to massacre the cold
and master the changed legions
whose breath never hurt
anything, but you are loved and it’s your responsibility.
JUST WEDNESDAY
So it likes light and likes
to be teased about it—please
don’t take me literally. That winter light
should be upon us soon in all its splendor—
I can see it now—and the likes of the haves
shall mingle with the have-nots, to some point
this time, we all hope, and the pride encoded
in the selection process that made us what we are,
that made our great religions fit us,
will be deployed, a map-like fan so you can
actually sit down
and find us where we came from. True, some
at first claimed they recognized it and later
admitted they didn’t, as though the slow rise
of history were just some tune. That didn’t prevent others
from really finishing the job, and in the process
turning up points of gold that are we say these
things we shall have, now. And the jolly
carpentered tune merely played along with all that
as an obbligato, but on a day
took up residence in its own strength.
A weary sense of triumph ensued but it was the reality
of creation. There were no two ways.
And so one emerged scalded with the apprehension of this,
that this was what it was like. You gave me a penny, I
gave you two copies of the same word that were to fit
you like rubber ears. Is it my fault if in the dust
of the sensation something got knowingly underscored, defaced,
a shame to all the nation?
After all, it suited when you set out dressed
in plum and Mama was to meet us at the midpoint
of the journey but she got taken away and an old
dressmaker’s dummy draped in soiled lace was substituted
for the intricate knowledge at this juncture.
The grass grew looser but closer together,
the flowers husky and fierce as trees. On the spiffy
ground no wagers were taken and a few minutes’
absence is the bee’s knees. It behooves
you to depart if the moon is cowled.
That homeless blanket you gave up—
you should have sent them both years ago. A few
cronies still gather there where the shore
was explained and now the waves
explain it with renewed mastery and suds. Almost
time for the watchman to tell it to the lamplighter
and I’ll be switched, after all these years.
IN MY WAY / ON MY WAY
Pardon my appearance. I am old now,
though someday I shall be young again. Not, it’s true, in the near future.
Yet one cherishes a hope
of being young before today’s children are young grandparents,
before the gipsy camp of today has picked up and moved
into the invisible night, that sees,
and sees on and on like a ritual conscience
that bathes us, from whose dense curves we know
we shall never escape. We like it here as the trial begins,
the warming trend, more air, even the malicious smile in the prefecture garden—
would we like it as much there? No, for we only like what we already
know, what is familiar. Anything different
is to be our ruin, as who stands
on pillars and pediments of the city,
judging us mournfully, from whose cresting gaze is no
turning away, only peering back into the blackness of the pit of water of night.
Once I tried to wriggle free of the loose skein of people’s suggestions
chirping my name. One can do that if one is rich. But for others a bad
supposition comes of it, there is more death and pain at the end,
so that one is better off out of the house, sleeping in the open
where chiggers infest the lilacs, and a sullen toad sits,
steeped in self-contemplation. By glory I had
better know before too long what the verdict is. As I said I was changing
to more comfortable clothing when the alarm bell sounded.
Which is why I am you, why we too
never quite seem to escape each other’s shadow.
Perhaps drinking has something to do with it
and the colored disc of a beach umbrella, put up long ago against the sun.
Yet even where things go wrong there is more
drumming, more clatter than seems normal. There is a remnant of energy
no one can account for, and though I try
to despise my own ways along with others, I can’t help placing
things in the proper light. I am to exult
in the stacks of cloud banks, each silently yearning
for the upper ether and curving its back, and in the way all things
seem to have of shaping up before the deaf man comes.
O in a way it is spiritual to be out from under these
dead packages of the air that only inhibit
further learning and borders, as though these too came to see the sea
and having done so, returned
to selfish buildings enclosed by walls. Their conceit
was never again to be quite as apt as that time that is remembered
but no more, on a quilted sea of pylons and terminal anxiety
far from the rich robe, imagined and unimagined, as far as the pole
is from us. As around the pond, several rods away, the liquid
performance starts and repeats, endlessly.
We live now in that dust
but no one shakes it, no finish is yet prized, prized and forgotten.
