And on—“I’ll watch a film of when they mate,
If I can stand it,” he will say at lunch—
But for her manners. Here I stand,
Friend of her friend, whom she must either love
Or overlook or maul. Here is her hand
Reaching out for me, its charcoal glove
Scuffed and wrinkled; myself taken in
Before I know it, by uncritical eyes
—Unlike the moment—as we solemnize
Our new (our old) relation: kissing kin.
Moment that in me made the “happy” sign
Like nothing I—like nothing but that whole
Fantastic monkey business of the soul
Between lives, gathered to its patron’s breast.
All those years, what else had so obsessed
The representatives of Clay and Ford?
Weren’t we still groping, like Miranda, toward
Some higher level?—subjects in a vast
Investigation whose objective cast,
Far from denying temperament, indeed
Flung it like caution to the winds, like seed.
Take the equivocal episode beginning
When Gopping-Simpson’s mother lets the baby
Drown in the bath. Ephraim, beside himself,
Asks don’t we know any strong sane woman
In early pregnancy, reborn to whom
His charge would have a running start on life?
Hold on! who’d wish the likes of Gopping
On his worst enemy? But Ephraim briskly
Counters with a thousand-word show-stopping
Paean to the GREAT GENETIC GOD
By whose conclusion we cannot but feel
So thoroughly exempted from ideal
Lab conditions as to stride roughshod
Past angels all agape, and pluck the weird
Sister of Things to Come by her white beard.
I mention my niece Betsy. D has had
Word from an ex-roommate, name of Thad,
Whose wife Gin—that will be Virginia—West,
A skier and Phi Bete, is on the nest.
Ephraim, delighted, causes time to fly
(For he is hesitant to SLIP THE SOULS
LIKE CORRESPONDENCE INTO PIGEONHOLES
Until he hears, out of the womb forthcoming
Late in the sixth month, a MELODIOUS HUMMING
—Which, heard there, would do much to clarify
Another year’s abortion talks in Rome)
And sure enough, soon after Labor Day
Not only he-of-Gopping but—get this—
Ham’s Joselito, who drinks lye
At the eleventh hour, are at home,
One in Virginia, one in Beatrice.
Cause indeed for self-congratulation.
Diplomats without portfolio,
We had achieved, it seemed in the first glow,
At last some kind of workable relation
Between the two worlds. Had bypassed religion,
Its missionary rancor and red tape
No usefuller than the Zen master’s top
Secret lost in silence, or in pidgin.
Had left heredity, Narcissus bent
Above the gene pool. As at a thrown stick,
Still waking echoes of that give-and-take
—Repercussions dire in the event—
Between one floating realm unseen powers rule
(Rod upon mild silver rod, like meter
Broken in fleet cahoots with subject matter)
And one we feel is ours, and call the real,
The flat distinction of Miranda’s kiss
Floods both. No longer, as in bad old pre-
Ephraim days, do I naively pray
For the remission of their synthesis.
Guests were now descending on our village
Hideaway, drawn by the glowing space
Beneath its dome. Who were they? Patrons, mostly,
Of all whose names we mentioned. Any night
A Zulu chieftain could rub elbows with
Jenny, a pallid Burne-Jones acrolith,
Patrons respectively of a chum of mine,
Dead in grammar school, and Gertrude Stein,
Both safely back—he’ll tell us where—on Earth;
Once stroked, once fed by us, stray souls maneuver
Round the teacup for a chance to glide
(As DJ yawns, quick!) to the warmth inside.
Where some of course belong: patrons of living
Dear ones—parents, friends—we dutifully
Ask after. Few surprises here. E’s tact
Encourages us—PATRON NOT UNHOPEFUL
Meaning that things are really pretty grim—
To drop the subject. We don’t challenge him.
If Maya is a WHITE WITCH or my father
ONLY IN HIS OLD AGE MAKING PROGRESS
It figures in both cases. And if Mary Jackson
Has narrowly, as a Sicilian child,
MISSED SAINTHOOD she deserves the martyr’s palm
With oakleaf cluster for those thirty-nine
Mortal years with Matt. The lady from
Kyoto (Mary’s patron) raises fine
Eyebrows—as if wives could choose!—then giggling
Calls MFJ a BLOSSOMING PLUM BRANCH
IN MY HUMBLE TOKONOMA Others crowd
About us. Wallace Stevens, dead that summer,
Reads us jottings from his slate of cloud,
Graciously finds a phrase of mine to quote
—But ouf! So much esprit has left us quite
Parched for a double shot of corps.
