Two Ph.D.s Fix the Toilet

Which took half a day. Once before, I tried fixing the bathroom sink and broke the basin. The fixtures were that 70s avocado green, which was at the time no longer available in the style we needed. I was finally able to order an acceptable sink, but none of the old plumbing fit. The plumber had to come and replace all the pipes leading to the sink. And the faucet. We were new Ph.D.s, then, poor as church mice, which of course is why I was trying to do it myself, while my husband was in his study trying to get tenure.Being a plumber, say, or a poet or a critic or a novelist or a painter or a filmmaker, seems to require the same kind of attentiveness. It’s a particular kind that requires learning what you need to know both with your head and with your fingers. You stay with what you’re doing until it begins to “do itself,” almost without conscious choice. You don’t say, now I will pick up the socket wrench, or now I will employ this half-rhyme, or now I will shift the tone in this chapter. You just fall into it or crawl under the sink and that silly part of your mind that has to control everything nods off, while that part that knows, just knows, how it needs to be done, begins to do the work. “Knowing” is so interesting. It seems to come from not the self, but the whole atmosphere, an intellect that includes the self, but isn’t limited to that.“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,” says Hamlet. There’s DNA, there’s our blessed/ wretched parents, all that, but beyond, what? What nuance of difference caused matter to win out over anti-matter? Calling it Divinity seems awfully easy. I wasn’t thinking of answers when I wrote the poem below. Just the questions.I wrote the poem, of course, after we were actually sure the toilet was “fixed.” After we lay awake for awhile and heard no more little wasteful trickle of water, the repair being really just a temporary stay against confusion, and I know it.The poem was in the fall issue of The Southern Review, which is one of my favorite magazines. Hare’s BreathWe examine the toilet, hold the ball-cock up,determine the flapper fails to fully fall.We put a new one in, snip off the excess chain.The tank fills only one-third full. We lowerthe chain, change the settings on the dial,flush over and over, studying the maddeninglevels until the mechanism settles intobalance as inexplicable as this life we live,machines coming on and going off, gearsspinning like dreidels on their perfectly honedtips, a hair’s breadth, or hare’s breath, or hair’sbreath, the metaphor long messed up,all sense of origin gone, which no doubt explainswhy we’re floating, wavering, letting gallonsof water pass through, running up the bill.I ask you, what volume can a hare breathe,its tiny lungs pumping carroty air?  How wideis a hair? Furthermore, by what tiny margindid the quarks and leptons have to increaseover anti-quarks and anti-leptons to let matterwin out over anti-matter, to bring us here,to the flushing of toilets, filling of tanks?