For how we live—that good enough?” Tom smiled
And rose. “I’ve heard worse. Those thyroid
Pills—you still use them? Don’t. And keep in touch.”
I walked out into much
Guilt-obliterating sunlight. FREUD
We learned that evening DESPAIRS
OF HIS DISCIPLES & SAYS BITTE NIE
ZU AUFGEBEN THE KEY
TO YR OWN NATURES We felt clouds disperse
On all sides. Our beloved friend
Was back with us! We’d think some other time
About the hour with Tom
—Nonchalance that would gradually extend
Over a widening area. The question
Of who or what we took Ephraim to be,
And of what truths (if any) we considered
Him spokesman, had arisen from the start.
If he had blacked out reason (or vice versa)
On first sight, we instinctively avoided
Facing the eclipse with naked eye.
Early attempts to check what he let fall
Failed, E’s grasp of dates and places being
Feeble as ours, his Latin like my own
Vestigial; even D knew better German.
As through smoked glass, we charily observed
Either that his memory was spotty
(Whose wouldn’t be, after two thousand years?)
Or that his lights and darks were a projection
Of what already burned, at some obscure
Level or another, in our skulls.
We, all we knew, dreamed, felt and had forgotten,
Flesh made word, became through him a set of
Quasi-grammatical constructions which
Could utter some things clearly, forcibly,
Others not. Like Tosca hadn’t we
Lived for art and love? We were not tough-
Or literal-minded, or unduly patient
With those who were. Hadn’t—from books, from living—
The profusion dawned on us, of “languages”
Any one of which, to who could read it,
Lit up the system it conceived?—bird-flight,
Hallucinogen, chorale and horoscope:
Each its own world, hypnotic, many-sided
Facet of the universal gem.
Ephraim’s revelations—we had them
For comfort, thrills and chills, “material.”
He didn’t cavil. He was the revelation
(Or if we had created him, then we were).
The point—one twinkling point by now of thousands—
Was never to forego, in favor of
Plain dull proof, the marvelous nightly pudding.
Joanna (Chapter One) sat in the plane,
Smoke pouring from her nostrils. Outside, rain;
Sunset; mild azure; sable bulks awince
With fire—and all these visible at once
While Heaven, quartered like a billionaire’s
Coat of arms, put on stupendous airs.
Earth lurched and shivered in the storm’s embrace
But kept her distances, lifting a face
Unthinkingly dramatic in repose
As was Joanna’s. Desiccated rose
Light hot on bone, ridge, socket where the streak
Of glancing water—if a glance could speak—
Said, “Trace me back to some loud, shallow, chill,
Underlying motive’s overspill.”
Ephraim scolds me for the lost novel’s
Fire and brimstone version of his powers.
Meteorological eeriness
On the above lines left him cold, let’s say.
Yet who originally makes us feel
The eeriness of Santa Fe?
He cannot think why we have gone out there
That summer (1958). THE AIR
ABOVE LOS ALAMOS IS LIKE A BREATH
SUCKED IN HORROR TOD MORT MUERTE DEATH
—Meaning the nearby nuclear research
Our instinct first is to deplore, and second
To think no more of. Witter Bynner reads
Renderings of T’ang poetry he made
As a young man. Firelight on spinach jade
Or white jade buckles, and austere
Bass-bullfrog notes. Li Po himself draws near—
NO BEAUTY Ephraim dryly judges, yet
IN SIMPLE HONESTY MY SLEEVE WAS WET
Or, afternoons, an easy drive from town,
Chimayo’s clay and water spell works on us:
Adobe sanctuary for the glow
Of piñon-scented candles. Circus-tent
Rainbow carpentry frames booth on booth
From which, adroitly skewered, smocked by Sears,
Tall dolls personify the atmosphere’s
Overall anguish and high spirits, both.
Whatever these old carnivals once meant,
The wonder is, how they still entertain!
Pale blue wax roses—we’re outdoors again—
Deck the wooden crosses, a poor crop,
Sun-bleached Martínez, splintering Ortiz,
Bees buzzing, or a dozen terminal z’s.