We need a real, live guest. So Maya comes,
And soon to a spellbinding tape—dream-drums—
Can be discovered laying down in flour
Erzulie’s heart-emblem on the floor.
That evening she danced merengues with us.
Then Ephraim, summoned, had her stand between
Two mirrors—candle-scissorings of gold;
Told her she was in her FIRST LAST ONLY
Life, that she knew it, that she had no patron.
The cat she felt kept dying in her stead
Did exactly that. She was its patron.
Smoke-ring enigmas formed to levitate
Into a swaying blur above the head.
Ephraim, we understood, was pleased; but Maya
Found him too much the courtier living for pleasure.
LETS HOPE THE LIVED FOR PLEASURE WILL NOT BE
ALL MINE WHEN YR WHITE WITCH SETS EYES ON ME
Whereupon Maya stiffens. She has heard
A faint miaow—we all have. In comes Maisie,
Calico self-possession six weeks old,
Already promising to outpoise by ounces
Ephraim as the household heavyweight.
Maya, shaken, falls into a chair.
She’s had enough. Cattily we infer
E rocked the boat by getting her birthdate
Five years wrong; and not for five more years
Figure out that he had been correct.
Maya departs for city, cat, and lover.
The days grow shorter. Summer’s over.
We take long walks among the flying leaves
And ponder turnings taken by our lives.
Look at each other closely, as friends will
On parting. This is not farewell,
Not now. Yet something in the sad
End-of-season light remains unsaid.
For Hans at last has entered the red room—
Hans who on his deathbed had still smiled
Into my eyes. He and our friend are friends now.
He teaches Ephraim modern European
History, philosophy, and music.
E is most curious about the latter.
What simpleminded song and dance he knew
Has reached the stage of what H calls TRANSFERRED
EXPERIENCE So we must play him great
Works—Das Lied von der Erde and Apollon Musagète—
While like a bored subscriber the cup fidgets…
More important, Ephraim learns that Hans
Has INTERVENED on my behalf
As patrons may not. To have done so requires
SOME POWERFUL MEMORY OR AFFINITY
(Plato intervened for Wallace Stevens).
In any case HL REMEMBERS U
STILL HEARS THRU U JM A VERNAL MUSIC
THIS WILL BE YR LAST LIFE THANKS TO HIM
—News that like so much of Ephraim’s leaves me
Of two minds. Do I want it all to end?
If there’s a choice—and what about my friend?
What about David? Will he too—? DJ
HAS COME ALL THINGS CONSIDERED A LONG WAY
What things? Well, that his previous thirty-four
Lives ended either in the cradle or
By violence, the gallows or the knife.
Why was this? U DID NOT TAKE TO LIFE
Now, however, one or two, at most
Three lives more—John Clay, a beaming host
ALREADY PLANS THE GALA—Stop, oh stop!
Ephraim, this cannot be borne. We live
Together. And if you are on the level
Some consciousness survives—right? Right.
Now tell me, what conceivable delight
Lies for either of us in the prospect
Of an eternity without the other?
Why not both be reborn? Which at least spares one
Dressing up as the Blessed Damozel
At Heaven’s Bar to intervene—oh hell,
Stop me. You meant no harm. But, well, forgive
My saying so, that was insensitive.
His answer’s unrecorded. The cloud passed
More quickly than the shade it cast,
Foreshadower of nothing, dearest heart,
But the dim wish of lives to drift apart.
Times we’ve felt, returning to this house
Together, separately, back from somewhere—
Still in coat and muffler, turning up
The thermostat while a slow eddying
Chill about our ankles all but purrs—
The junk mail bristling, ornaments in pairs
Gazing straight through us, dust-bitten, vindictive—
Felt a ghost of roughness underfoot.
There it was, the valentine that Maya,
Kneeling on our threshold, drew to bless us:
Of white meal sprinkled then with rum and lit,
Heart once intricate as birdsong, it
Hardened on the spot. Much come-and-go
Has blackened, pared the scabby curlicue
Down to smatterings which, even so,
Promise to last this lifetime. That will do.
High upon darkness, emptiness—at a height
Our stories equalled—on a pane’s trapeze
Had swung beyond the sill now this entire
Rosy-lit interior: food, drink,
People at table, sheer Gemütlichkeit
Of insupportable hypotheses
Hovering there. It was a pied-à-terre
Made for his at-homes, we liked to think.
Though when the autumn winds blew how it trembled!
