A terminus, pole fringed with seaweed at its base, a cracked memory
Haibun 6
To be involved in every phase of directing, acting, producing and so on must be infinitely rewarding. Just as when a large, fat, lazy frog hops off his lily pad like a spitball propelled by a rubber band and disappears into the water of the pond with an enthusiastic plop. It cannot be either changed or improved on. So too with many of life’s little less-than-pleasurable experiences, like the rain that falls and falls for so long that no one can remember when it began or what weather used to be, or cares much either; they are much too busy trying to plug holes in ceilings or emptying pails and other containers and then quickly pushing them back to catch the overflow. But nobody seems eager to accord ideal status to this situation and I, for one, would love to know why. Don’t we realize that after all these centuries that are now starting to come apart like moldy encyclopedias in some abandoned, dusty archive that we have to take the bitter with the sweet or soon all distinctions will be submerged by the tide of tepid approval of everything that is beginning to gather force and direction as well? And when its mighty roar threatens in earnest the partially submerged bridges and cottages, picks up the floundering cattle to deposit them in trees and so on to who knows what truly horrible mischief, it will be time, then, to genuinely rethink this and come up with true standards of evaluation, only it will be too late of course, too late for anything but the satisfaction that lasts only just so long. A pity, though. Meanwhile I lift my glass to these black-and-silver striped nights. I believe that the rain never drowned sweeter, more prosaic things than those we have here, now, and I believe this is going to have to be enough.
Striped hair, inquisitive gloves, a face, some woman named Ernestine Throckmorton, white opera glasses and more
Variation on a Noel
“…when the snow lay round about,
deep and crisp and even…”
A year away from the pigpen, and look at him.
A thirsty unit by an upending stream,
Man doctors, God supplies the necessary medication
If elixir were to be found in the world’s dolor, where is none.
A thirsty unit by an upending stream,
Ashamed of the moon, of everything that hides too little of her nakedness—
If elixir were to be found in the world’s dolor, where is none,
Our emancipation should be great and steady.
Ashamed of the moon, of everything that hides too little of her nakedness—
The twilight prayers begin to emerge on a country crossroads.
Our emancipation should be great and steady
As crossword puzzles done in this room, this after-effect.
The twilight prayers begin to emerge on a country crossroads
Where no sea contends with the interest of the cherry trees.
As crossword puzzles done in this room, this after-effect,
I see the whole thing written down.
Where no sea contends with the interest of the cherry trees
Everything but love was abolished. It stayed on, a stepchild.
I see the whole thing written down:
Business, a lack of drama. Whatever the partygoing public needs.
Everything but love was abolished. It stayed on, a stepchild.
The bent towers of the playroom advanced to something like openness,
Business, a lack of drama. Whatever the partygoing public needs
To be kind, and to forget, passing through the next doors.
The bent towers of the playroom advanced to something like openness.
But if you heard it, and you didn’t want it
To be kind, and to forget, passing through the next doors
(For we believe him not exiled from the skies)…
But if you heard it, and if you didn’t want it,
Why do I call to you after all this time?
For we believe him not exiled from the skies.
Because I wish to give only what the specialist can give,
Why do I call to you after all this time?
Your own friends, running for mayor, behaving outlandishly
Because I wish to give only what the specialist can give,
Spend what they care to.
Your own friends, running for mayor, behaving outlandishly,
(And I have known him cheaply)
Spend what they care to.
A form of ignorance, you might say. Let’s leave that though.
And I have known him cheaply.
Agree to remove all that concern, another exodus—
A form of ignorance, you might say. Let’s leave that though.
The mere whiteness was a blessing, taking us far.
Agree to remove all that concern, another exodus.
A year away from the pigpen, and look at him.
The mere whiteness was a blessing, taking us far.
Man doctors, God supplies the necessary medication.
Staffage
Sir, I am one of a new breed
Of inquisitive pest in love with the idea
Of our integrity, programming us over dark seas
Into small offices, where we sit and compete
With you, on your own time.
We want only to be recognized for what we are;
Everything else is secondary.
Consequently, I shall sit on your doorstep
Till you notice me. I’m still too young
To be overlooked, yet not old enough to qualify
For full attention. I’ll flesh out
The thin warp of your dreams, make them meatier,
Nuttier. And when a thin pall gathers
Leading finally to outraged investigation
Into what matters next, I’ll be there
On the other side.
