More Experiments with the Mysterious Property of Animal Magnetism (1769)
Finding myself in a mesmeric orientation,
before me appeared Benjamin Franklin,
who magnetized his French paramours
at dinner parties as an amusing diversion
from his most serious studies of electricity
and the ethereal fire. I like thinking about
how he would have stood on tiptoe to kiss
their buzzing lips and everyone would gasp
and clap for the blue spark between them.
I believe in an honest and forthright manner,
a democracy of plain speech, so I have to
find a way to explain I don’t care to have sex
anymore. Once I was a high school teacher
and there was a boy who everyday came in late,
who only came to school at all to sell drugs
out of his backpack, upon which he laid
his head like a pillow and closed his eyes
while I pointed at a chart diagramming
the anatomy of a sparrow. The vice principal
was watching and taking notes as I taught
this class, so I slid the bag from under
his cheek, as if not to wake him, wrapped
his fingers around a pen. I was trying
to be a gentle mother and also trying
to show I was in control of an unstable
situation. The boy, also trying to be
in control of himself, walked so slow
to my desk and we stood to watch him
push everything—binders, piles of ungraded
papers, a beaker of red pens to the floor.
He was so calm. How do you like it when
I touch your things. I do not like it. I live
in a house with many blue mason jars,
each containing a feather collection or starfish
collection or vertebrae collection, and also
there is a fully articulated fetal alligator skeleton.
Each window is pressed by the design
of a sweet-gum branch, all the little orange
and red stars of its leaves, you can’t see
the perfect geometry this close, just haphazard
parabolas, but beneath the foundation
the roots mirror the branching. I have
a chart of this to pull down. The view is flat
and so quiet on the inside. Have I been
forthright yet? What I want to know is
what happens if I decide to never have sex
again? Or more precisely, can I decide
to not have sex again and still be kind?
And be a joy to others? I should mention
I am a wife. I should mention I was told
my sole purpose is to be joy to others.
The sidewalks outside are very full of people
and when I look at them I feel hopeless.
Benjamin Franklin was so jolly with his kite
and his key and his scandalous electricity.
He was so in love with women and drink
and democracy. Before I was this way,
I was not a house, I was just a jar and what
I wanted was to be broken. A cool trick
you can do that I once showed a class is crank
a wheel covered in felt against another felt
wheel. Static bristles and sparks and makes
your hair stand on end. But hook it to
a Leyden jar and the electricity fills up
in there, invisible as air. Becomes a glass
battery, until you too much the thing, then
wow! broken glass everywhere. I remember
wanting that. Do I have to always want that?
My house is blue and quiet. I can hardly
hear the squirrel in my sweet-gum tree
dancing like a sunbeam to sing his riddles:
“A house full, a hole full, but you cannot
gather a bowl full.” The air of everywhere
is wet with electric fluid, you can’t even tell,
but pop, whiz, everywhere. “In this
field,” Ben says, “the soul has room
enough to expand, to display all of her
extravagances.” The sweet gum has 10,000
sticky, spiky seed balls. They start green
but grow black and fall for want of
a barren season. They look like sea urchins.
I call them tree urchins and think it’s
a funny joke. I don’t tell it to anyone,
as I am tired of being told what is not.
Such a secret, I know, is an extravagance,
and I like best how it’s an extravagance so
small you must keep it in a jar with others
of its kind for it to ever mean anything at all.
Copyright Credit: Kathryn Nuernberger, "More Experiments with the Mysterious Property of Animal Magnetism (1769)" from The End of Pink. Copyright © 2016 by Kathryn Nuernberger. Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.