after which we could all go back to channeling the news.
There’s a story here about a kind of grass that grows in the Amazon
valley that is too tall for birds to fly over—
they fly past it instead—
yet leeches have no trouble navigating its circuitous heaps
and are wont to throw celebratory banquets afterward,
at which awards are given out—best costume in a period piece
too distracted by the rapids to notice what period it is, and so on.
Before retiring the general liked to play a game of all-white dominoes,
after which he would place his nightcap distractedly on the other man’s crocheted chamber-pot lid.
Subsiding into fitful slumber, warily he dreams
of the giant hand descended from heaven
like the slope of a moraine, whose fingers were bedizened with rings
in which every event that had ever happened in the universe could sometimes be discerned.
Sometimes you end up in a slough no matter what happens,
no matter how many precautions have been taken, threads picked from the tapestry
that was to have provided us with underwear, and now is bare as any
grassless season, on whatever coast you choose to engage.
It’s sad that many were left behind,
but a good thing for the bluebirds in their beige houses.
They never saw any reason to join the vast, confused migration,
fucking like minks as far as the spotty horizon.
It doesn’t get desperately cold any more, and that’s certainly a lucky anomaly too.
I ASKED MR. DITHERS WHETHER IT WAS TIME YET HE SAID NO TO WAIT
Time, you old miscreant! Slain any brontosauruses lately? You—
Sixty wondering days I watched him navigate the alkali lick,
always a little power ebbing, streaming from high windowsills.
Down here the tetched are lonely. There’s nothing they can do
except spit.
We felt better about answering the business letter
once the resulting hubris had been grandfathered in,
slowly, by a withered sage in clogs
and a poncho vast as a delta, made of some rubbery satinlike
material. It was New Year’s Eve
again. Time to get out the punch bowl,
make some resolutions,
I don’t think.
HAVEN’T HEARD ANYTHING
Quietly the first hours left, amused.
We were in a quandary at first then wet our whistles
in some neighborhood bar. The throng came on strong.
It’s too far off to hear the people over there,
someone said. Perhaps we should move,
another one said. Perhaps. But we were way off
and the rut in the sand only led to one place.
When the sand closes over our ease
we’ll know it done.
The morose driver wept, represented his case
as somehow more urgent. Than other passengers’.
Some of them we got out.
Vanilla ice cream, I quaffed,
for it seemed good, for a little time at that.
The poet wanted to introduce us to his suite.
But what he really wanted to do
was play for a little time. Well, that’s natural—
I mean, who among us hasn’t tried?
Few, it’s true, have succeeded.
Another morn he would lie in shock
over the state of poetry. “None could penetrate
the recesses of the human mind like Major Pendennis,”
he opined. We saw it coming,
or should have:
a big empty cape
on the shoulders of the oldest,
who seemed to be advancing.
He wasn’t ancient, but he struck us that way.
If we’d never been to town, and heard the lights
sometime, we’d be all over a neighbor, licking,
passing out free samples of dude. But it was like
too cagey for them, none of us wanted to retire.
Since that day the memory of recognition beats
at my template. I don’t know what to do with all my acquired knowledge.
I could give it to someone, I suppose. Wait, no then
they wouldn’t know what to do with it.
I suppose I could be relaxed.
Yes, that’s more the ticket we smiled.
CHINESE WHISPERS
And in a Little while we broke under the strain:
Suppurations ad nauseam, the wanting to be taller,
though it’s simply about being mysterious, i.e., not taller,
like any tree in any forest.
Mute, the pancake describes you.
It had tiny Roman numerals embedded in its rim.
It was a pancake clock. They had ’em in those days,
always getting smaller, which is why they finally became extinct.
It was a hundred years before anyone noticed.
The governor-general
called it “sinuous.” But we, we had other names for it,
knew it was going to be around for a long time,
even though extinct. And sure as shillelaghs fall from trees
onto frozen doorsteps, it came round again
when all memory of it had been expunged
from the common brain.
Everybody wants to try one of those new pancake clocks.
A boyfriend in the next town had one
but conveniently forgot to bring it over each time we invited him.
Finally the rumors grew more fabulous than the real thing:
I hear they are encrusted with tangles of briar rose,
so dense
not even a prince seeking the Sleeping Beauty could get inside.
What’s more, there are more of them than when they were extinct,
yet the prices keep on rising. They have them in the Hesperides
and in shantytowns on the edge of the known world,
blue with cold. All downtowns used to feature them.