As when we bumble, maintaining steadfastly that there is no life in the truth of us,
no bearings in the grass, and who cares anyway, why the salt
on his fingertip is life enough for us under the present circumstances,
something always focuses attention on all we have done since school,
how we were naked, and fell, and those
coming up behind dutifully picked us up and presented us as evidence
and the court in a major shift decided to hear the arguments
and all was sadness, it was decreed, for a while,
till pregnant pauses were abandoned, and miniskirts returned, and with them
a longing for a future of fashionable choices,
dotted earthworks in the comforting desert,
various fruits to assuage thirst
and the almost maniacal voice of your leader
reminding us of practical solutions so out of date they were all but forgotten.
Far from fear of crowds stumbling,
what ought to incite you is a new hunger for all the angles of whatever
day this is, placed against the sandstone of undoubted
approval from many different quarters.
True, all that we hurled
returns to visit, and true too that the bayoneted
clock recovers, that composure is a gift
that sometimes the gods bestow, and sometimes not; their reasons in the one
as in the other case remaining inscrutable even to apple-
scented mornings where the light seems newly washed, the gnarled trees in the prime
of youth, and the little house more sensible than ever before
as a boat passes, acquiescing to
the open, the shore, the listless waves that distract us
out of prurience and melancholy, every time. Yet something waits.
I can hear the toad crooning. It’s almost time for intermission.
The guest register awaits signing. It’s another, someone’s, voyage.
NO GOOD AT NAMES
We’ve been out here long enough.
The past recedes like an exaggeratedly long shadow
into what is prescient, and new—
what I originally came to do research on.
I have my notes, thank you. The train is waiting
in the little enclosed yard. My only duty
now is to thank all those who put up with me
and trusted me so long. It must have seemed
like a long process. My thanks are due, too,
to others with whom I never came in contact,
who may not have been alive, but
somehow we were in apposition, and as my pen
strikes out on its own, it is chiefly those others
I wish to remember. In a word, merci.
And at random stages of the journey he sees
what we were meant to see: underwear on a clothesline,
flying leaves, patches of dirty snow. It’s true no one
ever tests you on these things, that nothing would have been different
if you hadn’t seen them all, yet by emerging
they have become part of the picture, so vast and energetic
it gets seen by nobody. Later, in the station,
you greet a small group of close and not-so-close friends,
sparring about would the bargain have been different
if it had happened in something resembling a time-frame,
or a landscape, even a landscape one has only heard about.
And you show each other your clothes, smiling shyly,
and talk about the after-effects of the medication
everyone’s taking these days, and it seems to have made
a difference, brought out the leaves in the public squares.
Great travel writing has to be manufactured this way
for the desert’s glitter to sink back into something tractable
and frozen antennae to balk at the day’s closing prices.
A moment of horrible witchcraft isn’t too much to be swallowed
for the land to become whole, and people wise
in the way that suits them.
FILM NOIR
Just the washing of the floors
under him was cause for hope. If there was a flaw
in something precious, it meant one or more persons
had been inducted already. When they heard about it
it would come to seem as though the rich background
was you, your space. It lent you
a furious dignity that you breezed right through.
No more apples on the dashboard,
this is cheating the real thing, earnest
with life and self-assurance. And when you died
they remembered you chiefly. It was two
lights on a rowboat, a half-mile off shore
as the evening breeze drew nigh, cementing relationships.
And it seemed as though they always heard you, loud you,
that otherwise nobody remembered except conveniently.
When the inevitable abrupt change arrived
I looked to you for reflected confirmation of what
was happening to me, and unfortunately got it.
The afternoon windows released their secrets in a flood
as though no one had ever had any. In the downpour
distinct noses and adam’s-apples could be determined
in a mounting hush of congratulation soon to be
shattered by a train’s ear-piercing whistle:
the doors slid shut, there was nothing to do except wait
for another train, yet this one still stayed at the platform.
Too bad suicide is discouraged
in certain modern climates and situations; it makes
for such a neat ending; nevertheless we will brush on,
clinging to separate ideas as though they made a pattern.
And all shall be insulted
at the end where the going gets sticky
beyond any apology, beyond dried beans and casual sex, beyond even
the neighbor’s girl in a schoolyard, half a century ago
when things still seemed pretty modern
and underlying motives were the same
though not the dark, intricate working out of them.
