But be brief. What remains to be quizzed will be spelled out for us
in the epilogue, in the unheated crawl space under the eaves.
The time of the fool approaches. And an aureole is running.
DINOSAUR COUNTRY
So, with a bath and tin words,
the stranger settled in. Just so,
the evening idlers—lorikeets, back-
scratcher vendors, declined to take cognizance.
Everyone waits for the BIG day
that happened billions of years ago
or is definitely tomorrow—take your pick—
while fending off tunnel vision in the race
for the sauna. The new purple bath towels
are here!
But what if on a subtle
sky-ridden day some scum comes up to you and sez:
“Jeez! Can’t anybody take a joke anymore?
I was only asking after the missus and those ten
dear, dim orphans whistled for the fur to fly.
Now I’m on an island in a self-engrossed river
with the selected essays of Addison and Steele
and enough K rations to last till Michaelmas
and its daisies, which, incidentally,
bloom only for me.”
I’d thought no one knew about the pact between me and Junior.
But a woman getting off a bus twisted her ankle and shouted:
“For the last time! My dwelling place is no longer your oven
no matter how much you fancy its delicately frosted petits fours.”
And then there was the time
when you just joked coming
up to me, laid your wrist on
my shoulder and whispered the news about
the Romans: They’d won again,
and, what was more to the point, done so
in an era that surpassed the age of the dinosaurs
by as much as this minute moment of pleasure
scoffs at you for the taking, and you flash your sweatshirt
for everyone in the country to see, and hold on to.
Yes, there are shadows still, but
cheap compared to the price you’d pay for not gainsaying
that sail swooping toward you, for not getting even
with the white-haired acrobats.
LEEWARD
Up, up it rises,
the penumbra,
for all to see.
Heaven is open—
make no mistake.
That row of books
just slid over by itself,
and a guy, a tubby guy,
came to look at it, sneer,
snicker, be off again—only,
ouch! There are other strands
in that equation, he sees now, not
too late. The green spoilage,
all other things being equal,
may be contained.
Only wear your shirt right.
Wash it again
and yet again.
The bear is still around
whose hide you sold,
wondering why children fear him.
Is it too much to ask
safe conduct, yes, for him too
in the travesty of night
we all must wear
for a while?
PARAPH
I have to sign my name
to this paragraph. Writing pieces you can’t use up
till the bus starts. I feel like a beer,
buxom brew.
One felt secure, reading
the edge of a newspaper.
More schools come out. An overload.
Destiny and the comics. Two can’t play
as one. In the box outside
the golf course hasn’t disappeared.
Spot watering of test areas
guarantees a mediocre result. We can dance
to it.
We can’t read around the edge, the rim
is whiter before we were done.
Check this out. A situation
in which no situations appear.
And the code is locked in your throat.
We should be leaving or
the bird will chide us,
no chime break.
NOT PLANNING A TRIP BACK
And the ignorance on your hands is August,
and a common wish-fulfillment is put in reverse.
All these dinners you paid too much for—
not worth writing about? Then the astral walk
resumes. Men are playthings. I’ve been
notified before.
Or pause before a bush in August,
and the trepidation that is natural in men
takes root here too, is bigger than before
but not so just. Take a boat ride.
I give to strangers—make that, I grieve to strangers,
asking no rebuttal, no rebuke. The jackass
is off his rocker again. How pliant the gold of the stars
is! We stare and stay, then part anyway.
There’s a reason for this, but it’s shut up
in a tomb, somewhere.
Oh the wind whips through here sometimes.
Gosh, does it? Can’t these feuds
ever be removed, like lace panties?
Can’t we stare down the stair
that’s coming to get us? If we had the right look
everything could be secular, and easy.
But the soul isn’t engaged in trade.
It’s woven of sleep and the weather
of sleep. Forgets what there is to hide.
MYRTLE
How funny your name would be
if you could follow it back to where
the first person thought of saying it,
naming himself that, or maybe
some other persons thought of it
and named that person. It would
be like following a river to its source,
which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.
