A Haunted Book

by Charlotte M. Porter

Are finders keepers? Who decides in today’s grabby world? Eliza knows that present residents of North Florida, herself included, live on homelands of the Timucua people and hunt lands of the later Creeks and Seminoles. In the sixteenth century, European disease, enslavement, and conquest decimated Timucua communities. In the nineteenth century, the United States Federal Government marched the Creeks off to Oklahoma and pushed the Seminoles downstate into the Everglades. The Seminoles came back strong. They organized high-stakes Bingo, and the Seminole Nation now controls the State’s casinos. Tribal trusts make their kids multimillionaires, not losers.   

Bookish Eliza imagines Julius Caesar’s conquest of France. Caesar described all Gaul, omnis divisa in partes tres, divided into three parts like some gorgeous cloth for the taking. In 55 BC, Roman legions tramped through purple fields. The fragrant lavender oil soaked their sandals. Their swords clanked by their sides. Dogs barked. Gallic children parted the grape vines and hid. 

Eliza hides and divides in a different way. She cuts off the top corner of the flyleaf to mark her place in a used paperback volume of poetry purchased at a now defunct independent bookstore in Gainesville, Florida. The pages are peppered with notes of the previous owner, Ris Bunting. When she purchased the book in the late 1980s, she didn’t know who he was. Now she does—Albert Iris Bunting, a local insurance agent. Some regard Ris Bunting as a gifted hipster poet. Others dismiss him as a con artist. No question, the man could charm a snake, but Eliza would not buy a policy from him. Yet she values a volume that once belonged to him. 

And why? The marked-up pages possess a life of their own. Rereading them, she disturbs a ghost. Not the long-dead author, William Carlos Williams. No, the disgruntled ghost is young Ris Bunting kicking up his heels. As a college student, Ris gained notoriety as The Dasher, the bandshell flasher. His profuse annotations race across the margins. They make a palimpsest of the printed text. Some scribbles warn her off. Other notes, better than the author’s words, draw her into uncharted territory. Good. 

On this her first free afternoon in the new century, she can ponder Williams’s verse through the lens of another reader, Ris, an impetuous young man. She, despite herself, will be his sounding board. Such is the power of a haunted book. Finder, Eliza wonders if she chose the volume from a heap of paperbacks. Or, keeper, did the book choose her?

‘Owning someone else’s book also has lasting consequences.’

This collection of poetry is not Eliza’s first haunted book. In the 1960s, her stepmother gave her an unabridged copy of the Brothers Grimms’ fairy tales. Reading the terrifying stories of witches, ghosts, and goblins, she trembled, too frightened to look under her bed or behind the door. She wouldn’t touch foods with breadcrumbs—salads with croutons, turkey stuffing, and Swedish meatballs. Scolded, she retaliated and broke the spine of the book into three parts. She hid the different sections in the woodpile, under the potting shed, and inside a hollow tree. Her desperate measure, a simple spell, returned the words to darkness. Almost. She still regards all trail mix as suspect because trails are suspect. The advertised waterfall may be a gingerbread house owned by a cannibal. 

Owning someone else’s book also has lasting consequences. A mid-career museum conservator in a sprawling university town, Eliza bumps into Ris—or, rather, his name, on handbills for poetry jams—but the two do not move in the same circles. Like her, however, he is a registered voter and, in spring of 2002, the stars aligned and they received the same jury summons. 

The trial became famous as the Gumbo Limbo Lawsuit. A contractor used defective fill to pave over an exclusive subdivision. In the dirt business, gumbo, the courtroom learned, is a mixture of fine clay particles, prone to potholes. To compound and confuse matters, the fill-in dispute contained seeds of Bursera simaruba, the gumbo limbo tree, an aggressive invasive member of the fig family. What a hex!

The case boiled down to an accident of nature versus professional negligence. Eliza watched lawyers for both sides quiz Ris for jury selection. He claimed he could not serve without bias. 

And why not? asked the prosecutor.

Gumbo limbo, Ris explained, was the union of two nouns—the one, a comfort food; the other, an unholy state of the soul. Neither usage was defensible in roadwork. 

Gumbo, he explained to a mostly white courtroom, is a simmered okra stew popular in Creole communities. 

        And limbo? asked counsel. 

       Ris shook his head, then replied in a low somber voice, Must you know? The Devil’s task is to remain unknown, even in the details.

