As tightly as umbrellas. What difference?
The orange shine stood off, just far enough away
Not to catch the commas and puns as you spoke
This time in defense of riders of the squall,
Of open-faced daring, not just to the empty seas
But for the people swathed in oilcloth on the beach.
“It is no great matter to take this in hand, convince
The tips of the trees they were rubbing against each other
All along. Each contrives to slip into his own hall of fame
And my common touch has triumphed. The doorpost shall turn again and again.”
Variations on an Original Theme
Our humblest destinies amount to this:
A maze of leaves, and one who sat
Within them dreaming of plants and their syrups
(Because of the yellow rings and zigzags
Visited on the moss-grown turret walls)
And a hare running far away, in the blond night.
And to dream of having sex with my beloved
Brings the figured wall no closer:
A fleet of pleasure boats and shadow
Dipping over them, lost
To the righteous eye brooding expensively
On tomorrow’s fabric, how it overflows
Where there are no kick-pleats, and thins,
And what is wasted comes back anyway.
A ride in common variety
Was all it ever got to be; there are no friends
To make it serve. Only sometimes, a promised
Stranger makes us see it in another light
As though we have been standing here always,
Lake to the right, and the house, a Manichaean
Presence between the two widely spaced trees
On the backed-up, rusted gold of the grass.
And setting out in the punt on a larger
Stream and returning just in time
For the oracle, these things had not yet
Begun to dream, and there was thus no questioning
Of them yet. What was one day to be
Removed itself as far as possible from scrutiny.
We got down to the business of preparing
For the night only to find it prepared
For us as a bride, a flag rolled in the darkness,
Now no longer comfort, a spirit only.
Homesickness
The deep water in the travel poster finds me
In the change as I was about to back away
From the idea of the comedy around us—
In the chairs. And you too knew how to do the job
Just right. Trumpets in the afternoon
And you first get down to business and
The barges disappear, one by one, up the river.
One of them must be saved for a pirate. But no,
The park continues. There is no space between the leaves.
Once when there was more furniture
It seemed we moved more freely not noticing things
Or ourselves: our relationships were wholly articulate
And direct. Now the air between them has thinned
So that breathing becomes a pleasure, an unconscious act.
Then when you had finished talking about the trip
You had planned, and how many days you were to be away
I was looking into the night forests as I held
The receiver to my ear, replying correctly
As I always do, to everything, having become the sleeper in you.
It no longer mattered that I didn’t want you to go away,
That I wanted you to return as quickly as possible
To my house, not yours this time, except
This house is yours when we sleep in it.
And you will be chastised and purified
Once we are both inside the world’s lean-to.
Our words will rise like cigarette smoke, straight to the stars.
This Configuration
This movie deals with the epidemic of the way we live now.
What an inane cardplayer. And the age may support it.
Each time the rumble of the age
Is an anthill in the distance.
As he slides the first rumpled card
Out of his dirty ruffled shirtfront the cartoon
Of the new age has begun its ascent
Around all of us like a gauze spiral staircase in which
Some stars have been imbedded.
It is the modern trumpets
Who decide the mood or tenor of this cross-section:
Of the people who get up in the morning,
Still half-asleep. That they shouldn’t have fun.
To get them anyway. You might as well linger
On verandas, enjoying life, knowing
The end is essentially unpredictable.
It might be soldiers
Marching all day, millions of them
Past this spot, like the lozenge pattern
Of these walls, like, finally, a kind of sleep.
Or it may be that we are ordinary people
With not unreasonable desires which we can satisfy
From time to time without causing cataclysms
That keep getting louder and more forceful instead of dying away.
Or it may be that we and the other people
Confused with us on the sidewalk have entered
A moment of seeming to be natural, expected,
And we see ourselves at the moment we see them:
Figures of an afternoon, of a century they extended.
Metamorphosis
The long project, its candling arm
Come over, shrinks into still-disparate darkness,
Its pleasaunce an urn. And for what term
Should I elect you, O marauding beast of
Self-consciousness? When it is you,
Around the clock, I stand next to and consult?
You without a breather? Testimonials
To its not enduring crispness notwithstanding,
You can take that out. It needs to be shaken in the light.