Between them and the present flows a clear
Stream shaded by great cottonwoods. It’s here
That Ephraim tangles with A KIND OF GOD
HALF MAN HALF TALKING TREE ICECAPPED PEATSHOD
Transported from ALEUTIA 40 ODD
MILLENIA BC and on this spot
Left by his followers TO MELT & ROT
While they pressed southward. Soon as we appear
Crossing his stream, he stumps up full of fear
That we will claim it—HOW HE DITHERS ON
FIRST GOD OF MY ACQUAINTANCE & O DEAR
Back to the novel for a bit, it’s here
Gentle Sergei Markovich, in his bone
And turquoise necklace, was to come one day
As he had done for years—alone or with
People who mattered, Leo, Mrs Smith—
And find the very crosses turned to stone;
Crutches (that thick as bats hung from the ceiling
Above a pit of wonder-working clay
Beyond the altar—Lucy swears by it)
Gone; whitewash everywhere. He’d have the feeling
He too was cured, refurbished, on his way…
Here as well, Joanna and Sergei
“Recognize” each other, or I as author
Recognize in them the plus and minus
—Good and evil, let my reader say—
Vital to the psychic current’s flow.
Joanna worries me. (Sergei I know.)
I need to dip into that murky roman
Fleuve our friends, lawyers, the press, worked on
Throughout my awkward age, when glances did
Speak volumes. We called this one The Other Woman.
The stepmother whom in due course I met
Bore no resemblance to its heroine.
Whereas Joanna…Jung on the destructive
Anima would one day help me breathe
The smoke of her eternal cigarette
Coiling round Old Matt Prentiss—with a cough
Woken by acrid nothings in his ear,
His knobby fingers gripped between her thighs
(In the twin bed Lucy sleeps on and off).
Would help me hear Joanna, her ex-drunk’s
Snorts of euphoria, the Magic Fir
e
Music filling her earphones. Help me see
By the cruel reading light her sun-scabbed brow,
Thin hair dyed setter-auburn. Finally
To be, as she can never, this entire
Parched landscape my lost pages fly her toward,
Carrying a gift-wrapped Ouija board.
Kimono’d in red gold, SWIRLS BEFORE PINE
Ayako sights us through a pale bronze disc
Half mirror and half gong
Hanging at Kamakura, in the shrine.
From the Osaka puppets we are learning
What to be moved means. And at Koya-san—
Sun-shaft and cryptomeria,
Smoke-samurai, incensed retainers turning
To alabaster—word comes of my father’s
Peaceful death, his funeral tomorrow.
There will be no way to fly back in time.
Trapped by a phone booth, my transparency
Betrays (a young Zen priest centuries old
Tells Ephraim with approval) 16FOLD
LACK OF EMOTION Which may be the view
From where they sit. Then CEM gets through,
High-spirited, incredulous—he’d tried
The Board without success when Nana died.
Are we in India? Some goddam fool
Hindoo is sending him to Sunday School.
He loved his wives, his other children, me;
Looks forward to his next life. Would not be
Weeping in my shoes. An offhand salute,
And gone! TOO BOYISH IN HIS NEW GREEN SUIT
Ephraim, who enjoys this flying trip
Round the world more than we do, sees us next
At the tailor’s in Kowloon:
MY DEARS I AM BEST SUITED WHEN U STRIP
In Bangkok stumbles on us laid full length
Each on a bamboo dais, flexible
And polished dark as teak by smokers’ oils.
While DJ dreams, I retch all night.
Wat Arun’s tall rice-paper lantern not
Unfolded quite sways with the current
—A vision? No, a sight. As I’m afraid
We both are. Cure: whole jars of marmalade.
Short but sweet spells on Earth. And in between,
Broad silver wings drone forth our own cloud-backed
Features fainter than pearl
On white brow (Paradiso, III, 14).
Christmas. A jeweler in Kandy pushes
Flawed white sapphires for the price of glass.
D buys his mother one—see his rapt face
Broadcast in facets to the brink of Space!
Effect reversed by the ceiling at Fatehpur-Sikri
Embedded in which uncountable quicksilver
Convexities reduce and multiply
The visitor to swarms of the same fly.
Stupefied by Mother India
VEDANTA IS A DULLARDS DISCIPLINE
Ephraim adores these Mogul palaces
Ghosts of flouzis primp and twitter through;
Calls himself A TEMPERAMENTAL MOSLEM
I CLIMB ABOARD THE PRAYER RUG OF YR LEAST
WHIM TO BE CARRIED WESTWARD FACING EAST
To Istanbul. Blue DJs, red JMs
Or green or amber ones, we sweat among
The steam room’s colored panes.
I DECK MYSELF IN GLIMPSES AS IN GEMS
YR FATHER JM he goes on (we’re back
At the hotel now) WAS BORN YESTERDAY
To a greengrocer: name, address in Kew
Spelt out. Oh good, then I can look him up,
Do something for him? We’ll be there—The cup
All but cracks with consternation. WILL
U NEVER LEARN LOOK LOOK LOOK LOOK YR FILL
BUT DO DO DO DO NOTHING I admit
That what with market, mackerel, minaret,
Simmering mulligatawny of the Real,
I had forgotten we were on parole.