A great hush descended as Ris described limbo, the restive souls in Purgatory. Limbo bimbos, he called them. Gluttons gorge, drunkards binge, gossips can’t stop talking. Most sad, the suicidal harm themselves again and again. The showman, Eliza appreciated, was paraphrasing the great 14th-century Italian poet Dante. Justice does not bud, love is the true seed.

In a lawsuit about a weed tree, the word seed resonated. Prospective jurors shifted in their chairs. Lawyers cleared their throats. Deputies at the door raised their eyebrows. The judge banged her gavel and called for order. 

Of course both sides wanted clever Ris on the jury. Eliza was dismissed, not Ris. He served as jury foreman in a trial that dragged on through the hot wet Florida summer. As afternoon rains settled the gumbo clay, the gumbo limbo seeds sprouted and cracked open the contested pavement for all to see. 

Media attention made gumbo limbo a household word, a local ice-cream flavor. After the jury deadlocked, Ris told reporters, Get used to variables and feet of clay.

Feet of clay. Everybody laughed

About variables, Eliza knew Ris was riffing on William Carlos Williams. The Noble Laureate sought to capture the American idiom with a variable foot. Talk about a snipe hunt! Williams also coined the term triversen for a sentence broken into three lines, each readable in one breath, tough in an era of smokers. Finders, keepers. The one divided into three. Like Gaul.

Physician and poet, Dr. Williams lived his entire life in Rutherford, New Jersey, population 18,000. In the late seventeenth century, the town’s founder, Walling van Winkle, settled on lands of the Lenape (the Delaware Indians) because of Boiling Springs, a resource valued for therapeutic properties. Ailing locals could drink a glass of water, and a doctor could take the credit. Large or small, hot or cold, springs evoke renewal. Win::win. Eliza wonders if Williams read poetry to his patients as part of his bedside manner.  

One of Eliza’s favorite poems by Williams recounts a young woman who replaces fallen petals on a flower stem. The poem is a twist on the finders/keepers theme, and Eliza knows she likes it for the wrong reason. How often has she, Eliza, heard catty advice to pick up the pieces, make ends meet? The woman in the poem attempts to undo what’s done, to heal with dexterity. She’d be great selling used cars, thinks Eliza. Or, insurance. 

Yes, that’s what Ris was doing with his notes. He was budding Williams’s verse, giving the stalks a second chance. Pull apart the petals and destroy the life, but open a book and release vital power.

Eliza wonders why Ris parted with the book. Was he moving, downsizing, flat broke, but why sell this volume for two bits? Ris, Eliza realizes, was getting married—becoming married, placing petals on a lonesome flower stalk of self. Eliza has seen his wife Cirl at book events. Unlike trim fit Ris, she is indifferent to appearance, the heavy-footed girl playground kids tagged ‘tard, retarded, low IQ. Like those schoolyard geniuses now have partners who breathe poetry. 

But Cirl is not a modern woman. Eliza has watched her eat a plate of scrambled eggs in a crowded jazz bar. The jostle and jive of horn, bass, drums, and the spoken poetry do not perturb the woman. Cirl doesn’t cock her head and listen. She’s not a member of the audience defining the artistic space. She does not put down her fork to clap. She and her plate of eggs are the moment. For her, there is no season but the one, as Williams wrote in The Existentialist’s Wife. 

Without apology, Cirl is Ris’s season against despair. She is the powerful flower of no scent, save to the imagination. She harbors Ris during mood swings wilder than a hammock in a tropical storm. If Cirl is Ris’s defense, Williams’s Collected Poems is the handbook, Eliza realizes, the self-help manual. 

So, where does the book situate her, the book’s second owner? She can’t read the poems without reading Ris’s comments. He has embedded an intimate self-portrait in responses to another man’s verse. Immersion therapy, rebirth… Eliza conjures a drive-through fountain, a car wash, and laughs. She writes Williams’s full name backwards in the air as the impossible nom de plume Smailliw Solrac Mailliw and recites her own modified triversen:

Roses prick

red against 

clouds 

white against

pale summer skies rain soon

why bother with blue?

Or, as Williams wrote, blue as of the sea struck startling us with a bouquet of iris on the breakfast table. Iris—was Ris Bunting’s birth name really Iris or is Iris a fetching alias, Siri backwards? Perhaps the blue of the sea was the blue of a sedan that struck, what, startling the poet and his wife in their rituals of marriage.

More to the point, who was the dawn walker who arranged the startling bouquet on Williams’s breakfast table? Eliza envisions the irises as a collective messenger. The lovely early morning bouquet brings word from an admirer outside the marriage. The beauty of the flowers help keep the poet in his marriage. Man to man, back-up support, is this what a restless Ris hoped for? What is her place?

