Free Had I a Hundred Mouths by William Goyen Page B

Something’s stopped. The battery fell out somewhere along the way. Where’s the power? Also I became grubby. The shine gone. I felt molty. The flower off me. I felt dry. Love! Love unreturned. Do you know, est-ce que vous savez , you who took me from the icebound hothouse and now “detain” me, are you acquainted with fouled love? You will answer that that is a sentimental question, even unscrupulous under the circumstances. “Unscrupulous” indeed! Well, that’s your word, not mine. I’m not trying to work up pity; nor am I trying to build up a case of self-pity, God forbid. But a poet is a person of love, whether he’s producing, at the moment, or not; a person with love to give. He’s also somebody who needs to get love back—for Christ’s sake. You back there who the hell did you think I was, somebody giving all that passion and not getting anything back? How long did you think I could go on like that? I must admit it was my choice to go on like that. I kept hoping you’d change. That you’d come to me. Give me something back . And so I went on; giving, giving; went on too far, went into a territory where I couldn’t turn back, where I was lost; a territory that was dark and where I felt dark feelings toward you, resentment and hate. My God, I who could love you so much. I, torn lover, who wanted to put you together with tender hands and wanted to tear you apart with the hands of a savage. Love not got back! You somewhere! Perverter! Spoiler! Perverting what was beautiful, fouling what was beautiful. Fouler! Fouler! Fouler! I don’t know what kept me from striking you in those days. Because of your fear, your little lack of courage, your selfish little fear. And I keep walking around with a hole in my breast. I could have talked to the Nurseryman about this. We could have had conversations in the deepest nights and in the veiled and humid morning twilights in the healing flower-hung bloom-graced grottos and little primrose bowers, Wisteria arbors of the Nursery. He might have taken my sorrow, smoothed a little my anger, given me some of the wisdom of a gardener, helped me understand the fouling of passion, the spoiling of love. I might have shown him the photographs, the letters, even some of my early poems written in the gone days of my passion and tender love, while they were still pure feeling in me, poetry, before I found a fouling object. Love indeed! Poem-crusher! Poetry-robber! I could have spoken of betrayal, of the knife-cut of tepid love, the stabbing dagger of half-baked feeling. The Nurseryman might have begun to drink less whiskey. He might have felt needed, of service beyond the watering of mute blooms, the feeding of dumb stalks. Does nobody give a penny in Hell for another’s woes? If he did not, if the gardener-Nurseryman did not, and put concern and caring for his brothers into the bottle, at least he could have allowed me the company of flowers, passing blooms for a passing visitor. Well he didn’t. Even so. He’d probably have annoyed me with drunken slobberings, baby speech. And he couldn’t have heard me or would’ve half-heard me ringing with booze like doorbells in his ears. But I don’t know anything and this is all only conjecture. And it doesn’t matter now.
    But what was between those two, Nurseryman and dead girl, beautiful figure laid out almost obscenely in the leaves and blooms? And why was this sight chosen for me to see, why was I selected as a witness to it? I, no more than a passerby, enchanted by a glowing hothouse in the frozen winter, somehow possessed by a drunken Nurseryman who denied me hospitality when I most needed welcome. Or was there nothing between the two, were they strangers? And therefore was it a murder? Murder in the Biology Lab and at daybreak and the body hurled below, into the greenhouse. There was no stab wound on the perfect body; no prints of a squeezing hand on the fair