Camera obscuras,
too, were big that year. But why is it that with so many people
who want to know what a shout is about, nobody can find the original recipe?
All too soon, no one cares. We go back to doing little things for each other,
pasting stamps together to form a tiny train track, and other,
less noticeable things. The past is forgotten till next time.
How to describe the years? Some were like blocks of the palest halvah,
careless of being touched. Some took each other’s trash out,
put each other’s eyes out. So many got thrown out
before anyone noticed, it was like a chiaroscuro
of collapsing clouds.
How I longed to visit you again in that old house! But you were deaf,
or dead. Our letters crossed. A motorboat was ferrying me out past
the reef, people on shore looked like dolls fingering stuffs.
More
keeps coming out about the dogs. Surely a simple embrace
from an itinerant fish would have been spurned at certain periods. Not now.
There’s a famine of years in the land, the women are beautiful,
but prematurely old and worn. It doesn’t get better. Rocks half-buried
in bands of sand, and spontaneous execrations.
I yell to the ship’s front door,
wanting to be taller, and somewhere in the middle all this gets lost.
I was a phantom for a day. My friends carried me around with them.
It always turns out that much is salvageable.
Chicken coops
haven’t floated away on the flood. Lacemakers are back in business
with a vengeance. All the locksmiths had left town durin
g the night.
It happened to be a beautiful time of season, spring or fall,
the air was digestible, the fish tied in love knots
on their gurneys. Yes, and journeys
were palpable too: Someone had spoken of saving appearances
and the walls were just a little too blue in mid-morning.
Was there ever such a time? I’d like to handle you,
bruise you with kisses for it, yet something always stops me short:
the knowledge that this isn’t history,
no matter how many
times we keep mistaking it for the present, that headlines
trumpet each day. But behind the unsightly school building, now a pickle
warehouse, the true nature of things is known, is not overridden:
Yours is a vote like any other. And there is fraud at the ballot boxes,
stuffed with lace valentines and fortunes from automatic scales,
dispensed with a lofty kind of charity, as though this could matter
to us, these tunes
carried by the wind
from a barrel organ several leagues away. No, this is not the time
to reveal your deception to us. Wait till rain and old age
have softened us up a little more.
Then we’ll see how extinct
the various races have become, how the years stand up
to their descriptions, no matter how misleading,
and how long the disbanded armies stay around. I must congratulate you
on your detective work, for I am a connoisseur
of close embroidery, though I don’t have a diploma to show for it.
The trees, the barren trees, have been described more than once.
Always they are taller, it seems, and the river passes them
without noticing. We, too, are taller,
our ceilings higher, our walls more tinctured
with telling frescoes, our dooryards both airier and vaguer,
according as time passes and weaves its minute deceptions in and out,
a secret thread.
Peace is a full stop.
And though we had some chance of slipping past the blockade,
now only time will consent to have anything to do with us,
for what purposes we do not know.
IN THE TIME OF PUSSY WILLOWS
This is going to take some time.
Nope, it’s almost over. For today anyway.
We’ll have a beautiful story, old story
to fish for as his gasps come undone.
I never dreamed the pond of chagrin
would affect me this much. Look, I’m shaking,
shrinking with the devil
in the stagy sunrise he devised.
Then there will be no letters for what is truth,
to make up the words of it. It will be standing still
for all it’s worth. A hireling shepherd came along,
whistling, his eyes on the trees. He was a servant of two masters,
which is some excuse, although not really all that much of a one.
Anyway, he overstayed his welcome. The last train had already left.
How does one conduct one’s life amid such circumstances,
dear snake, who want the best for us
as long as you’re not hurt by it?
My goodness, I thought I’d seen a whole lot of generations,
but they are endless, one keeps following another,
treading on its train, hissing.
What a beautiful old story it could be after all
if those in the back rows would stop giggling for a minute.
By day, we paddled and arbitraged
to get to this spot. By night it hardly matters.
Strange we didn’t anticipate this,
but the dumbest clues get overlooked by the smartest gumshoe
and we’re back in some fetishist’s vinyl paradise
with no clue as to how we got here
except the tiny diamond on your pillow—it must have been a tear
hatched from a dream, when you actually knew what you were doing.
Now, it’s all fear. Fear and wrongdoing.
Our outboard motor sputters and quits, and silence
beats down from every point in the sky. To have digested this
when we were younger, and felt a set of balls coming on ...