Eliza walks the variable foot backwards. She’s wearing another reader’s shoes, and anything can happen—a poem for the beloved, perhaps, as all true poems are.

Why bother with blue? But I do

Rain pales summer skies

dims clouds winsome above roses. 

Impulsive Ris also embraced Williams’s rare outbursts: brains… scattered aimlessly in the street. This is a wrenching image of a hit dog. Eliza’s turn to annotate. Too late to help the pooch, she responds to the spattered gore

on tarmac no Assisi no assistance

wind-blown roses petals sun-dried blood

Blood. Julius Caesar enslaved thousands in a triumphant march back to Rome. How brutal the looting! Were the captors captivated? If all vision is theft, the poet, too, counts as thief and marauder, a Conquistador, a finder as a keeper, but also as a loser.

Ris noted Williams often spoke of sight as two-way possession via a central hole of the eye itself into which we dare not stare too hard or we are lost. Peer into the optical sinkhole, thinks Eliza, and lose your soul in limbo,

shuttered peephole 

pine knot pushed-out rifle slot

in sapwood stockade 

But why, Williams asks, has a particular weed or woman or tumbling row of wheat caught the eye at a specific moment to hold me, the poet, openmouthed? More divide and conquer, thinks Eliza, but dear Doc, close your mouth, please, when you gawk.

‘If all vision is theft, the poet, too, counts as thief and marauder, a Conquistador, a finder as a keeper, but also as a loser.’

In the margins of Williams’s long verse about a yellow weed, Ris Bunting checked senses as assertion. He craved the awe of heroic mood. Back to Caesar. Eliza would have pressed a flower. Back to botany, but the real question is: Can a poem capture the bedraggled flower for a task neither weed nor poet can fulfill? The homely flower caught Smailliw Solrac Mailliw off guard and enslaved him with the favor of a poem. Eliza wants to read yellow flower as yellow fever. Is her eye jaundiced? Or, too clinical. Can an ungainly yellow weed serve beauty as a spare, hah, an understudy iris in dawn’s dim light? 

And so goes the national debate about normalization and acclimation. As if freedom, a political idea, is a biological entity, opportunistic by nature and invasive by happenstance. Like gumbo limbo. And the nuisance Cuban tree frog, Osteopilus septentriolis, that Eliza 

first saw yesterday 

and should have stomped

as if 

one dead frog counts.

As if… what prompts the poetic moment? A plate of yellow eggs, a strand of yellow weed.

Yes, the sun will rise whether or not dawn turns startling blue as an iris and the sea. Young Ris Bunting would like to be on the right side of the horizon, but where is the line? To highjack Williams’s poetic pursuit of the color blue, all a person has to do is snatch the blossoms from the vase on his breakfast table. Finder as keeper as thief. 

Williams addresses theft of beauty in The Stolen Peonies. He describes the loss, but not the peonies, which his spouse Flossie cherished. In 1922, the abrupt absence of a magnificent view, he claims, more than the theft, brought the couple, parents, closer than any other event in their then ten-year marriage. 

Mature peonies at the bottom of the garden—grand frilly blossoms with dark green leaves—Eliza knows them from her Wisconsin childhood. Her playhouse under big peony bushes was a glorious summer palace filled with the petals. Unlike Williams, her parents were renters, not homeowners, and she pondered borrowed beauty. Are finders keepers? 

Peonies, Paeonia lactiflora, cultivated in their native China for beauty and medicine, thrive for decades, but the plants do not move well. The thought sickens Eliza. The thieves who stole the Williams’s peonies probably killed them, whether they sold them or transplanted them. 

Or, tossed them from a speeding car. Eliza suspects Dr. Williams knew the thieves. Perhaps, the pranksters were friends of his two school-age sons—maybe on the same ball teams. Or, townies angry about the privileges rich kids enjoyed. Did the successful physician run a clinic in Rutherford for the less fortunate? Was William Carlos Williams a nice person? 

  Contemporaries assumed William’s domestic space of kiddy bunkbeds, hausfrau pin curls, and night-owl blotter was a safe place. Eliza thinks the up-and-coming pediatrician took his summertime peonies and his wife for granted. Yet, that same year, on November 21, 1922, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, The New York Times ran a story that gave readers their first chilling glimpse of the new chairman of the Nazi party, the demagogue, Adolph Hitler. Can Williams’s poem be read as a stupefied response? The world would never be the same.

