I knelt and listened. There was nothing unusual,
no appearance of impropriety. Meals were prepared again,
the summer’s sheaf raided, rains drowned the meadows pell-mell
under the eyes of peasants. Is what I’m being singled
out for, to tell of this, while the main population
of truants escapes over nearby hills? If so, so be it:
I’ve taken my stand and am pretty much prepared
to let it wear me out. Nor does the crucible of what we said
out of turn return to urge a new complacency, quiet
between the paws of the sphinx, nor does anything electrical have to interfere.
I know the air itself is noxious. I must breathe it
for those who can’t; only let the nodes be protected from themselves
that in some joyous valley, far from here, picnicking
can occur under the vines, and the
tiniest constituents be sorted and drained, and approved.
The opposition has its way
always. See that neon fence? It spells out too much common sense,
which is a good thing, in the sense that memory is voided.
Afterwards, the monoliths grow untended;
something strange and seedy in the sky though centralization
has finally been realized after how many decades
of struggle and one may live
in these little homes, with their gardens, and all
be complete for a few more years. But I think the stealth
is a parasite hidden in it somewhere, that soon
other towns and banks discourage newcomers and there is a shortage
of the most vital commodities and even time
has almost run short. Now, tell it to your teachers,
kids, how well off we were and what you were going to write
in your essay about the conversion. What is vast is also hollow,
ragged with age, riddled with false modesty and complaints
from divers sources, including death. It seems
the truth was about something else, various and vicious, or it was
these very elements but mostly
a protracted span. And when it was over, that was the truth:
a nest of eggs still hidden, the false flight of a bird.
A HOLE IN YOUR SOCK
A man walks at a city
as though veering off somewhere.
They extend arms, touch hands.
This is how it is done, every day.
My phone is tapped.
I wish to call the police.
Not, not obviously, part of the
“proceedings,”
the message takes control smoothly.
We contemplate the shells of crustaceans
long dead, waiting for the Bronze Age to end.
We go farther, fare worse.
And they gave us our little raincoat back.
Then the government gets into the act
and the others crowd in and out.
That was something, sainthood
of a sort. You have to take it.
They simply … die. And that’s it.
When we come back
in fortuitous weather
the charm has multiplied beyond the sky,
is ever so contemporary,
as an ingredient should be.
The class marshals, boring thespians
have walked on. A teardrop
stands in the middle air.
This future does us good.
AND SOCIALIZING
Back from his breakfast, thirty-five years ago,
he stumbles, finds in the sun a nod that’s new.
Which is not to say we are any better off than a second ago.
These days, by turns solemn and skittish, our days,
belong to someone who once was here. More we cannot say.
Yet a vague pathos urges them in our direction.
“Wait a moment,” it says, “perhaps a compromise
could be reached, who knows?” But we are in the departure
mode. All along the autumn, the hunters’
red coats star the rubbery and decaying foliage:
“It looks as though it’s been through a lot.”
So that when we say we are sorry, that was just
a little growing accomplished too fast, no one hears us.
The time for trumpets is here, has just passed. Gosh,
and I was getting up to answer the door, and by the time
I got there no one was there. Oh, well,
there’s no use crying over spilled peanuts.
But I want the one I love to be aware
that we are all cowards, not just me, and just so
we have our normal victory in the time that ordinary
arriving brought, and rooting about
enthusiastically in search of cohorts;
and when none are definitively there, why, it has grown cooler
and we can talk this over endlessly, under the vine,
quaff the abstract moonlight.
REVISIONIST HORN CONCERTO
What more clouds are there to say
how it all matters to us? Buttons, strings, bits of fluff:
it’s all there, the vocabulary of displaced images,
so that if its message doesn’t add up to much, whose
fault is it? I can imagine casting the answer correctly
but it doesn’t work, there’s no question implied
in those gorgeous, plaited ravellings. Only a little
is known about them, and nothing about their hometowns,
backgrounds, etc. Really nothing more than a masterful
way of dealing with silence, of leaving it there, and then
being off on some expedition. So nothing
works. But there is nothing there that can harm us.
Don’t be afraid to let it hurt you, dance it
under morning’s wire, ponder anew the shuffle between the infinite
time bomb of the Nile and today’s shoelaces. Besides, these periods
have a way of elapsing, and the so-called healing process.