It may be that thunder and lightning are two-dimensional,
that there was never really any place for fear,
that others get trapped, same as us, and make up
amusing stories to cover their tracks. Wait,
there’s one in the donjon wants to speak his piece. Rats,
now he’s gone too.
Yes, he slipped and died in front of you,
and you intend to twist this into an ethos?
Go make up other stories.
Window reflected in the bubble,
how often I’ve tried to pray to you,
but your sphere would have nothing of it.
I felt almost jinxed. Then a spider led the way
back into the room
and I knew why we’d never left. Outside was brushfires.
Here was the peace of Philemon and Baucis,
offering chunks of bread and salami to the tattered stranger,
and a beaker of wine darker than the deepest twilight,
a table spread with singularities
for the desperate and tragic among us.
Angel, come back please. Let us smell your heavenly smell again.
THE AMERICAN
It’s dull, no realism. A no-color. To what
formlessness have we committed? How fond I am
of it blew off the pensive boarder
hunkered amid lilacs, a hoverer, as meat loves salt.
world of decent gin, this midden whose ungodly
stench plunders all inserts of a keepable diary.
Why call them stones?
Swapping and cheating are as a labor of love
for all concerned. I try to read some sense
into the minutes but am usually rebuffed,
as scorched linen yells at the ironing board’s
grace note of intrigue. Sooner or later
we send them packing, and they leave us—it’s
so simple? Don’t you love it? Ask later whether
we and they were loved. Someone should know. In 150, 160 years
they’ll be beholden, you can bet. And not knowing what
those others want has all along been a jiffy.
The shelf’s canceled
from the Adriatic to the Antarctic, my footsteps cast
incredibly long shadows, though that’s not for you to macerate.
Or masticate. I who matriculated was perhaps
meant to be a lover unto you
through the unabated storm’s portholes—dear, we’re
here because he asked us to wait some more.
THE SEVENTIES
For a long time things seemed to go astutely.
Every evening at four the unspooling showed us
its friendly face. “I will treat you well,
on my honor.” In those days, no one kept records
or took notice of things much. It was
possible to live as an entity.
Still, surprising things were overheard
from time to time. Voices that seemed to come from a garage
with a third option no one had been told about.
Something about a shipwreck. It was probably OK.
We began to grow impatient
about peace and war, after a busy day of relaxation
few around us could contain or apprehend.
The money fish had been strapped to my thigh.
Otherwise I might have turned informant, living out my days
in a Tudor bungalow under the wi
tness protection program.
I needed the cash. The rest was just net profit and loss.
ALL THAT NOW
How old? The fish and the lake
swam around together, easily bored.
The belly of a courtier leans forth.
It is mild weather. Just so much we know.
So much we know and cannot have it
in our little hands. The mouse goes to bed.
A neighbor is placing his false teeth
in a glass of water. You say, not like this,
like this, but too much wells up—
the patient outline of the maples’ faces,
the brook that ran too far,
into some intelligence or other.
Amber and vanilla are all what we know,
how can it be so? Whose little tootsie
are you, once? Did the elephant
walk silently past your house, one
night when you were out?
None of the children escapes—
dam, waterfall, how could we hear
it in the crashing noise? Whose complaint
goes unregistered? How many of us are there,
anyway? Or were, some, some of the time.
Mayhap in dreams
a lady kisses a far shuttle,
warning away visions of Kansas
and outer suburbia, where cows work.
You came back from that dung
as from another world,
one that made you and broke you
four times in the course of your life.
Yet, you were “splendid.”
You have answered every question.
TRUTH GLEAMS
“I threw a hairnet over the dry cleaner’s embroidery. It wasn’t long before something shot out of the rain pipe, between my ankles. An animus avoided me. The surface was fractured. Why do you come here, old man? Leave your nosegay of nettles on the altar in the side street. We don’t want too much of any one thing today. But you and your dog can stay.”
“Nor will I know what to eat, when she rounds the curve of bananas. The altar offered little but idle chitchat. How far you’ve come if it’s autumn, and the plagues will surround you nervously, waiting for an opening. It could be anything, or just about anything, it seems. I am nervous with waiting in this alley of darkened peanut vendors. Mayhap some will come to inquire about me. After all, I was on your board of regents, too, when I was young. Maybe this may not be made to count. I offer you affection, distilled from the worldly tisanes of the stranger who stalked us here, once, offering insurance.”