Suddenly he glanced upward toward the scree and noticed a girl in a Victorian shirtwaist and a straw boater hat moving timidly down the path through the now wildly swirling mists. She was giggling silently with embarrassment and wonder, meanwhile clasping an old-fashioned kodak, which she had pointed at Mercury.
“It is Sabrina,” he said. “The wheel has at last come full circle, and it is the simplicity of an encounter that was meant all along. It happened ever so many years ago, when we were children, and could have happened so many times since! But it isn’t our fault that it has chosen this moment and this moment only, to repeat itself! For even if it does menace us directly, it’s exciting all the same?”
And the avalanche fell and fell, and continues to fall even today.
The Path to the White Moon
There were little farmhouses there they
Looked like farmhouses yes without very much land
And trees, too many trees and a mistake
Built into each thing rather charmingly
But once you have seen a thing you have to move on
You have to lie in the grass
And play with your hair, scratch yourself
And then the space of this behavior, the air,
Has suddenly doubled
And you have grown to fill the extra place
Looking back at the small, fallen shelter that was
If a stream winds through all this
Alongside an abandoned knitting mill it will not
Say where it has been
The time unfolds like music trapped on the page
Unable to tell the story again
Raging
Where the winters grew white we went outside
To look at things again, putting on more clothes
This too an attempt to define
How we were being in all the surroundings
Big ones sleepy ones
Underwear and hats speak to us
As though we were cats
Dependent and independent
There were shouted instructions
Grayed in the morning
Keep track of us
It gets to be so exciting but so big too
And we have ways to define but not the terms
Yet
We know what is coming, that we are moving
Dangerously and gracefully
Toward the resolution of time
Blurred but alive with many separate meanings
Inside this conversation
Ditto, Kiddo
How brave you are! Sometimes. And the injunction
Still stands, a plain white wall. More unfinished business.
But isn’t that just the nature of business, someone else said, breezily.
You can’t just pick up in the middle of it, and then leave off.
What if you do listen to it over and over, until
It becomes part of your soul, foreign matter that belongs there?
I ask you so many times to think about this rupture you are
Is draped around your shoulders. The weather report
Didn’t mention rain, and you are ass-deep in it, so?
Find other predictions. These are good for throwing away,
Yesterday’s newspapers, and those of the weeks before that spreading
Backward, away, almost in perfect order. It’s all there
To interrupt your speaking. There is no other use to the past
Until those times when, driving abruptly off a road
Into a field you sit still and conjure the hours.
It was for this we made the small talk, the lies,
And whispered them over to give each the smell of truth,
But now, like biting devalued currency, they become possessions
As the stars come out. And the ridiculous machine
Still trickles mottoes: “Plastered again …” “from our house
To your house …” We wore these for a while, and they became us.
Each day seems full of itself, and yet it is only
A few colored beans and some straw lying on a dirt floor
In a mote-filled shaft of light. There was room. Yes,
And you have created it by going away. Somewhere, someone
Listens for your laugh, swallows it like a drink of cool water,
Neither happy nor aghast. And the stance, that post standing there, is you.
Introduction
To be a writer and write things
You must have experiences you can write about.
Just living won’t do. I have a theory
About masterpieces, how to make them
At very little expense, and they’re every
Bit as good as the others. You can
Use the same materials of the dream, at last.
It’s a kind of game with no losers and only one
Winner—you. First, pain gets
Flashed back through the story and the story
Comes out backwards and woof-side up. This is
No one’s story! At least they think that
For a time and the story is architecture
Now, and then history of a diversified kind.
A vacant episode during which the bricks got
Repointed and browner. And it ends up
Nobody’s, there is nothing for any of us
Except that fretful vacillating around the central
Question that brings us closer,
For better and worse, for all this time.
I See, Said the Blind Man, as He Put Down His Hammer and Saw
There is some charm in that old music
He’d fall for when the night wind released it—
Pleasant to be away; the stones fall back;
The hill of gloom in place over the roar
Of the kitchens but with remembrance like a bright patch
Ever pull away and spunky at all times he’d
Got the mission between the ladder
And the slices of bread someone had squirted astrology over
Until it took the form of a man, obtuse, out of pocket
Perhaps, probably standing there.
Can’t you see how we need these far-from-restful pauses?