Say we just landed, like strangers in a hole:
what manner of manners is to be cut out of us, what sails
trimmed for the descent
into the matter of the sun.
Are Americans sexier, she breathed, or what is it
that gives their nudes a subliminal variation
on this often rehearsed enterprise, until we can see
into it, arranging differences? And that moan
you heard was just idle gossip, someone running around
to instruct the clerks of our compassion
in rules, rhetoric or some other tell-tale destiny
if we are about to get it right again.
But on the curb of the residential street
where wind thrives and the locals
shrug off any connection to the scenery, back where it was bad,
the same dichotomy obtains. We and they.
It’s not much more simple than that.
And as I approach the master switch
for instructions, there are little smiles of recognition
everywhere, in the curdled clouds, on the reluctant shore,
to tell us it’s safe to go home.
I hope they can come.
They can sleep under my bed.
IN VAIN, THEREFORE
the jetsam sighs,
flooding the front hall,
with the fragile violence etched
on the captain’s forehead:
some got off at the next-to-last stop;
others, less fortunate
were lost on the trail,
pines and mist carrying over
until the exit wicket
displaced all thoughts of a former, human time.
We, it was reasoned,
led lewd lives, belong with the bears.
A very few carry enough energy to
create a kinetic bonding arrangement.
eating alone in restaurants,
drying their hair …
The dandelions are dead and the mud
of summer. They
tell of roasted meats, be oblivion
but a decade away
and the waterfall, unused,
is ruined, it is ruined, is not to stand.
THE BEER DRINKERS
Think of it as something that is happening
or something that is merely in the way, unnamed
until we call a meeting, go over it, eat it.
And then of course so much more of it is found
than was really necessary. Look at this season.
Trees are shiny, trapped in prisms. Umbrellas
are a new, raw color. The temperature’s
not what it’s supposed to be yet. Look. Enjoy.
Your house comes clattering down around you
like beads from a string. That’s
nice. Each has its strength, its subliminal magic
and knows just how to keep out of the way
until the time for its expression is scratched
into the rude stone. How it will be forever.
You couldn’t do that young. Now,
you set about what is going, and already
find it refreshed. And what of the new year?
It had an air of finality to it when last seen
but weathers wash so many of what we are, it
seems lame at last, then crowded into the omnibus
with all the fates, and furies, and us
of course, and the folks from home. How we
managed it yet again is a tale
for the newspapers by now, but how
the wariness of the telling could so
stock a nursery is something that continues
to baffle authorities. And all the colors
put up for sale, were they meant to
go by us two, and what is the change.
They have this tremendous power
in their doing, these Americans, and next you
know a coin extracted from a pouch
will be seen to be the real truth serum,
only you cannot get away just now
and in the autumn the roads freeze over.
And then of course he added distance
and rightness to them, and they came
apart amazed, and he was in someone else’s camp
but could write to you. And you were embarrassed
in a bathrobe and it shut them all up.
He was only dying to air these anemones as a truth
and the truth shot all over him
and he came, and of course that one fact annihilated him.
Time for toasts now, darling? I think
rather, and hope I shall see him long
one of these evenings before the new snow starts.
THAT YOU TELL
The cannons waved summer goodbye
and the long arcs of breathing took up where they left off:
speechless. An old jalopy with wobbly wheels was seen to limp
into an abandoned filling station. Autumn sticks
in your throat; you must have a reason for doing anything now,
such as looking in a place you were sure
they weren’t. Then you find something. Money jingles,
brightness is for a second. Then the cars, crows and cows walk away.
In sixteen years it hadn’t been like this … this
symphonic stretch. How room had been created
before the notion of what was to go in it actually existed,
and yet by becoming, it did. And already had a history.
You, you were in it too. It started to curl back on us
like a sheet at night, and the choices were somehow limited,
the instructions far from complete. You must go down
to the shore of the steeply flowing river and assuage
whatever they call gods there. Then the reflected shimmer waxes bright
again. This is the prologue. The irises are dark
and prudent, and I like my male-pattern baldness. Far at sea
porpoises and businessmen are asleep
taking us farther than can be imagined, to the floor above.