They just automatically appear at a place
where they get wider, and soon a real
river comes along, with fish and debris,
regal as you please, and someone
has already given it a name: St. Benno
(saints are popular for this purpose) or, or
some other name, the name of his
long-lost girlfriend, who comes
at long last to impersonate that river,
on a stage, her voice clanking
like its bed, her clothing of sand
and pasted paper, a piece of real technology,
while all along she is thinking, I can
do what I want to do. But I want to stay here.
MAN IN LUREX
It’s only a matter of days now.
The luster on the child’s eye says so.
Be back before morning she says.
O return! Return so that my enemies may see me
lolling in the grape arbor.
Once we’ve given our brother a breather
where is the hill that will take us down?
He loved the formal: sonatas and knot gardens
and more manner than one had anticipated:
alienating, idled.
Down farther: the economics of doubt,
this carapace, gives pause to some.
For us it is the very concept, the scent
of home. As snowshoes are meant for snow.
IN THE MEANTIME, DARLING
The time is for going out
and across.
One woke up and wished he was dead.
There is for everyone a solemn feeling
unless you put it away.
Go on adumbrating he said.
Go on listening because
eavesdropping is the only way to write.
O so you’re doing a handbook again.
Though
t I’d ankle over.
Then the sea rushed past.
Hurricane Charlie and his sister
sure were glad to see us.
At times there is a daze
with a diamond-like purity.
These and others could be sent for later.
It’s not the food in his mouth.
He’d hear others could become
and just drift away.
Pterodactyls still haunt
the ethnic ballpark.
It’s better this way,
just inside this window
as night approaches.
JUST FOR STARTERS
Charges about this unhappiness:
They would run out and stay a minute,
exhibit the requisite stinginess,
roll up in a blanket.
That’s how they and she looked to you and me.
But of course we were vendors of a sort,
tied to no actual drift, and so
when it became poorer and spoons were put up for sale
we stood in our back alleys, chagrin
painted brilliantly on our faces.
I don’t know what got me to write this poem
or any other (I mean, why does one write?),
unless you spoke to me in my dream
and I replied to your waking
and the affair of sleeping and waking began.
No matter how hard I try
I can’t get back on the tricycle.
Look, a fish is coming to save us.
A sail nods gallantly in our direction.
Maybe unimportance isn’t such a bad thing after all.
BROMELIADS
In my original philosophy for the age of gink
it felt like a harp was being plucked.
How not to respond to those suggestions, if that’s what they are,
like little breezes lifting grass and leaves,
as a delta of mattering fans out from
a point like a minimal encounter.
That’s how I faced up and got far away
from the lucky island and arrived at this place of crossings
where no two things occupy the same outline
in both space and time. It’s as if the people
who brought you up were to abandon you in your best interests
so as to bring on a crisis of enlightenment—
and then jump up from behind furniture and out of closets
screaming, “Surprise! Surprise!” But it’s not clear
just who ages in the process. I look ever closer
into the mirror, into the poured grain of its surface, until another I
seems to have turned brusquely to face me, ready
to reply at last to those questions put long ago …
Will we achieve anything? Not likely.
But as starlings occur in patterns, and in pairs, it
seems that does mean something and you shouldn’t stay
in your cave until this century is forgotten.
Who’d pay the photographer then?
Did I tell you your prints are ready,
that you look as reckless as an enchanter emeritus
and weary as the first gables of spring?
COMMERCIAL BREAK
Take care of values. The rest is shopping,
raiding the islands
for what little coral they possess.
Tell me … You opted for the shrimp cocktail.
I have no more
sand in my shoes. The witch squints at the fire.
SICILIAN BIRD
The perfume climbs into my tree.
It is given to red-haired sprites:
words that music expresses
almost amply.
The symphony at the station
then, and all over people trying to hear it
and others trying to get away. A “trying”
situation, perhaps, yet no one is worse off than before.
Horses slog through dirt—hell,
it’s normal for ’em.
And that summer cottage we rented once—remember
how the bugs came in through the screens, and
all was not as it was supposed to be?
Nowadays people have cars for things like that,
to carry them away, I mean,
I suppose.