And in the wind neighbors and such agree
It’s a hard thing, a milestone of sorts in some way?
So that the curtains contribute what charm they can
To the spectacle: an overflowing cesspool
Among the memoirs of court life, the candy, cigarettes,
And what else. What kind is it, is there more than one
Kind, are people forever going to be at the edge
Of things, even the nice ones, and when it happens
Will we all be alone together? The armor
Of these thoughts laughs at itself
Yet the distances are always growing
With everything between, in between.
Edition Peters, Leipzig
Another blueprint: some foxing, woolly the foliage
On this dusky shrine
Under the glass dome on the spinet
To make it seem all these voices were once one.
Outside, the rout continues:
The clash erupting to the very door, but the
Door is secure. There is room here still
For thoughts like ferns being integrated
Into another system, something to scare the night away,
And when morning comes they have gone, only the dew
Remains. What more did we want anyway?
I’m sorry. We believe there is something more than attributes
And coefficients, that the giant erection
Is something more than the peg on which our lives hang,
Ours, yours … The core is not concern
But for afternoon busy with blinds open, restless with
Search-and-destroy missions, the approach to business is new
And ancient and mellow at the same time. For them to gain
Their end, the peace of fireworks on a vanishing sky,
We have to bother. Please welcome the three insane interviewers
Each with his astrolabe and question.
And the days drain into the sea.
37 Haiku
Old-fashioned shadows hanging down, that difficulty in love too soon
Some star or other went out, and you, thank you for your book and year
Something happened in the garage and I owe it for the blood traffic
Too low for nettles but it is exactly the way people think and feel
And I think there’s going to be even more but waist-high
Night occurs dimmer each time with the pieces of light smaller and squarer
You have original artworks hanging on the walls oh I said edit
You nearly undermined the brush I now place against the ball field arguing
That love was a round place and will still be there two years from now
And it is a dream sailing in a dark unprotected cove
Pirates imitate the ways of ordinary people myself for instance
Planted over and over that land has a bitter aftertaste
A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing
He is a monster like everyone else but what do you do if you’re a monster
Like him feeling him come from far away and then go down to his car
The wedding was enchanted everyone was glad to be in it
What trees, tools, why ponder socks on the premises
Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there
In a smaller tower shuttered and put away there
You lay aside your hair like a book that is too important to read now
Why did witches pursue the beast from the eight sides of the country
A pencil on glass—shattered! The water runs down the drain
In winter sometimes you see those things and also in summer
A child must go down it must stand and last
Too late the last express passes through the dust of gardens
A vest—there is so much to tell about even in the side rooms
Hesitantly, it built up and passed quickly without unlocking
There are some places kept from the others and are separate, they never exist
I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another
In Buffalo, Buffalo she was praying, the nights stick together like pages in an old book
The dreams descend like cranes on gilded, forgetful wings
What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
Did you say, hearing the schooner overhead, we turned back to the weir?
In rags and crystals, sometimes with a shred of sense, an odd dignity
The boy must have known the particles fell through the house after him
All in all we were taking our time, the sea returned—no more pirates
I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare colors
Haibun
Wanting to write something I could think only of my own ideas, though you surely have your separate, private being in some place I will never walk through. And then of the dismal space between us, filled though it may be with interesting objects, standing around like trees waiting to be discovered. It may be that this is the intellectual world. But if so, what poverty—even the discoveries yet to be made, and which shall surprise us, even us. It must be heightened somehow, but not to brutality. That is an invention and not a true instinct, and this must never be invented. Yet I am forced to invent, even if during the process I become a songe-creux, inaccurate dreamer, and these inventions are then to be claimed by the first person who happens on them. I’m hoping that homosexuals not yet born get to inquire about it, inspect the whole random collection as though it were a sphere. Isn’t the point of pain the possibility it brings of being able to get along without pain, for awhile, of manipulating our marionette-like limbs in the strait-jacket of air, and so to have written something? Unprofitable shifts of light and dark in the winter sky address this dilemma very directly. In time to come we shall perceive them as the rumpled linen or scenery through which we did walk once, for a short time, during some sort of vacation. It is a frostbitten, brittle world but once you are inside it you want to stay there always.