Student Ris Bunting doubted the physician’s world of small measures was reliable enough for poetry or social order. He craved a moral odor, harkened in Williams’s famous poem, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower. Ris filled the margins of that spousal ode with notes about danger in vision. The garden imagery, however, pleased him, a Florida reader. He accepted Williams’s wife as the ordinary bloom, big or small, with holding power for the hummingbird. 

Ah, that ruby throat, the poet’s fount. Eliza sees that Ris underlined Williams’s word secret and penciled in forgiveness. Sucker-punched, she knows Smailliw Solrac Mailliw was not a faithful husband. Is Ris? His wife is an ordinary bloom.

Onward. Eliza throws water on her face and tackles Williams’s Desert Music, a diary mash-up of verse and prose. The year is 1954, and the unexpected death of Senator Joe McCarthy will end the politician’s ruthless homophobic witch hunt. The desert is the Chihuahuan Desert, a vast region of western Texas and northern Mexico lying in a rain shadow. The music seeks definition. What lies ahead? 

Under yellow city lights, the doctor and his wife, spry though no longer young, cross the footbridge from El Paso to Juárez for a Mexican dinner and a stroll. On the bridge, Williams sees a large bag of rags and does a double-take. Is it alive? he asks, Or, a corpse, wrapped in a dirty mantle? The sight haunts him. Later, he will wonder if the bag is a womb holding awful promise. 

Eliza reads this image as a uterus, an organ that has defined her life. For her, the poem becomes a paso, a passage or two-way birth canal between the lights of two cities. She, too, has walked the crossing for a supper of anchos and flautas Chihuahua-style on day-old shredded iceberg, the greeny lettuce.

Williams hears the desert as a tawdry cantina, not an ecotone of nightjars and jumping mice. For Ris, like Eliza, a Flower Child of the Sixties, the squalor of Juárez proved tough to stomach, but Dr. Williams does not protest the cholera, filth, and graft. His poem is a transgressive sojourn from suburbia. Blame the dusk, blame the desert music and dark doorways. No, thinks Eliza, blame the poet. 

Eventually, the couple re-cross the bridge and reclaim their hotel room in El Paso. They are no longer a threesome of doctor, poet, and compliant spouse. The bag on the bridge now seems only a bag, an amniotic sack or sausage casing. Williams cannot ignore the sight but, ashamed, he aborts the unseemly. Just before he reaches American soil, the doctor cuts the cord. Adíos. The desert music stops. 

Not so fast, thinks Eliza. Readers deserve an epiphany about the mysterious bag as a eureka moment, but Smailliw Solrac Mailliw has reached an impasse. The finder of the bag does not want to be the keeper.

At the paso, Eliza knows the Río Grande to be a slow river. Desert Music is a slow narrative, a horse opera with swaggering rancheros more hat than cow, swarthy card sharks more indío than bandito, and saloon whores more wet-nurse than strumpet. To Eliza, they are B-level stereotypes of the silver screen.

Williams adds himself to this cast as outlaw poet. Rubbing shoulders in the margins, Ris Bunting, too, relished the unsavory camaraderie of studio renegades, hustlers, and outpost madams of Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, and Maverick. Ah, those galloping horses on black-and-white T.V. What a fade out! What happens as the dust settles? 

What else, a jingle from the sponsors—L&M cigarettes, Boraxo soap, Kaiser Aluminum Foil. In commercial breaks, a pretty housewife takes a puff, shakes out brilliant white sheets, and lines a baking pan with quilted foil for certain success. 

Too easy, but, like Ris, child Eliza was sucked into the eye-hole. She knew what to do. Ready for gunslingers, her one-girl posse took cover behind the couch, pulled up her kerchief, and aimed a cap gun. Thanks to the limbo of endless commercials, she’s remained in ambush ever since, spooked into verse by a used book.

In Desert Music, two senior gringos from New Jersey cross the border on foot, the variable foot, but, in a new century, the twenty-first century, the poet’s desert music no longer intrigues Eliza. She’s done with puke green moral odor. Ghost muse be gone! Go babysit barf bags on bridges. 

As for Ris’s intense student scrawl, let agent Albert Iris Bunting, a.k.a. The Dasher, bounce out the company door like a blue rubber ball off through the pink azaleas—poof, to Gaul, Jersey, El Paso.

On this fine Florida day, Eliza feel like a new person, and she knows what to do. Time for a binding. She starts a small fire in her charcoal grill and burns her bra. She then takes the book of poems and breaks the spine. Divide and conquer. Eliza laughs. Pulling apart the pages, she litters. Let birds and cotton rats line their nests with paper mansplain. Finders, keepers.