Ephraim, relax. How’s little Wendell P?
HE IS AN ANGEL HE HAS DREAMED OF ME
And so forth. But deep down I chafe. Dusk. Sleet
Hissing from the Bosporus? Steam heat?
A gale that stifles. A fierce cold that warms.
Chairs like brocaded tombstones, or “French Forms”
Squirmed from, at twelve, in my Verse Manual.
Despite our insights (Section I) we fall
Back on the greater coziness of being
Seen by him, and by that very seeing
Forgiven for the spectacles we’ve made
Of everything, ourselves, the world, the mud
Gullies skipped over, rut on trickling rut,
All in the name of life. Life? Shh. En route.
CLAY SAW GENEVA AT A TENDER AGE
Odder to bob up in—but can it be
The same old man’s bifocals
Who scissored Hans in profile from a page
Black as pitch? The flashing swerve of shears
Deftly stealing eyelash, brow and lip.
Tough shadow that remains,
The sitter long removed to sunless shores.
Also cut out (from our itinerary)
Is Capri, where we’d promised—but so what?
Another day. If we are characters
As now and then strikes us, in some superplot
Of Ephraim’s, isn’t our prerogative
To run away with its author? A disappointment
He takes smoothly, though the Prinsengracht
Shudders once, our images are racked
Revealed of unreflecting…
But the plane’s leaving and we haven’t packed.
A mapmaker (attendant since Jaipur)
Says that from San Francisco our path traces
The Arabic for GREAT WONDER
—Small wonder we feel ready to expire.
Riddled by roads, ruled by the peregrine,
England, these last days, dozes in a Spring
Habit of blade and bud,
Old lives made new, wheat green or oakshade green.
Not ours though. At the mere notion of Kew—
Ten thousand baby-carriages each maybe
Wheeling You Know Who—
NOTHING is exactly what we do.
Life like the periodical not yet
Defunct kept hitting the stands. We seldom failed
To leaf through each new issue—war, election,
Starlet; write, scratch out; eat steak au poivre,
Chat with Ephraim. Above Water Street
Things were advancing in our high retreat.
We patched where snow and rain had come to call,
Renewed the flame upon the mildewed wall.
Unpacked and set in place a bodhisattva
Green with age—its smile, to which clung crumbs
Of gold leaf, like traces of a meal,
Proof against the Eisenhower grin
Elsewhere so disarming. Tediums
Ignited into quarrels, each “a scene
From real life,” we concluded as we vowed
Not to repeat it. People still unmet
Had bought the Baptist church for reconversion.
A slight, silverhaired man in a sarong,
Noticing us from his tower window, bowed.
Down at the point, the little beach we’d missed
Crawled with infa
ntry, and wavelets hissed.
Wet sand, as pages turned, covered a skull
Complete with teeth and helmet. Beautiful—
Or were they?—ash-black poppies filled the lens.
Delinquency was rising. Maisie made
Eyes at shadows—time we had her spayed.
Now from California DJ’s parents
Descended. The nut-brown old maniac
Strode about town haranguing citizens
While Mary, puckered pale by slack
Tucks the years had taken, reminisced,
Thread snapping at the least attention paid.
They left no wiser our mysterious East.
David and I lived on, limbs thickening
For better and worse in one another’s shade.
Remembered, is that summer we came back
Really so unlike the present one?
The friends who stagger clowning through U.S.
Customs in a dozen snapshots old
Enough to vote, so different from us
Here, now? Oh god, these days…
Thermometer at 90, July haze
Heavy with infamy from Washington.
Impeachment ripens round the furrowed stone
Face of a story-teller who has given
Fiction a bad name (I at least thank heaven
For my executive privilege vis-à-vis
Transcripts of certain private hours with E).
The whole house needs repairs. Neither can bring
Himself to say so. Hardly lingering,
We’ve reached the point, where the tired Sound just washes
Up to, then avoids our feet. One wishes—
I mean we’ve got this ton of magazines
Which someone might persuade the girl who cleans
To throw out. Sunset. On the tower a gull
Opens and shuts its beak. Ephemeral
Orange lilies grow beneath like wild.
Our self-effacing neighbor long since willed
His dust to them, the church is up for sale.
This evening’s dinner: fried soup, jellied sole.
Three more weeks, and the stiff upper lip
Of luggage shuts on us. We’ll overlap
By winter, somewhere. Meanwhile, no escape
From Greece for me, then Venice…D must cope
With the old people, who are fading fast…
But that’s life too. A death’s-head to be faced.