To be delivered again to its shining arm—
O farewell grief and welcome joy! Gosh! So
Unexpected too, with much else. Yet stay,
Say how we are to be delivered from the fair content
If all is in accord with the morning—no prisms out of order—
And the nutty context isn’t just there on a page
But rolling toward you like a pig just over
The barges and light they conflict with against
The sweep of low-lying, cattle-sheared hills,
Our plight in progress. We can’t stand the crevasses
In between sections of feeling, but knowing
They come once more is a blessed decoction—
Is their recessed cry.
The penchant for growing and giving
Has left us bereft, and intrigued, for behind the screen
Of whatever vanity he chose to skate on, it was
Us and our vigilance who outlined the act for us.
We were perhaps afraid, and less purposefully benevolent
Because the chair was placed outside, the chair
No one would come to sit in, except the storm,
If it ever came. No shame, meanwhile,
To sit in the hammock, or wherever straw was
To see it and acclaim the differences as they were born.
And we were drunk as flowers
That should someday be, or could be,
We weren’t keeping track, but just then
It all turned the corner into a tiny want ad:
Someone with something to sell someone
And the stitches ceased to make sense.
They climb now, gravely, with each day’s decline
Farther into the unmapped sky over the sunset
And prolong it indelicately. With maps and whips
You came eagerly, we were obedient, and then, just then
The real big dark business got abated, and I
Awoke stretched out on a ladder lying on the cold ground,
Too upset and confused to imagine how you
Had built the colossal staircase in my flesh that armies
Were using now, their command a curse
As all my living swept by, the flags curved with stars.
Their Day
Each act of criticism is general
But, in cutting itself off from all the others,
Explicit enough.
We know how the criticism must be done
On a specific day of the week. Too much matters
About this day. Another day, and the criticism is thrown down
Like trash into a dim, dusty courtyard.
It will be built again. That’s all the point
There is to it. And it is built,
In sunlight, this time. All look up to it.
It has changed. It is different. It is still
Cut off from all the other acts of criticism.
From this it draws a tragic strength. Its greatness.
They are constructing pleasure simultaneously
In an adjacent chamber
That occupies the same cube of space as the critic’s study.
For this to be pleasure, it must also be called criticism.
It is the very expensive kind
That comes sealed in a bottle. It is music of the second night
That winds up as if to say: Well, you’ve had it,
And in doing so, you have it.
From these boxed perimeters
We issue forth irregularly. Sometimes in fear,
But mostly with no knowledge of knowing, only a general
But selective feeling that the world had to go on being good to us.
As long as we don’t know that
We can live at the square corners of the streets.
The winter does what it can for its children.
A Tone Poem
It is no longer night. But there is a sameness
Of intention, all the same, in the ways
We address it, rude
Color of what an amazing world,
As it goes flat, or rubs off, and this
Is a marvel, we think, and are careful not to go past it.
But it is the same thing we are all seeing,
Our world. Go after it,
Go get it boy, says the man holding the stick.
Eat, says the hunger, and we plunge blindly in again,
Into the chamber behind the thought.
We can hear it, even think it, but can’t get disentangled from our brains.
Here, I am holding the winning ticket. Over here.
But it is all the same color again, as though the climate
Dyed everything the same color. It’s more practical,
Yet the landscape, those billboards, age as rapidly as before.
The Other Cindy
A breeze came to the aid of that wilted day
Where we sat about fuming at projects
With the funds running out, and others
Too simple and unheard-of to create pressure that moment,
Though it was one of these, lurking in the off-guard
Secrecy of a mind like a magazine article, that kept
Proposing, slicing, disposing, a truant idea even
In that kingdom of the blind, that finally would have
Reined in the mad hunt, quietly, and kept us there,
Thinking, not especially dozing any more, until
The truth had revealed itself the way a natural-gas
Storage tank becomes very well known sometime after
Dawn has slipped in
And seems to have been visible all along
Like a canoe route across the great lake on whose shore
One is left trapped, grumbling not so much at bad luck as
Because only this one side of experience is ever revealed.
And that meant something.
Sure, there was more to it
And the haunted houses in those valleys wanted to congratulate
You on your immobility. Too often the adventurous acolyte
Drops permanently from sight in this beautiful country.
