1
That old book has a million moving parts
and when you open it to look inside,
they all spill out, like the escapement
from a sproinged clock,
spelling up the life and correspondence
of a Dutch cloth merchant call van Leeuwenhoek.
A regular little factory, this book,
as busy as a Jacquard loom
constructing its bustling world
of high-piled clouds and shambling
courtyards and canals,
and copper gutters filling up with rain,
a 17th-century rain, curled
like a great cascading periwig
over the cankered rooftiles of old Delft.
It has some chickens in it, and a hive of bees
and 16 coffin-bearers and a bowl,
(and divers things too numerous to name).
Press your eye against the page
and marvel at the makes that shift
this pretty engine, with its
weights and wormscrews,
tumbling cams and pins,
all shaped by hand & cunningly contrived
to move a miniature Dutchman through his life.
2
He was the first Microscopist,
a worldly man compelled
by wasteful curiosity to build
a homely magnifier and enlarge
inconsequential items: fishscales,
pepper, fly-stings, dandruff, dust,
nose hair, spidersilk, some stuff
he found between his teeth,
and he was the first to do a thing
the finest intellects of Europe never thought of,
which was to look, simply look,
inside a water drop
at all the thrashing whiptailed swimmers,
motile cogs and quaking ghosts
that make their lives in there,
and these he called his “little animals,”
some appearing in the glass
“as large as your arm” and others
“as small as the heard hairs of a man
that hath not in a fortnight shaved,”
disporting themselves with merry
convolutions, flexing their numerous
limbs and nimble paws
in a manner pleasing to a haberdasher’s eye,
commendatory to the Genius
of their Maker.
3
So, here was a man who looked
at pieces of his world and found
more worlds inside them,
which is the natural order: worlds
that roost in tiny apertures on worlds
where dainty worldlings
dwell, and each one
is a world as well, some
milling in the streets of Delft and others,
pulsing through pondwater.
And each of these should have a book.
And there should be a book
for every punctuation mark
in all those books, and every speck
should be recorded and preserved
so that all things in time might be
made known and magnified
and put before us in the book of books.
But for now there is only this excellent one
by Clifford Dobell to enjoy,
and I have neglected to mention
the best part, which is the bookplate pasted
on its inside cover, ornately framed
in the Art Nouveau style,
and the picture inside it
which hangs in a well-lit stillness,
calm and perplexing as a tarot card,
over a rippling armorial ribbon
bearing a line from Chaucer.
It is a scene from mythical Arcadia, not
the prefecture of modern Greece,
but the literary, made-up place
where idle minds imagine
poetry belongs: sloping pastures
on unpopulated hills,
a billowing meringue of clouds
stitched with careful penstrokes,
a lonely place, at once
intimate and remote, for this
is a private wilderness, a place
for nobody to find but me,
and curled up at the bottom
of a vine-laden sycamore sits
a boyish short-horned faun, his hooves
tucked up beneath him, and instead
of scamping through purple freshets,
“trilling joyously on oaten pipe,”
or humping dryads as it may be,
in a dappled grove,
the little goat is captivated by
a book too small to read the title of,
and look how he holds it, his book,
exactly as I hold mine, his head
a little tilted, on hand propping up his chin,
the picture of perfect absorption,
a picture of life at its best,
because, what else is there to do
in Paradise bu loaf beneath a tree,
and dream of other worlds?
4
Or peer for hours and hours,
and more hours adding up to years,
through bits of polished glass
at beings who have no idea
they are being watched?
5
A spring rain pools on the porch-chairs
at the group home for addicts,
and the same rain soaks a toddler’s sock
that has been lying in my yard all year
and this is the very rain
that fills a frog pond down the road
where I go to collect little animals
to look at in my microscope.
It is all I have done this week.
I am neglecting my life
to spy on them! And if I had a shop that sold
button loops and red kersey
and bombazine at 9 stivers an ell,
that shop would surely fail,
with no one there to watch the till,
for you would find me locked upstairs instead
in a rambling sun-stunned room,
the room where Vermeer himself
might well have painted
our hero in his scholar’s robe, with his
star globe and dividers
and his cabinet of handmade
brass and silver microscopes, a man
of his time, staring until the light ran out at things
no mentioned in the Bible.