The year—not yet abandoned but a living husk, a lesson
Haibun 2
… and can see the many hidden ways merit drains out of the established and internationally acclaimed containers, like a dry patch of sky. It is an affair of some enormity. The sky is swathed in a rich, gloomy and finally silly grandeur, like drapery in a portrait by Lebrun. This is to indicate that our actions in this tiny, tragic platform are going to be more than usually infinitesimal, given the superhuman scale on which we have to operate, and also that we should not take any comfort from the inanity of our situation; we are still valid creatures with a job to perform, and the arena facing us, though titanic, hasn’t rolled itself beyond the notion of dimension. It isn’t suitable, and it’s here. Shadows are thrown out at the base of things at right angles to the regular shadows that are already there, pointing in the correct direction. They are faint but not invisible, and it seems appropriate to start intoning the litany of dimensions there, at the base of a sapling spreading its lines in two directions. The temperature hardens, and things like the smell and the mood of water are suddenly more acute, and may help us. We will never know whether they did.
Water, a bossa nova, a cello is centred, the light behind the library
Haibun 3
I was swimming with the water at my back, funny thing is it was real this time. I mean this time it was working. We weren’t too far from shore, the guides hadn’t noticed yet. Always you work out of the possibility of being injured, but this time, all the new construction, the new humiliation, you have to see it. Guess it’s OK to take a look. But a cup of tea—you wouldn’t want to spill it. And a grapefruit (spelled “grapfruit” on the small, painstakingly lettered card) after a while, and the new gray suit. Then more, and more, it was a kind of foliage or some built-in device to trip you. Make you fall. The encounter with the silence of permissiveness stretching away like a moonlit sea to the horizon, whatever that really is. They want you to like it. And you honor them in liking it. You cause pleasure before sleep insists, draws over to where you may yet be. And some believe this is merely a detail. And they may be right. And we may be the whole of which all that truly happens is only peelings and shreds of bark. Not that we are too much more than these. Remember they don’t have to thank you for it either.
The subtracted sun, all I’m going by here, with the boy, this new maneuver is less than the letter in the wind
Haibun 4
Dark at four again. Sadly I negotiate the almost identical streets as little by little they are obliterated under a rain of drips and squiggles of light. Their message of universal brotherhood through suffering is taken from the top, the pedal held down so that the first note echoes throughout the piece without becoming exactly audible. It collects over different parts of the city and the drift in those designated parts is different from elsewhere. It is a man, it was one all along. No it isn’t. It is a man with the conscience of a woman, always coming out of something, turning to look at you, wondering about a possible reward. How sweet to my sorrow is this man’s knowledge in his way of coming, the brotherhood that will surely result under now darkened skies.
The pressing, pressing urgent whispers, pushing on, seeing directly
Haibun 5
Bring them all back to life, with white gloves on, out of the dream in which they are still alive. Loosen the adhesive bonds that tie them to the stereotypes of the dead, clichés like the sound of running water. Abruptly it was winter again. A slope several football fields wide sprang out of the invisible f
oreground, the one behind me, and unlaced its barren provocation upwards, with flair and menace, at a 20-degree angle—the ascending night and also the voice in it that means to be heard, a pagoda of which is visible at the left horizon, not meaning much: the flurry of a cold wind. We’re in it too chortled the rowanberries. And how fast so much aggressiveness unfolded, like a swiftly flowing, silent stream. Along its banks world history presented itself as a series of translucent tableaux, fading imperceptibly into one another, so that the taking of Quebec by the British in 1629 melts into the lollipop tints of Marquette and Joliet crossing the mouth of the Missouri River. But at the center a rope of distress twists itself ever tighter around some of the possessions we brought from the old place and were going to arrange here. And what about the courteous but dispassionate gaze of an armed messenger on his way from someplace to someplace else that is the speech of all the old, resurrected loves, tinged with respect, caring to see that you are no longer alone now in this dream you chose. The dark yellowish flow of light drains out of the slanted dish of the sky and from the masses of the loved a tremendous chant arises: We are viable! And so back into the city with its glimmers of possibility like Broadway nights of notoriety and the warm syrup of embarrassed and insistent proclamations of all kinds of tidings that made you what you were in the world and made the world for you, only diminished once it had been seen and become the object of further speculation leading like railroad ties out of the present inconclusive sphere into the world of two dimensions.