus the national life can rely on it to assist its own undeveloped and passive social organization. The problem with the hotel-sprit for James is not only that it is unifying but also that while it predends to meet the need of American ideals, it in fact creates new American ideals. It is not only educative but also prescriptive. The great national ignorance is taken advantage of artfully by the hotel-spirit that will define relations. This is the revelation James encounters instead of a fulfilling meal at his Florida hotel.
He finds this revelation troubling from the perspective of “the individual” or “the informed few” looking at “the crowd” or the “uninformed” (441) masses:

I seemed to see again … the whole housed populace move as in mild and consenting suspicion of its captured and governed state, its having to consent to inordinate fusion as the price of what it seemed pleased to regard as inordinate luxury. Beguiled and caged, positively thankful, in its vast vacancy, for the sense and the definite horizon of a cage, were there yet not moments,,, in which it still dimly made out that its condition was the result of a compromise into the detail of which there might some day be an alarm in entering? (441)

It is James’s notion of individuality existing in differentiations, taste, manners that is captured by the hotel-spirit in America. The cumulative sum, the golden-mean as the universal ideal of the hotel-spirit oppresses him as the quality that has no need for his kind of individual sensibility at all.

"The Cigarette" from The Letters of Virginia Joyce. 6 vols, ed. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann, London: Chatto, 1975 - 80.

It was a splendid sunshine. For if the sun is like an eye that changes day into night with each of its flickers, or like a mother who caters her child through the day with the rhythm of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, then the morning has been started successfully in the refectory and was well on its way to the Chapterhouse Restaurant. She has had orange juice, cereal, and coffee. She has appropriated two apples and a tub of marmalade. She has reached saturation. Many people never reach saturation. Here she glanced vaguely towards the polished drops of moisture on the grass and as the glitter of her watch rose to meet it, in the distance she made out the figures of the other members of the group, discretely leaning on their elbows or dozing off in the silent heat of the somehow Mediterranean greenery of the park, like ancient gods and goddesses listening to Hermes on the affairs of a world far below. They needed entertainment, clap your hands and sing if you live where motley is worn.
But after breakfast, what comes next? If breakfast, then a cigarette. And also a number of meals to be had. But at least she's had breakfast. Breakfast she was sure of. Then... A cigarette? One cigarette? The figures were moving slowly in the halo of light, their limbs ejecting soft moaning sounds as they streched. They needed guidance, they needed to be provoked into action. One cigarette... Is it smell, is it taste? When will she have it? A cigarette... She asked herself what is a man sitting in the grass in the sunshine, fingering an unlit cigarette, a symbol of. If she were a composer, she would compose a fugue on that attitude. The movement away from the mouth and back to it would be repeated in different tones and the explanatory circles of the brown end would spiral into the white wilderness of the soul. It was a splendid sunshine, after breakfast. After breakfast, there comes lunch. Lunch --