Traveling Sprinkler Read Online Free Page A

and drank some Pellegrino and sweated. I sat bent over with my head on the steering wheel and let all of my self and my mind flow into my lips, so that they were swollen with unvoiced words. I thought of male actors with big lips and how if I had big lips I could stand with a slight frown and ploof out my full set of lips and maybe that would be attractive to women, since women seemed to like James Dean and other sexually ambiguous people. My lips felt like a horse’s lips. Just give me an apple and I’ll wimble at it. Hi, I’m Harry Connick, Jr. I would really like to be Harry Connick, Jr.
    Time now to get my frequent burrito card punched again at Dos Amigos Burritos.
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    I T’S ALWAYS BETTER to start fresh than to rewrite. The cult of rewriting has practically sunk poetry. For instance, right now, hell, I could begin a poem with “I dusted the side table with one of her underpants.” That’s not a bad beginning. I could take it from there. It’s true. I have an old pair of Roz’s underpants, and sometimes if I have to make the living room presentable for teatime guests I squirt some Old English furniture polish on my grandmother’s table, which was unfortunately refinished at one point with polyurethane, and I polish it to a nice shine.
    Today I thought, My birthday is coming up, and nobody knows I want a guitar: I’ll just go to Best Buy and buy myself one. So I did, admiring as I drove into the parking lot the splendid striped colors of the new sign at the Old Navy store, which is trying to relaunch itself in a changed world. Best Buy is faltering a bit, too, I’d read—nobody is buying CDs, and Netflix and other movie streamers have destroyed the DVD business, and videogame sales are off. But there was plenty of noise in the music department, and my guitar was still there. It was a Gibson Maestro. The word “Maestro” was in fifties handwriting script, and the box said: “Everything you need is right here!” I rested it on the roof of my car and tore it open. Inside was a black guitar with six strings, a black case, a strap, some picks, and a warranty. Hah, a warranty. How many of these warranty cards have I seen and thrown out in my life? A hundred? I knew the guitar would never break, and it hasn’t.
    I got in the car and plucked a note with my thumb on the biggest, fattest string. An almost incomprehensibly gorgeous sound gushed out of the big hole, from inside the guitar’s wooden velodrome. It made something vibrate in my pituitary gland. “Ooh, that’s so nice,” I said.
    I drove home and worked through the first few guitar lessons in GarageBand. I practiced chords until the tips of my fingers hurt terribly. You have no idea how sharp guitar strings are. I looked at my fingers and saw deep red grooves. Fortunately the string just missed the numb skin graft on my index finger, where I once cut it slicing bread.
    I wanted to play minor chords immediately, but the cheerful, well-groomed instructor from GarageBand was sitting on his stool telling me how to play major chords. They always start you off with major keys even though minor is where you generally end up.
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    L ONG YEARS AGO I wrote a poem called “Misery Hat.” It was about a magical hat that the narrator, a woman, knits out of yarn from a mysterious yarn store, and when she puts it on she can sense any misery within a five-mile radius. She senses human misery and animal misery and sometimes even plant misery—the misery, for instance, of a neglected banana turning black in a bowl. She’s dissatisfied with the hat and she knits a bigger one, with yellow and brown and green and black stripes, that can sense any misery anywhere in the world. She sits miserably doing nothing, wearing her long floppy hat. I sent the poem to Peter Davison, the poetry editor at
The Atlantic
. He sent