No, no! Set in our ways
As in a garden’s, glittered
A whole small globe—our life, our life, our life:
Rinsed with mercury
Throughout to this bespattered
Fruit of reflection, rife
With Art Nouveau distortion
(Each other, clouds and trees).
What made a mirror flout its flat convention?
Surfacing as a solid
Among our crudities,
To toss them like a salad?
And what was the sensation
When stars alone like bees
Crawled numbly over it?
And why did all the birds eye it with caution?
It did no harm, just brightly
Kept up appearances.
Not always. On occasion
Fatigue or disbelief
Mottled the silver lining.
Then, as it were, our life saw through that craze
Of its own creation
Into another life.
Lit by a single candle after dining
TRY THINKING OF THE BEDROOM WALLPAPER
And without having to close my eyes come
Gray-blue irises, wine intervals.
A window gasping back of me. The oil-lamp
Twirling white knobs of an unvarnished bureau.
It’s sunset next. It’s no place that I’ve been.
Outside, the veldt stops at a red ravine,
The bad pain in my chest grown bearable.
WHO ARE U A name comes: I’m Rufus…Farmer?
FARMETTON DEC 1925
December? YES DECEMBER AND Deceased!
How much of this is my imagination
Sweating to graduate from private school?
I’m in bed. Younger than myself. I can’t…
GO ON I hear them in the vestibule.
WHO Peter? YES & Hedwig? PETERS AUNT
And Peter is my…YR GREAT HAPPINESS
So, bit by bit, the puzzle’s put together
Or else it’s disassembled, bit by bit.
Hot pebbles. Noon is striking. U HAVE STUMBLED
Upon an entry in a childish hand.
The whole book quivers. Strikes me like a curse:
These clues, so lightly scattered in reverse
Order, aren’t they plain from where I stand?
The journal lies on Peter’s desk. HE NOW
NO LONGER LOCKS HIS ROOM not since my illness,
Heart-room where misgivings gnaw, I know.
Eyes in the mirror—so I’ve woken—stare,
Blue, stricken, through a shock of reddish hair
—Can we stop now please? U DID WELL JM
DEATHS ARE TRAUMATIC FEW REMEMBER THEM
Maya in the city has a dream:
People in evening dress move through a blaze
Of chandeliers, white orchids, silver trays
Dense with bubbling glassfuls. Suavities
Of early talking pictures, although no
Word is spoken. One she seems to know
Has joined her, radiant with his wish to please.
She is a girl again, his fire-clear eyes
Turning her beautiful, limber, wise,
Except that she alone wears mourning weeds
That weigh unbearably until he leads
Her to a spring, or source, oh wonder! in
Whose shining depths her gown turns white, her jet
To diamonds, and black veil to bridal snow.
Her features are unchanged, yet her pale skin
Is black, with glowing nostrils—a not yet
Printed self…Then it is time to go.
Long trials, his eyes convey, must intervene
Before they meet again. A first, last kiss
And fadeout. Dream? She wakes from it in bliss.
So what does that turn out to mean?
Well, Maya has lately moved to the top floor
Of a brownstone whence, a hundred and six years
Ago, a lady more or less her age
Passed respectably to the First Stage.
Now (explains Ephraim) in a case like this
At least a century goes by before
Its deathplace here below, locates and enters
On the spot a sleeping form its own
Age and sex (easier said than done
In rural or depopulated areas:
E treats us here to the hilarious
Upshot of a Sioux brave’s having chosen
By mistake a hibernating bear).
Masked in that sleeping person, then, the soul
For a few outwardly uneventful hours—
Position shifting, pillowcrease, a night
Of faint sounds, gleams, moonset, mosquito bite—
Severs what LAST THREADS bind it to the world.
Meanwhile (here comes the interesting bit)
The sleeper’s soul, dislodged, replaces it
In Heaven. Ephraim now, remembering
Her from that distant weekend, pulls a string
THIS TIME AT LEAST NO GRIZZLY ON RAMPAGE
Transferring Maya’s dream to his own Stage.
And who was her admirer? CANT U GUESS
But is that how you generally dress,
You dead, in 1930’s evening clothes?
WE ARE CORRECT IN STYLES THE DREAMER KNOWS
This dream, he blandly adds, is a low-budget
Remake—imagine—of the Paradiso.
Not otherwise its poet toured the spheres
While Someone very highly placed up there,
Donning his bonnet, in and out through that
Now famous nose haled the cool Tuscan night.
