The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker Page A

commands. It does not know spelling or meaning. And because it's an efficient mouth control center, it classes that series of muscular commands as being very similar to one next door to it: rune. The end is the same, and it's going to store that near "moon," but it's going to give you a different beginning. It's going to say, Okay, go back in the back of your mouth, I want you to do something kind of difficult with the back of your tongue. And then I want you to flip your tongue up. Rrr. Don't roll it! Don't roll the R, don't trill it, because you are not Sarah Bernhardt. You're not William Butler Yeats. You're just going to say "rune."
    The tongue is a rhyming fool. It wants to rhyme because that's how it stores what it knows. It's got a detailed checklist of muscle moves for every consonant and vowel and diphthong and fricative and flap and plosive. Pull, relax, twitch, curl, touch. And somewhere in there, on some neural net in your underconsciousness, stored away, all these checklists, or neuromuscular profiles, or call them sound curves, are stored away, like the parts of car bodies, or spoons, with similar shapes nested near each other. Broom and loom and tomb and spume and womb and whom are all lying there on the table in one spot. And you figured all that out by yourself. They rhyme.
    And what's different about them? The all-important beginning. The removable hair. Or the wig. The sound has a body, a sort of a snaky thing, with a little bell on its tail. And then when you get up to the head, the head can have a bunch of puffy P kind of hair on its head, poom, or a fluffy FL kind of hair, or a dark black M hairdo, or big blowsy bastardizing hair. You can have all kinds of hair preceding that oom sound.
    Buh. Hoo. Huh. Hay. And once you've got them classed and labeled, you can start taking off and putting on the sound-wigs. You pick up "plume" and you carefully, patiently, take off the PL and you put it aside. Don't drop it! And you pick up the BL, put that on. Get it properly adjusted. Brrrrrr. Brrrroooom.
    So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in your mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme. They're saying, That way that you first learned language, right at the beginning, by hearing what was similar and what was different, and figuring it all out all by yourself, that way is still important. You're going to hear it, and you're going to like it. It's going to pull you back to the beginning of speech.
    And that's why we like puns, too. Some puns. A few puns. Orange you glad. Puns and plays and near-misses and alliterations. Fair and foul. Fee fie fo fum. Liquor locker. The Quicker Picker Upper. Road rage. Boxtop. Pickpocket. Smile and dial. Drink and drive. Lip-smacking, whip-cracking Cracker Jacks.
    Or: Sir, isn't that a steering wheel sticking out of your zipper? Yes, it's driving me nuts.
    We like to visit the parallel sound-studio universe with all these mixing boards and XLR patch cables going here and there, independent of the other part of our head, which is the conscious part that has spent a long time sweating the books and trying to make sense of objects and ideas and meanings. Trying to be a responsible citizen.
    Rhyme taught us to talk.
    I RANG NAN'S DOORBELL and told her how good the chicken was, and she said she was glad to hear it. But she seemed a little preoccupied, maybe even a little down. She said that she'd just gotten two very high estimates to put in a wide plank floor in her guest room--both more than twenty-eight hundred dollars.
    "To nail in a pine