Does anybody care, anymore, where it went? Or whose sleep
it interrupted with a unique dissonance
of its own devising? They were always photographing
the cash register, some men came in and said it should be this way.
From now on you’re in the proverbial fix. Yet what was promised
was equal to what was subtracted, while periods of socializing
in the yard made up for how the money was spent. It wasn’t until
years later that someone got around to noticing the bald,
comic error that had been hidden there in the first place
to equate it with life’s beginning. By then it was in full sail,
swinging on the gate of how much longer we
have to lean out of the railroad car, swaying, singing.
The foul mouth should be caked with mud and weeds by now.
But we’re not going to let a little thing like that
spoil this surprise birthday, are we?
In addition to which the pole
still turns, in dreams, like the enormous wheel
of a rickshaw, viewed from up close, now
dipping into the mud and chaos, now rising like a sigh, a lark
on the mend, to remind us that all is well, or should be,
or will be shortly, given the interest in its shadow.
THE WOMAN THE LION WAS SUPPOSED TO DEFEND
And sometimes when you want it to it won’t:
the space around a yodel grows deafening,
then vomits into the orchestra pit.
Yet all of this was waiting for me,
to hug me into accepting what I thought
I was losing, barrel of light down the stairs.
You know when we leave home for a
short time
we can never be sure what that place will be
when we get back—some yellow tenant gibbering
in place, or, more likely the furniture
will be a shade blacker. And of course it’s
up to you to find out—it’s your problem.
Which is why I so precisely intuit
the edge of all you gave to hold back:
precisely the forlorn edge of the road
that slices through much of time and ourselves.
Don’t butter it—the trees
will be officious; the frog on his own time,
a bored meter-reader. And if we can’t get off the bus
why men we’ll adore that patch of leopard-gray
where the schoolchildren would have assembled.
And if I had gotten laid—or mislaid—
somewhere in the cosmos, there was always an ancient
truth to speak about it. How quietly everything
conducts to this day past, urges, without pressing,
nature’s monuments on us, and before you know it
we have dreamed the spectrum again. Some days
are for washing (“this is the way we wash our clothes”),
others for sneaking about, eating. The patchwork girl
was heard singing in her studio. For a few weeks
after I got off I was like one possessed—couldn’t
find the proper forms. The silence was terrible.
But after being battered by weather and coasts,
something creamy slips in, a wedge
more or less of the temper that compounded you,
drafted you, waited for you to fall, oversaw.
The sledge of ice melts in spring sun—
more water to weep over. Soon the first picnics …
But they led to the black cove
pirates used to drown each other in. What was
contracted for is now scaffolding, steeped in blue.
We have ways to keep in touch with you.
HARBOR ACTIVITIES
The prospect: roofs and more roofs.
Look for a street-guide too:
anything that will attract a name.
But it doesn’t mean that the getting-together
of the newborn
casts the Lumpen in a definitive shape
like a rafter. The clots,
cloth slits, upended
breezes could be imagined by no human wizard.
The stalls they take down argue
impenetrably. That’s good. In a month’s time
when the bicycle’s eye scrutinizes
this landscape, we’ll be vapid and know how.
Every hand has a player;
every player a new hand.
Casting for consciousness like an angler,
you make them stop to admire you.
What greater form, better force, than this?
This spreading out over the page
of someone’s newspaper at breakfast?
A small thing nevertheless,
for piano left-hand,
for piano four-hands.
Later, we take the train.
IT MUST BE SOPHISTICATED
There are attics in old houses
where doubt lingers as to the corrosive
effect of night-blindness: namely,
are its victims directly linkable to a chain
of events happening elsewhere? If so,
we should shrug off resemblances
to our line of work. What was said around
the house had undue influence on one of several
shapely witnesses. And, as dames do,
she started talking to any and every
interlocutor out of harm’s way. One day
you wake up and they’ve skipped. Or was it
always empty like this? It’s hard
to remember a time when it wasn’t. Maybe
your memory’s playing tricks on you? Maybe
there never was such a person as Lisa Martins?
Maybe it’s all over when you stand up
to walk the last mile in Enna Jettick shoes,
and they draw the blind quickly to forget you.
Once forgotten you’re as good as dead,
anyway. And who would help you now?