What speed-of-light redecorations,
As we began to move from place to place,
It suffered—presto! room and guests assembled
By a flicked switch, the host’s own presence
Everywhere felt, who never showed his face.
How could we see him? DIE his answer came
Followed by the seemlier afterthought
HYPNOSIS With a how-to-do-it book
From the Amherst library (that year I taught)
On the first try, one evening in mid-fall,
I put D under. Ephraim had coyly threatened
To lead us BY THE HAND TO PARADISE
& NOT LET GO We were alone, with Maisie,
In a white farmhouse up a gravel road
Where Frost had visited. DJ’s oldfashioned
Trust in nature human and divine
Was anything but Frostian. As for mine,
Trances like these are merciful, and end
I prayed. We held hands. We invoked our friend.
The stillness deepened. Garlands of long dead
Roses hung on every wall. Was Ephraim there?
No cup would move, this time. D’s lips instead
Did, and a voice not his, less near,
Deeper than his, now limpid, now unclear,
Said where he was was room for me as well.
Whose for that matter was the hand I held?
It had grown cool, impersonal. It led
Me to a deep black couch, and stroked my face
The blood had drained from. Caught up in his strong
Flow of compulsion, mine was to resist.
The more thrilled through, the less I went along,
A river stone, blind, clenched against whatever
Was happening that once. (Only this May
D lets me have the notes he made next morning,
Wherein a number of small touches rhyme
With Maya’s dream—as we shall see.) The room
Grown dim, an undrawn curtain in the panes’
Glass night tawnily maned, lit from below
So that hair-wisps of brightness quickened slowly
the limbs & torso muscled by long folds of
an unemasculated Blake nude. Who then
actually was in the room, at arm’s length,
glowing with strength, asking if he pleased me. I
said yes. His smile was that of an old friend, so
casual. Hair golden, eyes that amazing
blood-washed gold our headlights catch, foxes perhaps
or wildcats. He looked, oh, 25 but seemed
light years older. As he stroked J’s face & throat
I felt a stab of the old possessiveness.
Souls can’t feel at E’s level. He somehow was
using me, my senses, to touch JM who
this morning swears it was my hand stroking him.
(Typical of J to keep, throughout, staring
off somewhere else.) Now Ephraim tried to lead me
to the mirror and I held back. Putting his
hand on me then, my excitement, which he breathed
smiling, already fading, to keep secret
Eyebeam sparkling coolly into black,
Lips rippling back into the glass-warp, breathing
Love…So much, so little, David saw.
That was before our brush with Divine Law.
I’d rather skip this part, but courage—
What we dream up must be lived down, I think.
I went to my ex-shrink
&nbs
p; With the whole story, right through the miscarriage
Of plans for Joselito. He
Got born to a VIRGINIA WEST IN STATE
ASYLUM —D too late
Recalls “Gin’s” real name: Jennifer Marie.
(The following week, I’ll scarcely dare
Ask after Betsy. But her child, it seems,
OUTDOES THE WILDEST DREAMS
OF PATRONS Whew. And later, when through fair
Silk bangs, at six months, Wendell peers
Up at me, what are such serene blue eyes
For, but to recognize—?
However.) We have MEDDLED And the POWERS
ARE FURIOUS Hans, in Dutch and grim,
May send no further word. Ephraim they’ve brought
Before a kind of court
And thrown the book (the Good Book? YES) at him.
We now scare him with flippancies.
DO U WANT TO LOSE ME WELL U COULD
AGENTS CAN BREAK OUR CODE
TO SMITHEREENS How Kafka! PLEASE O PLEASE
Whereupon the cup went dead,
And since then—no response, hard as we’ve tried,
“And so I just thought I’d…”
Winding up lamely. “Quite,” the doctor said,
Exuding insight. “There’s a phrase
You may have heard—what you and David do
We call folie à deux.
Harmless; but can you find no simpler ways
To sound each other’s depths of spirit
Than taking literally that epigram
Of Wilde’s I’m getting damn
Tired of hearing my best patients parrot?”
“Given a mask, you mean, we’ll tell—?”
Tom nodded. “So the truth was what we heard?”
“A truth,” he shrugged. “It’s hard
To speak of the truth. Now suppose you spell
It out. What underlies these odd
Inseminations by psycho-roulette?”
I stared, then saw the light:
“Somewhere a Father Figure shakes his rod
At sons who have not sired a child?
Through our own spirit we can both proclaim
And shuffle off the blame