Half of me I give
To do with as you wish—scold, ignore, forget for awhile.
The other half I keep, and shall feel
Fully rewarded if you pass by this offer
Without recognizing it, receding deliberately
Into the near distance, which speaks no longer
Of loss, but of brevity rather: short naps, keeping fit.
The Lonedale Operator
The first movie I ever saw was the Walt Disney cartoon The Three Little Pigs. My grandmother took me to it. It was back in the days when you went “downtown.” There was a second feature, with live actors, called Bring ’Em Back Alive, a documentary about the explorer Frank Buck. In this film you saw a python swallow a live pig. This wasn’t scary. In fact, it seemed quite normal, the sort of thing you would see in a movie—“reality.”
A little later we went downtown again to see a movie of Alice in Wonderland, also with live actors. This wasn’t very surprising either. I think I knew something about the story; maybe it had been read to me. That wasn’t why it wasn’t surprising, though. The reason was that these famous movie actors, like W. C. Fields and Gary Cooper, were playing different roles, and even though I didn’t know who they were, they were obviously important for doing other kinds of acting, and so it didn’t seem strange that they should be acting in a special way like this, pretending to be characters that people already knew about from a book. In other words, I imagined specialties for them just from having seen this one example. And I was right, too, though not about the film, which I liked. Years later I saw it when I was grown up and thought it was awful. How could I have been wrong the first time? I knew it wasn’t inexperience, because somehow I was experienced the first time I saw a movie. It was as though my taste had changed, though I had not, and I still can’t help feeling that I was right the first time, when I was still relatively unencumbered by my experience.
I forget what were the next movies I saw and will skip ahead to one I saw when I was grown up, The Lonedale Operator, a silent short by D. W. Griffith, made in 1911 and starring Blanche Sweet. Although I was in my twenties when I saw it at the Museum of Moder
n Art, it seems as remote from me in time as my first viewing of Alice in Wonderland. I can remember almost none of it, and the little I can remember may have been in another Griffith short, The Lonely Villa, which may have been on the same program. It seems that Blanche Sweet was a heroic telephone operator who managed to get through to the police and foil some gangsters who were trying to rob a railroad depot, though I also see this living room—small, though it was supposed to be in a large house—with Mary Pickford running around, and this may have been a scene in The Lonely Villa. At that moment the memories stop, and terror, or tedium, sets in. It’s hard to tell which is which in this memory, because the boredom of living in a lonely place or having a lonely job, and even of being so far in the past and having to wear those funny uncomfortable clothes and hairstyles is terrifying, more so than the intentional scariness of the plot, the criminals, whoever they were.
Imagine that innocence (Lilian Harvey) encounters romance (Willy Fritsch) in the home of experience (Albert Basserman). From there it is only a step to terror, under the dripping boughs outside. Anything can change as fast as it wants to, and in doing so may pass through a more or less terrible phase, but the true terror is in the swiftness of changing, forward or backward, slipping always just beyond our control. The actors are like people on drugs, though they aren’t doing anything unusual—as a matter of fact, they are performing brilliantly.
Proust’s Questionnaire
I am beginning to wonder
Whether this alternative to
Sitting back and doing something quiet
Is the clever initiative it seemed. It’s
Also relaxation and sunlight branching into
Passionate melancholy, jealousy of something unknown;
And our minds, parked in the sky over New York,
Are nonetheless responsible. Nights
When the paper comes
And you walk around the block
Wrenching yourself from the lover every five minutes
And it hurts, yet nothing is ever really clean
Or two-faced. You are losing your grip
And there are still flowers and compliments in the air:
“How did you like the last one?”
“Was I good?” “I think it stinks.”
It’s a question of questions, first:
The nuts-and-bolts kind you know you can answer
And the impersonal ones you answer almost without meaning to:
“My greatest regret.” “What keeps the world from falling down.”
And then the results are brilliant:
Someone is summoned to a name, and soon
A roomful of people becomes dense and contoured
And words come out of the wall
To batter the rhythm of generation following on generation.
And I see once more how everything
Must be up to me: here a calamity to be smoothed away
Like ringlets, there the luck of uncoding
This singular cipher of primary
And secondary colors, and the animals
With us in the ark, happy to be there as it settles
Into an always more violent sea.
Cups with Broken Handles
So much variation
In what is basically a one-horse town:
Part of me frivolous, part intentionally crude,
And part unintentionally thoughtless.
