not realized for centuries
meanwhile
another way of living had come and gone
leaving its width
behind
now the tall cedars
had become locked into
the plan
so that everywhere
you looked
was burning
inferential
interior space
not for colonies
but already closed
turned in on itself
its back
as beautiful as the sea
where you go up
and say the word
eminence
to yourself
all was lived in
had been lived in
was coming to an end
again
in the featureless present
that was expanding to
cloister it
this just a little too
comic parable
and so insure the second
beginning
of that day seen against the street
of whichever way
you walked and talked
knowing not knowing
the thing that was describing you
and not knowing
your taller
well somehow more informed
bearing
as you wind down
only a second
it did matter
you come back so seldom
but it’s all right
the way of staying
you started comes back
procession into the fire
into the sky
the dream you lost
firm in its day
reassured and remembered
The Ice-Cream Wars
Although I mean it, and project the meaning
As hard as I can into its brushed-metal surface,
It cannot, in this deteriorating climate, pick up
Where I leave off. It sees the Japanese text
(About two men making love on a foam-rubber bed)
As among the most massive secretions of the human spirit.
Its part is in the shade, beyond the iron spikes of the fence,
Mixing red with blue. As the day wears on
Those who come to seem reasonable are shouted down
(Why you old goat! Look who’s talkin’. Let’s see you
Climb off that tower—the waterworks architecture, both stupid and
Grandly humorous at the same time, is a kind of mask for him,
Like a seal’s face. Time and the weather
Don’t always go hand in hand, as here: sometimes
One is slanted sideways, disappears for awhile.
Then later it’s forget-me-not time, and rapturous
Clouds appear above the lawn, and the rose tells
The old old story, the pearl of the orient, occluded
And still apt to rise at times.)
A few black smudges
On the outer boulevards, like squashed midges
And the truth becomes a hole, something one has always known,
Where it comes from, or how long it will stay—
A randomness, a darkness of one’s own.
Valentine
Like a serpent among roses, like an asp
Among withered thornapples I coil to
And at you. The name of the castle is you,
El Rey. It is an all-night truck-stop
Offering the best coffee and hamburgers in Utah.
It is most beautiful and nocturnal by daylight.
Seven layers: moss-agate, coral, aventurine,
Carnelian, Swiss lapis, obsidian—maybe others.
You know now that it has the form of a string
Quartet. The different parts are always meddling with each other,
Pestering each other, getting in each other’s way
So as to withdraw skillfully at the end, leaving—what?
A new kind of emptiness, maybe bathed in freshness,
Maybe not. Maybe just a new kind of emptiness.
You are smart but the weather of this day startles and japes at you. You come out of it in pieces. Always pursuing you is the knowledge that I am there unable to turn around, unable to confront you with your otherness. This is another one of my houses, the one in Hampstead, the brick one in the middle of the block that you never saw though you passed along that street many times, sometimes in spring with a light drizzle blowing that made you avert your gaze, sometimes at the height of summer where the grandeur of the ideas of the trees swamped your ideas about everything, so you never saw my house. It was near where Arthur Rackham lived. I can’t quite remember the name of the street—some partly legible inscription on a Victorian urn: E and then MEL(E?), perhaps a Latin exhortation to apples or heroism, and down in the dim part a name like “Rossiter,” but that is too far down. Listen, I never meant for you not to be in my house. But you couldn’t because you were it.
In this part I reflect on the difficulty and surprise of being you. It may never get written. Some things are simultaneously too boring and too exciting to write about. This has to be one of them. Some day, when we’re stoned … Meanwhile, write to me. I enjoy and appreciate your phone calls, but it’s nice to get cards and letters too—so keep ’em comin’!