The resulting masterpiece takes years to write;
More, since the dogma of its day
Calls for a Purgatory, for a Hell,
Both of which Dante thereupon, from footage
Too dim or private to expose, invents.
His Heaven, though, as one cannot but sense,
Tercet by tercet, is pure Show and Tell.
(Film buffs may recall the closing scene
Of Maya’s “Ritual in Transfigured Time.”
The young white actress gowned and veiled in black
Walks out into a calm, shining sea.
It covers her. Then downward on the screen,
Feetfirst in phosphorescent negative
Glides her stilled person: a black bride.
Worth mentioning as well may be that “white
Darkness”—her own phrase—which Maya felt
Steal up through her leg from the dirt floor
During the ceremony in whose course
Erzulie would ride her like a horse.)
How were they to be kept down on the farm,
Those bumpkin seers, now that they had seen
Paris—the Piraeus—Paradise?
Had gleaned from nightclub ultraviolet
The glint of teeth, jeans flexing white as fire,
A cleavage’s firm shade haltered in pearl…
Where were we? On unsteady ground. Earth, Heaven;
Reality, Projection—half-stoned couples
Doing the Chicken-and-the-Egg till dawn.
Which came first? And would two never come
Together, sleep then in each other’s arms
Above the stables rich with dung and hay?
Our senses hurt. So much was still undone.
So many questions would remain unuttered.
Often on either pillow tossed a head
In heat for this or that conceptual
Milkmaid hired to elevate the chore,
Infect the groom, and drive the old gray mare
Straight off her rocker. Often, having seen
A film of Maya’s, read a page of Dante,
Nothing was for it but to rise and shine
Not in the fields, god knew, or in blue air
But through the spectacles put on to focus
That one surface to be truly scratched—
A new day’s quota of shortsighted prose.
Notes for the ill-starred novel. Ephraim’s name
Is Eros—household slave of Ptolemy,
Alexandria’s great astronomer.
We glimpse him, young head on his master’s knee,
Young eyes full of sparkling patterns, ears
Of propositions not just from the spheres.
He lets us understand that heaven went
A step beyond its own enlightenment
And taught the slave of intellect to feel.
More than a slave then, as my several “real”
Characters would learn, caught one by one
In his implacable panopticon.
Old Matt and Lucy Prentiss? This inane
Philemon and Baucis entertain
A guest untwigged by either as divine
Till after he has turned them to scrub pine
—Figuratively of course. Sergei, their queer
Neighbor uphill, whom every seventh year
Some new unseemly passion overthrows,
Adds him to a list of Tadzios.
Next, swagger in his tone, Eros the Stud
Rejuvenates Joanna’s tired blood,
And in the bargain keeps her hooks
Off Old Matt’s bank account and Leo’s looks.
To Leo and Ellen, who presumably
Love only one another, let me see…
Let Leo rather, on the evening
He lets himself be hypnotized, see Eros.
Head fallen back, lips parted, and tongue flexed
Glistening between small perfect teeth;
Hands excitedly, while the others watch,
Roving the to them invisible
Shoulders, belly, crotch; a gasp, a moan—
Ellen takes Lucy’s arm and leaves the room.
She is too young to cope, a platinum-
Haired innocent, who helps her grandmother.
Well before this scene we shall have had
Pages about her solitude, her qualms.
Back comes a different Leo from Vietnam,
“Rehabilitated.” Clear gray eyes
Set in that face emotion has long ceased
To animate (except as heat waves do
A quarry of brown marble) give no clue.
If only a psychiatrist, a priest—
For she can neither reach nor exorcise
This Leo. Now he wants their baby born
As Eros’s new representative.
What is it when the person that you live
With, live for, no longer—? She is torn
Between distaste and fright. Leo, or someone,
Has made a theatre of their bedroom—footlights,
Music, mirror, glistening jellies, nightly
Performances whose choreography
Eros dictates and, the next day, applauds.
Half of Ellen watches from the wings
Her spangled, spotlit twin before those packed
Houses of the dead, where love is act
Not sacrament; and struggles to dismiss
As figment of their common fancy this
Tyrannical ubiquitous voyeur
Only to feel within her the child stir.
And Leo feels? Why, just that Eros knows.
Goes wherever they go. Watches. Cares.
Lighthearted, light at heart. A candle
Haloing itself, the bedroom mirror’s
Wreath of scratches fiery-fine as hairs
(Joanna closes Middlemarch downstairs)
Making sense for once of long attrition.