You might as well be trapped at the bottom of a well
in the Sahara. They don’t know you’re alive,
or that your life was anything but exemplary
when it came time for you to live.
The fashionable present keeps queening it
over the slightly dishonorable past. Your
bridesmaids are scattered on the wind.
You don’t feel like having lunch. Maybe
a walk, and a cup of tea later?
We’ll see you at the end of the month!
they cried. Now it keeps ticking,
there must be a mystery down there,
darn it. I’ll find it if it takes all night
and then some other sleuth can solve it.
I was only hired as a go-between. My tour is ended,
and if I’ve a piece of advice for you, it’s
check out the rafters, the mouldings.
You can’t tell who might have bargained
for clemency in your absence, leaving you holding
the bag when you got back, restless,
ready to start school, but the vagrant air’s black,
what with the negative promise of spring.
The boys are still rehearsing their parts
they haven’t been over, and really
it’s none of my business. Said the table to the chair.
I was confined here. That’s all I know,
truthfully. During the amnesty I walked
out through the open gate. The streets were full of people,
running back and forth, talking disjointedly. I was
supposed to be somewhere else, but no one knew it.
In the confusion I returned home.
Now the newshounds pester us daily.
Why are they fighting over a fuse? It doesn’t
seem to be harmless like those people are listening to over there;
at the same time, everyone’s a suspect in the new
climate and country. The wind turns a page
of the old tome, then another and another; soon
it’s riffling through them too fast to stop.
There’s nothing in it anyway. Time to move on
to another frontier beyond the transparent frieze
of foliage, guns, barges, to where he began.
Sure, dem days is gone forever, but it’s the attention span
that’s really gone. Back when they’d send for you
once they got a house built, it was clever
to hedge your bets and produce a fraternal twin
made of bedclothes with a mop for a wig
while you scaled the wall on a rope ladder
to be the next new thing that thinks
and cautions others not to. Far from the
inner city of conflicting attitudes, one fled with one’s
holy illusions intact, one’s misconceptions too, until the whole
mindset took on a largely symbolic
look, an indifferent jewel, toy
of the weather, of successive washes of light.
I can hardly believe I’m here
in this tiny republic carved out of several conflicting
principalities. It’s enough, perhaps, that I was questioned
at the edge of my performance. That now I’m safe
from my own sang-froid and scores of others,
that mere forgetfulness can save up to fifty-three lives,
that they can share your power and go on glancing
upward. Because after all we were the three
original ones, the presiden
t, vice-president and treasurer
of our class. And were formed to repay
what obscure debt and be summarily
taken out of school and handed over to our parents.
It’s what matters then, and after. No one
says you have to live up to principles; indeed, what are they?
What difference does it make which one came too close
in the richly darkened theater, if all
they were after was to coax you into the light,
watch you blink a minute, and then pass on, they too,
to the larger arenas, each in the wind,
in the sand, the reeds, growing? Because even if it doesn’t
punish you exactly, the thing has been
lived through, the experience sealed.
O what book shall I read
now? for they are all of them new, and used,
when I write my name on the flyleaf. Look,
here is another one unread, not written. Time for you to choose.
ALBORADA
My friend, how are you?
I write with my mouth full
of crumbs in this waning summer city
as ruby grains sink majestically
to the bottom of day and others float
up past them, into something that speaks of cloud.
Do we all know we’re aspected—
frightened, rather, while what comes as a ghost
continues as street life, pausing
to hitch a stocking, rambunctious, reproved,
all over the partings?
O if it were the thickness of a book,
laminated, or worse, into the meaning of chapters
that overlay one another like a horse’s blankets.
But what shoots up, will.
Another day he likened it to the roar
of Paris traffic, how expensive it all seemed at first;
later, a sparrow. Besides they all get out of their cars,
stoop, and notice. Then the first one’s
risen, in men’s eyes. Her bathing suit
took first prize but I have to say climate never
nourished luck more, nor came out as an extraordinary
pencilled thing draped across rooftops
for all to see, till they saw, and the resultant gold-rush
landed us in the pokey. Here, as ever, some
are believers. Top-notch achievers.
In this way one gets to do it
and become one’s self. Never
again did the small matter of a raised
skylight’s hasp sicken the winter, the kitten.
By evening only the thought rained.