Through bearded twilight I hear things like “Now see here, young man!” or “Henry Groggins, you old reprobate!” or “For an hour Lester has been staring at budget figures, making no progress.” I know these things are, that they are. At night there are a few things, and they slide along to make room for others. Seen through an oval frame, one of the walls of a parlor. The wallpaper is a conventionalized pattern, the sliced okra and star-anise one, held together with crudely gummed links of different colored paper, among which purple predominates, stamped over a flocked background of grisaille shepherdesses and dogs urinating against fire hydrants. To reflect on the consummate skill with which the artist has rendered the drops as they bounce off the hydrant and collect in a gleaming sun-yellow pool below the curb is a sobering experience. Only the shelf of the mantelpiece shows. At each end, seated on pedestals turned slightly away from one another, two aristocratic bisque figures, a boy in delicate cerise and a girl in cornflower blue. Their shadows join in a grotesque silhouette. In the center, an ancient clock whose tick acts as the metronome for the sound of their high voices. Presently the mouths of the figures open and shut, after the mode of ordinary conversation.
Thought I’d
Row across to you this afternoon,
My Irina! Always writing your beloved articles,
I see. Happened on one only recently in one of the more progressive journals.
Brilliantly written, or so it seemed, but isn’t your thought a bit too
Advanced by present-day standards? Of course, there was much truth
In what you said, but don’t you feel the public sometimes has more truth
Than it can cope with? I don’t mean that you should … well, “fib,”
But perhaps, well, heh heh, temper the wind to the shorn lamb
A bit. Eh? How about it, old boy?
Or are you so in love with your “advanced” thinking that everything else
Seems old hat to you, including my conversation no doubt? In that
Case I ought to be getting on. Goodness, I’ve a four-thirty appointment and it’s
Already five after. What have you done with my hat?
These things I write for you and you only.
Do not judge them too harshly. Temper the wind,
As he was saying. They are infant things
That may grow up to be children, perhaps—who knows?—
Even adults some day, but now they exist only in the blindness
Of your love for me and are the proof of it.
You can’t think about them to
o long
Without knocking them over. Your castle is a house of cards,
The old-fashioned kind of playing cards, towering farther
Than the eye can see into the clouds, and it is also built on
Shifting sands, its base slurps out of sight too. I am the inhabitable one.
But my back is as a door to you, now open, now shut,
And your kisses are as dreams, or an elixir
Of radium, or flowers of some kind.
Remember about what I told you.
Blue Sonata
Long ago was the then beginning to seem like now
As now is but the setting out on a new but still
Undefined way. That now, the one once
Seen from far away, is our destiny
No matter what else may happen to us. It is
The present past of which our features,
Our opinions are made. We are half it and we
Care nothing about the rest of it. We
Can see far enough ahead for the rest of us to be
Implicit in the surroundings that twilight is.
We know that this part of the day comes every day
And we feel that, as it has its rights, so
We have our right to be ourselves in the measure
That we are in it and not some other day, or in
Some other place. The time suits us
Just as it fancies itself, but just so far
As we not give up that inch, breath
Of becoming before becoming may be seen,
Or come to seem all that it seems to mean now.
The things that were coming to be talked about
Have come and gone and are still remembered
As being recent. There is a grain of curiosity
At the base of some new thing, that unrolls
Its question mark like a new wave on the shore.
In coming to give, to give up what we had,
We have, we understand, gained or been gained
By what was passing through, bright with the sheen
Of things recently forgotten and revived.
Each image fits into place, with the calm
Of not having too many, of having just enough.
We live in the sigh of our present.
If that was all there was to have
We could re-imagine the other half, deducing it
From the shape of what is seen, thus
Being inserted into its idea of how we
Ought to proceed. It would be tragic to fit
Into the space created by our not having arrived yet,
To utter the speech that belongs there,
For progress occurs through re-inventing
These words from a dim recollection of them,
In violating that space in such a way as
To leave it intact. Yet we do after all
Belong here, and have moved a considerable
Distance; our passing is a facade.
But our understanding of it is justified.
Spring Light
The buildings, piled so casually
Behind each other, are “suggestions
Which, while only suggestions,
We hope you will take seriously.” Off into
The blue. Getting there is easier,
But then we hope you will come down.
There is a great deal on the ground today,
Not just mud, but things of some importance,
Too. Like, silver paint. How do you feel
About it? And, is this a silver age?
Yeah. I suppose so. But I keep looking at the cigarette
Burns on the edge of the sink, left over
From last winter. Your argument’s
Nearly beyond any paths I’m likely to take,
Here, or when I eventually leave here.