And I am a man of my time, but my
microscope came here from China
in a foam box reeking of solvents,
and the first live thing I saw in it
was a piece of myself, a tiny monster
from the back of my tongue: a macrophage,
whose from in my life is to eat
my enemies, the black
jots and whits, the lithe and vibrating
umlauts, hyphens & tilders
that would use my for food—
and that is where you will find Narcissus
on a clean glass slide,
on which a nano-assassin
encapsulated in a see-through sphere
is taking care of business, and there
in its scintillant middle I could see
my would-be devourers
being devoured, a pleasing sight.
And the next thing I looked at was yogurt.
And then, I walked out to the pond.
6
On the path to the pond
there’s a hole, fairly large,
where a pope-faced turtle old enough
to be my grandmother buried her eggs
last year. It is littered with leathery
shells and I have a strong urge
to fill up my pockets with these,
but it is not what I came for. The place
where I gather my samples
reminds me of a ruined Roman
amphitheatre, there are trees all around it
frozen in gestures of theatrical
menace and operatic grief.
A private wilderness, but the air here
is not quiet, it is shrill with sex,
the unceasing, imperious, loud need
of these treefrogs insisting on sex.
There is skim-ice on the water,
still, and there are animals under there, too,
demanding sex, and in truth
I would not refuse it myself,
if some girl with a high forehead
rinsed in the silvery light of old Delft
were to stop pouring milk
or reading her mail
and come out to the musky woods
where a goat-footed stranger is waiting.
But now, I must open a hole in the ice
with my long-handled spoon
and scoop out a helping of murk
to fill my bowl.
7
It is water, the restless stuff
that sustains and dissolves us,
and I tell you, though you will never
believe what I say, it is alive inside,
for there are animals within it
smaller even than the mites
upon the rind of a cheese,
“and their motions in water
are so swift and various,
upwards, downwards, and round about
that it is wonderful to see.”
For it is down in the grey
and mazy darkness of the pond
that they are constructing their
glittering clattertrap City of Madness,
with its glass ladders, and lemon-grass
spirals and a sky traversed by
delirious weirdos, one
like an angry emoticon, with two long hairs
embrangled on its scalp,
one like a revolving cocklebur,
and another like an animated spill,
(s if an accident could live!)
and crescent moons and popeyed gorgons, things
with knives for hands,
frenetic writhers, tumblers, bells
on stalks, a sort of great loose
muscle flinching and contracting,
diatoms like crystalline
canoes serenely gliding
down a coast of brown decay, and suddenly,
what looks to be a throbbing bronze
Victrola trumpet
rocketing around as if it won the war!
And you can almost hear the fanfare
as it plants its small end in a clump of muck
and starts to stretch itself,
and stretch until it is
as long as an alp horn,
as long and quivering as a plume of smoke
as long and quivering and dreadful as a cyclone funnel,
working the furious hairs of its mouth to suck
its lessers down its throat.
8
I have stared at them all week
in my Chinese microscope and have tried
to absorb what I saw.
I have studied my little animals so closely,
and have memorized their names,
the names they received
from muttonchopped scholars in the age
of tailcoats and columnar hats, there was
lacrymaria olor, tears
of the swan, by which we mean
that it is somewhat tear-shaped, if a tear
should have a long prehensile neck
to wrap around its food,
and there was stentor the loudspeaker,
which speakers for itself,
rotaria rotatoria, named
for the whirling cartwheels on its mouth,
suctoria, because it sucks, amoeba
because it makes me sick,
digenea because, merciful God,
I have never seen anything like that,
and paramecium which slides
like a long grey shadow
through a world it knows by feels,
serene as a basking shark,
and takes what it needs
and gives nothing.
And there is no end to them,
no end in numbers,
and no end in strangeness,
no end to their appetites, and all of it
exactly as van Leeuwenhoek
described it to us all those years ago,
when he, being the first to look
became the first to see
that what the wise men said was wrong,
world is not death at all,
the old machinework mannequin
swinging his scythe, he is not there.
It is not Death that undresses us,
pulls at the loose threads,
teases our garments apart,
and thrust itself down
to make more of itself inside us,
nor is it Death
that incises those lines
in our cheeks
and lays his corrupting touch
on a Dutch girl’s breast,
or calls up to us
from the cool earth
under the ice-covered pond—
for if you look, simply look,
with your bit of ground glass
you will see what is eating
these holds in the world, what chews
at the black straggle
and clings to those rafts of algae,
and cries up from the pages of a
strange old book, and hangs
in the damp sycamores
hollering for sex, sex, sex,
and probes in the dark muck
with its snakelike head,
if that thing is its head,
then opens its sudden mouth
with its wheel of whirling hairs
and starts to pull one
world after another
into its throat.
