Hubert(a)
the hermaphrodite hippo
played old-time country
standards (Stoney's Waltz,
Flop-Eared Mule)
on a modified autoharp
with picks fashioned from Model T
head lamp reflectors.
(S)he took her music
from Virginia to Vermont in a Jeep Wagoneer,
playing any watering hole that (s)he could.
I stayed with Hubert(a)
in a Springfield, Vermont apartment
sublet by a chain-smoking
Catholic school custodian
named Lola Beanfield. She
piled dog feces and rags and clay idols
into mounds on the high places,
buttressed by votive candles and truck tires.
I took the daybed on the closed-in porch.
The hippo took to the tub, until the stench and smoke nearly
killed us. We paddled upriver,
to an estate probate farmhouse, complete with three
whitewashed cow stanchions
minus the cows. Maybe one cow ate the other cow,
and then ate itself. A perfect tin roof winked between
hand-hewn boards. There was knob and tube wiring,
and newspaper ads for ladies oxford shoes
(on sale, one week only, June 15, 1958).
Hubert(a) settled in, typed a manifesto
on a Singer electric typewriter, ranting with a quick
staccato touch against metallic hum, all about the harvesting
of artificial hips from the dead poor, pay toilets in department
stores, and subliminal advertising at drive-in theaters.
Hubert(a) lost focus,
ate more two buck Tony's pizzas,
became less the rambling he-she mystery hipster
championed in mimeographed broadsides.
One winter day
that tasted suspiciously like spring
cast light on living-dead Hubert(a).
She had grown more disturbed than usual.
The Oscar Schmidt autoharp's sliding bars,
shifters, strings and springs were sent to promenade
over a flight of stairs leading to a food cellar floor.
Hubert(a) stomped them under a foot of flood water,
then pushed what remained into silt and mud
in the wake of waters subsided
by sump pump incantations.
Hubert(a)
died three days later
in a spring that ran behind the barn,
drowned in whisky-fueled sorrow,
with all the old songs gone dry. |