Syringa
Orpheus liked the glad personal quality
Of the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part
Of this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends
Rocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks
Can’t withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon
To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.
Then Apollo quietly told him: “Leave it all on earth.
Your lute, what point? Why pick at a dull pavan few care to
Follow, except a few birds of dusty feather,
Not vivid performances of the past.” But why not?
All other things must change too.
The seasons are no longer what they once were,
But it is the nature of things to be seen only once,
As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along
Somehow. That’s where Orpheus made his mistake.
Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade;
She would have even if he hadn’t turned around.
No use standing there like a gray stone toga as the whole wheel
Of recorded history flashes past, struck dumb, unable to utter an intelligent
Comment on the most thought-provoking element in its train.
Only love stays on the brain, and something these people,
These other ones, call life. Singing accurately
So that the notes mount straight up out of the well of
Dim noon and rival the tiny, sparkling yellow flowers
Growing around the brink of the quarry, encapsulates
The different weights of the things.
But it isn’t enough
To just go on singing. Orpheus realized this
And didn’t mind so much about his reward being in heaven
After the Bacchantes had torn him apart, driven
Half out of their minds by his music, what it was doing to them.
Some say it was for his treatment of Eurydice.
But probably the music had more to do with it, and
The way music passes, emblematic
Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it
And say it is good or bad. You must
Wait till it’s over. “The end crowns all,”
Meaning also that the “tableau”
Is wrong. For although memories, of a season, for example,
Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure
That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting;
It is a picture of flowing scenery, though living, mortal,
Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,
Harsh strokes. And to ask more than this
Is to become the tossing reeds of that slow,
Powerful stream, the trailing grasses
Playfully tugged at, but to participate in the action
No more than this. Then in the lowering gentian sky
Electric twitches are faintly apparent first, then burst forth
Into a shower of fixed, cream-colored flares. The horses
Have each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks,
“I’m a maverick. Nothing of this is happening to me,
Though I can understand the language of birds, and
The itinerary of the lights caught in the storm is fully apparent to me.
Their jousting ends in music much
As trees move more easily in the wind after a summer storm
And is happening in lacy shadows of shore-trees, now, day after day.”
But how late to be regretting all this, even
Bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too late!
To which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours,
Replies that these are of course not regrets at all,
Merely a careful, scholarly setting down of
Unquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way.
And no matter how all this disappeared,
Or got where it was going, it is no longer
Material for a poem. Its subject
Mat
ters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly
While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad
Comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward
That the meaning, good or other, can never
Become known. The singer thinks
Constructively, builds up his chant in progressive stages
Like a skyscraper, but at the last minute turns away.
The song is engulfed in an instant in blackness
Which must in turn flood the whole continent
With blackness, for it cannot see. The singer
Must then pass out of sight, not even relieved
Of the evil burthen of the words. Stellification
Is for the few, and comes about much later
When all record of these people and their lives
Has disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm.
A few are still interested in them. “But what about
So-and-so?” is still asked on occasion. But they lie
Frozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus
Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name
In whose tale are hidden syllables
Of what happened so long before that
In some small town, one indifferent summer.
Fantasia on “The Nut-Brown Maid”
HE
Be it right or wrong, these men among
Others in the park, all those years in the cold,
Are a plain kind of thing: bands
Of acanthus and figpeckers. At
The afternoon closing you walk out
Of the dream crowding the walls and out
Of life or whatever filled up
Those days and seemed to be life.
You borrowed its colors, the drab ones
That are so popular now, though only
For a minute, and extracted a fashion
That wasn’t really there. You are
Going, I from your thought rapidly
To the green wood go, alone, a banished man.
SHE
But now always from your plaint I
Relive, revive, springing up careless,
Dust geyser in city absentmindedness,
And all day it is writ and said:
We round women like corners. They are the friends
We are always saying goodbye to and then
Bumping into the next day. School has closed
Its doors on a few. Saddened, she rose up
And untwined the gears of that blank, blossoming day.
“So much for Paris, and the living in this world.”