There is much to be said in favor of the danger of warding off danger
But if you ever want to return
Though it seems improbable on the face of it
You must master the huge retards and have faith in the slow
Blossoming of haystacks, stairways, walls of convolvulus,
Until the moon can do no more. Exhausted,
You get out of bed. Your project is completed
Though the experiment is a mess. Return the kit
In the smashed cardboard box to the bright, bland
Cities that gave rise to you, you know
The one with the big Woolworth’s and postcard-blue sky.
The contest ends at midnight tonight
But you can submit again, and again.
No, But I Seen One You Know You Don’t Own
Only sometimes is the seam in the way
Of space broken and three schedules cross:
The seasonable cold raging to be pliant and tit
Of gold.
He walks backward on the conveyor belt
As the blue powder of the day is dismissed
And he might pull the switch that would release
The immobile Niagaras that hover in the background.
There is no need, finally,
To inspissate the corded torsades
Of his loon voice. The dragees arrive in fumes:
The reprisal spinning through the air
Like an incandescent boomerang
As small flowers spring up at the feet
Of the near beasts, and in the distance
The hills are shrouded like shoulders
Behind the definitive errand of this glance.
The Shower
The water began to fall quite quickly
Just wanting to be friendly.
It’s too macho, and the sides and the plains get worse.
What are you writing?
Thus incurring a note for the milkman
City unit buses pass through. A laborer
Dragging luggage after cashing the king and ace of
It sifted slowly along the map, trying the lips,
The defender’s last trick.
Somewhere in the grotto it festered,
The summer was cast in a circle. Knots
There were to see, knot by knot
But almost as much as is your punishment again.
By ruffing the third club defender would be
Just a fat man in sunglasses
That knots caress, moving
Through shine—the uncle in the mirror—
As it is beginning again these are the proportions.
Instead the place,
Where we had been before, got tangled
Within us, forced
To break out so that no one knew
The stalks from the knot of pleasure
And it would be determined to happen again—
Said this, through rain and the shine
That comes after, so many opinions
And words later, so many dried tears
Loitering at the sun’s school shade.
Landscapeople
Long desired, the journey is begun. The suppliants
Climb aboard the damaged carrousel:
Some have been hacked to death, one has learned
Some new thing, and all are touched
With the same blight, like a snowfall
Of moments as they are read back to the monitor
Which only projects.
Some can decipher it,
The outline of an eddy that traced itself
Before moving on, yet its place had to be,
Such was the appetite of those times. A ring
Of places existed around the central one,
And of course these died away eventually.
Everything has turned out for the best,
The “eggs of the sun” have been returned anonymously,
And the new ways are as simple as the old ones,
Only more firmly anchored to the spectacle
Of the madness of the seasons as it unfolds
With iron-clad rigidity, filling the sky with light.
We began in an anonymous sensuality
And lived most of it out before the difference
Of time got in the way, filling up the margins of the days
With pictures of fruit, light, colors, music, and vines,
Until it ceases to be a problem.
The Sun
The watermark said it was alone with us,
“To do your keeping and comparing.” But there were bushes
On the horizon shaped like hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds.
They were considered
To belong to a second class, to which lower standards
Were applied, as called for in the original rule,
And these standards were now bent inward to become
The invariable law, to which exceptions
Were sometimes apposite, and they liked the new clime,
So bracing here on the indigo slopes
To which families of fathers and daughters have come
Summer after summer, decade after decade, and it never stops
Being refreshing. It is a sign of maturity,
This stationary innocence, and a proof
Of our slow, millennial growth, ring after ring
Just inside the bark. Yet we get along well without it.
Water boils more slowly, and then faster
At these altitudes, and slowness need never be something
To criticize, for it has an investment in its own weight,
Rare bird. We know we can never be anything but parallel
And proximate in our relations, but we are linked up
Anyway in the sun’s equation, the house from which
It steals forth on occasion, pretending, isn’t
It funny, to pass unnoticed, until the deeply shelving
Darker pastures project their own reflection
And are caught in history,
Transfixed, like caves against the sky
Or rotting spars sketched in phosphorus, for what we did.