Modesty and false modesty stroll hand in hand
Like twin girls. But there are more abstract things too
That play a larger role. The intense, staccato repetitions
Of whatever. You don’t know and we don’t know either.
From there it’s a big, though necessary, leap to
The more subtly conceptual conditionings: your opinion
Of you shaped in the vacuum-form of suppositions,
Correct or false, of others, and how we can never be ourselves
While so much of us is going on in the minds of other people,
People you meet on the street who greet you strangely
As though remembering a recent trip to the Bahamas
And say things like: “It is broken. But we’d heard
You heard too. Isn’t it too bad about old things, old schools,
Old dishes, with nothing to do but sit and wait
Their turn. Meanwhile you’re
Looking stretched again, concentrated, as you do not pass
From point A to point B but merely speculate
On how it would be, and in that instant
Do appear to be traveling, though we all
Stay home, don’t we. Our strength lies
In the potential for motion, not in accomplishments, and it gets
Used up too, which is, in a way, more effective.”
Just Someone You Say Hi To
But what about me, I
Wondered as the parachute released
Its carrousel into the sky over me?
I never think about it
Unless I think about it all the time
And therefore don’t know except in dreams
How I behave, what I mean to myself.
Should I wonder more
How I’m doing, inquire more after you
With the face like a birthday present
I am unwrapping as the parachute wanders
Through us, across blue ridges brown with autumn leaves?
People are funny—they see it
And then it’s that that they want.
No wonder we look out from ourselves
To the other person going on.
What about my end of the stick?
I keep thinking if I could get through you
I’d get back to me at a further stage
Of this journey, but the tent flaps fall,
The parachute won’t land, only drift sideways.
The carnival never ends; the apples,
The land, are duly tucked away
And we are left with only sensations of ourselves
And the dry otherness, like a clenched fist
Around the throttle as we go down, sideways and down.
They Like
They like to drink beer and wave their hands and whistle
Much as human beings everywhere do. Dark objects loom
Out of the night, attracted by the light of conversations,
It was a long time ago that you began. The dawn was brittle
And open, and things stayed in it for a long time as images
After the projecting urge had left. In the third year a tension
Arose like smoke on the horizon, but it was quickly subdued.
And now in the fifth year you return with tears
That are, I understand, a formality, to seal the naked time
And pave it over so that it may be walked across. The day with
Its straw flowers and dried fruits is for “putting up” too.
At a corner you meet the one who makes you glad, like a stranger
Off on some business. Come again soon. I will,
I will. Only this time let your serious proposals stick out
Into the bay a considerable distance, like piers. Remember
I am not the stranger I seem to be, only casual
And ruthless, but kind. Kind and strange. It isn’t a warning.
The flares in the lower sky are no longer ambitious
But a steady, droning red. That’s my middle initial up there,
Hanging over a populous city. Flowers and fires everywhere,
A warning surely. But they all lead their lives appropriately
Into desperation, and nobody seems surprised. Only the story
Stays behind, when they go away, sitting on a stone. It grew and grew.
So Many Lives
Sometimes I get radiant drunk when I think of and/or look at you,
Upstaged by our li
fe, with me in it.
And other mornings too
Your care is like a city, with the uncomfortable parts
Evasive, and difficult to connect with the plan
That was, and the green diagonals of the rain kind of
Fudging to rapidly involve everything that stood out,
And doing so in an illegal way, but it doesn’t matter,
It’s rapture that counts, and what little
There is of it is seldom aboveboard,
That’s its nature,
What we take our cue from.
It masquerades as worry, first, then as self-possession
In which I am numb, imagining I am this vision
Of ships stuck on the tarpaper of an urban main,
At night, coal stars glinting,
And you the ruby lights hung far above on pylons,
Seeming to own the night and the nearer reaches
Of a civilization we feel as ours,
The lining of our old doing.
I can walk away from you
Because I know I can always call, and in the end we will
Be irresolutely joined,
Laughing over this alphabet of connivance
That never goes on too long, because outside
My city there is wind, and burning straw and other things that don’t coincide,
To which we’ll be condemned, perhaps, some day.
Now our peace is in our assurance
And has that savor,
Its own blind deduction
Of whatever would become of us if
We were alone, to nurture on this shore some fable
To block out that other whose remote being
Becomes every day a little more sentient and more suavely realized.
I’ll believe it when the police pay you off.