And wherever man sets his giant foot
petals spring up, and artificial torsos,
dressmaker’s dummies. And an ancient photograph
and an ancient phonograph, that carols
in mist. Pardon. The landlord locked us out.
MUTT AND JEFF
“But what he does, the river,
Nobody knows.”
—HÖLDERLIN, “The Ister”
Actually the intent of
the polish remained well after
the soup was nailed down. Remnants to cherish:
the sunset tie old Mrs. Lessing gave me,
a fragment of someone’s snowball.
And you see, things work for me,
kind of, though there’s always more to be done.
But man has known that ever since the days
of the Nile. We get exported
and must scrabble around for a while
in some dusty square, until
a poster fragment reveals the intended clue.
We must leave at once for Wabash.
And sure enough, by the train side the blue-
uniformed bicycle messenger kept up easily
and handed me the parcel.
“Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,”
I must reflect on exactly what it was he did:
how lithe his arm was, and how he faded
in a coppice the moment the yarn was done.
Still, the goldfish bowl remains
after all these years like an image
reflected on water. It was not a bad thing
to have done what I have done,
though I can imagine better ones, but still
it amounted to more than anyone ever thought
it would. The mouse eyes me admiringly
from behind his chair; the one or two cats
pass gravely over or under my leg from time to time.
The point is there’s no bitterness,
not here, nor behind the scenes.
My sudden fruiting into the war
is like a dream now, a dream palace
written for children and others, ogres.
She was braining my boss.
The day bounced green off its boards.
There’s nothing to return, really:
Gumballs rattled in the dispenser, I saw
my chance for a siesta and took it
as bluebottles kept a respectful distance.
COVENTRY
There was one who was put out of his house
and another that played by a pond
of a lateness growing,
one that scalded his hand.
And now, he said, please deny there was ever a house.
But there was one and you were my mirror in it.
These lines almost convey the comfort of it,
how all things fitted together in their way.
But it was funny and we left it—
her address, her red dress.
Just stay out in the country a lot.
You have no house. The trees stand tentless,
the marmoreal floors sweating …
A delusion too.
Good thing. Good luck.
You’d have to stay in Coventry.
But I’m already there, I protested.
Besides, doesn’t any leaf or train want me
for what I’ll have stopped doing when I’m there,
truly there? Yet who am I to keep anything,
any person waiting? So we diverged
as we approached the city.
My way was along straight boulevards
&n
bsp; that became avenues, with barrels of trash burning
at each corner. The sky was dark but the blue light in it
kept my courage up, until the watch spring
broke. Someone had wound it too tight, you see.
Then I could only giggle at the odd bricks,
corners of tenements, buildings to be leased.
I fainted, honey.
And I never saw you again
except once walking fast
across the Victorian station
lit by holiday flares
yet strangely dumb and rumorless
like all the sleep and games that jammed us here.
AND THE STARS WERE SHINING
I
It was the solstice, and it was jumping on you like a friendly dog.
The stars were still out in the field,
and the child prostitutes plied their trade,
the only happy ones, having learned how unhappiness sticks
and will not risk being traded in for a song or a balloon.
Christmas decorations were getting crumpled in offices
by staffers slumped at their video terminals,
and dismay articulated otherness in orphan asylums
where the coffee percolates eternally, and God is not light
but God, as mysterious to Himself as we are to Him.
Say that on some other day garlands disbanded
in the fresh feel of some sea air,
that curious gulls coasted from great distances
to make sure nothing was getting more than its share
of pebbles, and the leaky faucet suddenly stopped dripping:
It was day, after all. One of those things like a length of sleep
like a woman’s stocking, that you lay flat
and it becomes a unit of your life and—this is where it
gets complicated—of so many others’ lives as well
that there is no point in trying to make out, even less read,
the superimposed scripts in which the changes of the decades
were rung, endlessly, like invading kelp, and
whatever it takes to be a simp is likely not what saved you
in time to get here, changing buses twice, and after,
when they sent you to your corner to lick
your wounds you found you liked licking
so much you added it to your repertory of insane gestures,
confident that sleep would punish those outside
even as it rescued you from the puzzle of the dance,