Can feel his crippling debt to—to the world—
Hearth where the nightlong village of desire
Shrieks and drowns in automatic fire—
Can feel this debt repaid in currency
Plentiful and precious as the free
Heart-high chamiso’s windswept gold that frost
Hurts into blossom at no further cost.
To touch on these unspeakables you want
The spry nuances of a Bach courante
Or brook that running slips into a shawl
Of crystal noise—at last, the waterfall.
(It’s deep in Indian land. Some earlier chapter
Can have Sergei drawing a map for Leo.)
Stepping through it drenched, he finds himself
On the far side of reflection, a deep shelf
Hidden from the nakedest of eyes.
Asked where he is, Eros must improvise
HE IS WITH ME The others panic—dead?
In fact (let this be where the orgies led)
Leo in tears is kneeling by the bones
He somehow knew would be there. Human ones.
A seance can have been devoted to
That young Pueblo, dead these hundred years,
Whose spirit SEEKS REPOSE (One of the others
Has killed him in a previous life? Yes.)
Whose features Leo now hallucinates:
Smooth skin, mouth gentle, eyes expressionless—
The “spy” his outfit caught, one bamboo-slender
Child ringed round by twenty weary men—
Expressionless even when Leo—even when—
Sleep overtakes him clasping what he loathes
And loves, the dead self dressed in his own clothes.
O’s of mildest light glance through the years.
Athens. This breathless August night.
Moonglow starts from scratches as my oval
Cheval-glass tilting earthward by itself
—The rider nodding and the reins gone slack—
Converges with lamplight ten winters back.
Strato squats within the brilliant zero,
Craning at his bare shoulder where a spot
Burns “like fire” invisible to me.
Thinking what? he studies his fair skin
So smooth, so hairless. O MY DEAR HES IN
HIS 1ST MANS LIFE WHAT WD U HAVE HIM DO
His first man’s…was he something else before?
The cup shrugs eloquently. How we bore
You, Ephraim! NO BUT THE UNSEASONED SOUL
LIKE QUICKLY BURNING TIMBER WARMS A BED
TOO SOON OF ASHES YOU & D ARE COAL
Pedigree that dampens us. We’ve wanted
Consuming passions; these refine instead.
Lifted through each level I call mine,
Deposits rich in elemental C
Yield such regret and wit as MERRILY
GLOW ON when limbs licked blazing past recall
Are banked where interest is minimal.
I recall virtues—Strato’s qualities
All are virtues back in ’64.
Humor that breaks into an easy lope
Of evasion my two poor legs cannot hope
To keep up with. Devotion absolute
Moments on end, till some besetting itch
Galvanizes him, or a stray bitch.
(However seldom in my line to feel,
I most love those for whom the world is real.)
Shine of light green eyes, enthusiasm
Panting and warm across the kindly chasm.
Also, when I claim a right not written
Into our bond, that bristling snap of fear
Recalling which I now—and don’t forget
How often, Ephraim, one has played your pet—
Take back my question. What he was is clear.
Woken, much later, by a lullaby:
Devil-baby altos, gibbous moans
Unseeing into whose black midst I flung
Cold water, pulled the shutters to,
Then lay in stillness under the dense ceiling
Seeking, in stillness the odd raindrop kissed,
Contours of what unmasterable throes
Had driven to this pitch their vocalist.
Greece was too much for Maisie. She’d grown old
Flights above the street. Now, worse than vile
Food, vile customs, than finding her place in my bed—
In her bed—taken, came these myriad
Voices repellently familiar
Undulating over clammy tile
Toward the half mad old virgin Henry James
Might have made of her, and this James had.
The side of me that deeply took her side
Was now a wall. Turning her face to it
She read the blankness there, and died—
Gone with the carrier pigeon’s homing sense,
The stilted gallantry of the whooping crane:
Endangered insights that at best would crown
Another hopeless reading of Lorenz.
Where but from such natures had ours come?
TOO MANY CHATTY STUDENTS TOO FEW DUMB
TEACHERS he’d say in ’70, & THE SCHOOLS
ARE CLOSING SO TO SPEAK LACKING THE WOLF
THE PIG THE HORSE WE MORE & MORE MAKE DO
WITH LESS EVOLVED MATERIAL You mean…?
I MEAN ALL MEAN CLOSEQUARTERED THINGS WHO SELF
DESTRUCT YET SPARE A NUCLEUS TO BREED BACK
ONE CAN BUT HOPE A SHARPERSIGHTED PACK
Instinctive pupils glowered in the tomb.
THE CAT LOOK IS A LOCK WHERE CONSCIOUSNESS