But I was going to say
It differently, about the way
Time is sorting us all out, keeping you and her
Together yet apart, in a give-and-take, push-pull
Kind of environment. And then, packed like sardines,
Our wit arises, survives automatically. We imbibe it.
HE
What was all the manner
Between them, let us discuss, the sponge
Of night pick us up with much else, carry
Some distance, so all the pain and fear
Will never be heard by anybody. Gasping
On your porch, but I look to new season
Which is exactly lost. “I am the knight,
I come by night.” We will say all these
To the other, in turn. And now impatient for
Sleep will have strayed over the
Frontier to pass the time, and it might
As well, dried baby’s breath stuck in an old
Bottle, and no man puts out to sea from these
Coves, secure or not, dwelling in persuasion.
SHE
It’s as I thought: there there is
Nothing solid, nothing one can build on. The
Force may have ebbed in the green wood.
Here is nothing, not even
Lazy slipping away, feeling of being abandoned, a
Distant curl of smoke above a car
Graveyard. Instead, the shadows stand
Straight out. Uninvited, light grabs its due;
What is eaten away becomes etched impression
Of mutability, but nothing backs it up.
We may as well begin the litany here:
How all that forgotten past seasons us, prepares
Us for each other, now that the mathematics
Of winter is starting to point it out.
HE
It is true, a truer story.
Self-knowledge frosts each action, each step taken
Freely. Life is a living picture.
Alone, I can bind you like a pleated scarf
But beyond that is much that might be
Examined for the purpose of examining it.
The ends stream back in the wind, it is too dark
To see them but I can feel them.
As Naming-of-Cares you precede the objection
To each, implying a Land of Cockaigne
Syndrome. You get around this as though
The eternally revised geography of spring meant
Something beyond its own sense of exaltation,
And love were cause for self-congratulation.
SHE
I might hide somewhere. I want to fly but keep
My morality, motley as it is, just by
Encouraging these branching diversions around an axis.
So when suddenly a cloud blackens the whole
Day just before noon, this is merely
Timing. So even when darkness swings further
Back, it indicates, must indicate, an order,
Albeit a restricted one, which tends to prove that idle
Civilizations once existed under a loose heading like
“The living and the dead.” To learn more
Isn’t my way, and anyway the dark green
Ring around the basin postulates
More than the final chapter of this intriguing
Unfinished last chapter. It’s in the public domain.
HE
But you will take comfort in it again.
Others, patient murderers, cultivated,
Sympathetic, in time will have subtly
Switched the background from parallel rain-lines
To the ambiguities of “the deep,” and in
Doing so will have wheeled an equestrian statue up
Against the sky’s facade, the eye of God, cantering
So as not to fall back nor yet trample the cold
Pourings of sunlight. You will have the look
Reflected on your face. The great squash domes seem
To vindicate us all, yet belong to no one.
Meanwhile others will grow up and fuck and
Get older, beating like weeds against the door,
But this wasn’t anticipated. You caught them off guard.
SHE
What I hear scraping at the door
Is palaver of multitudes who decided to come back,
Having set out too soon, and something must be
Done about them, names must be written down,
Or simply by being hoarse one whole side
Of the world won’t count any more,
The side with the story of our lives
And our relatives’ on it, the memory
Of the day you bicycled over.
But the reason for the even, tawny flow
Of the morning as it turned was the thought of riding
Back down all those hills that were so hard
To get up, and climbing the ones you had
Coasted down before, like mirror-writing.
HE
And when the flourish under the signature,
A miniature beehive with a large bee on it, was
Finished, you chose a view of distant factories,
Tall smokestacks, anything. It didn’t matter
So long as it was emptied of all but a drop
At the bottom like the medicine bottle that is thrown away.
The catch in the voice goes out of style then,
The period of civilities is long past.
Strange we should be continually waking up
To a barbaric calm that has probably
Always supported us, while still
Apologizing to the off-white walls we saw through
Years ago. But it stays this way.
SHE
What happened was you had finished
Nine-tenths of it before the great explosion,
The meteorite or whatever it was that tore out the
Huge crater eight miles in diameter.
Then somehow you spliced the bleeding wires,
Made it presentable long enough for
Inspection, then collapsed and slept until
The part where she takes the bus. And all
Because someone in a department store made some
Cryptic allusion, or so you thought as that person
Passed by, reducing the architecture of a life
To a minus quantity. There was no way
Back out of this because it wasn’t a departure.
HE
I once stole a pencil, but now the list with my name in it
Disgusts me. It is the horizon, tilted like the deck
Of a ship. And beyond, what must be the real
Horizon congeals into a blue roebuck whose shadow
Hardens every upturned face it trails across
And sets a blister there. If there was still time
To turn back, you must not follow me, but rather
Stay in your living, in your time,
Sizing up the future as accurately as the woman
In the old photograph, and, like her, turn away,
Your hand barely grazing the top of the little doric column.
Anything outside what the sheaf of rays delineates
For the moment is pain and at least illusion,
A piece of not very good news.
SHE
Then we must be like each other, because this afternoon’s
Ballast barely holds back the rising landscape
Of premonitions against that now distant (yet all too
Contemporaneous) magnesium flare in which
The habits of a moment, like wrinkles in a piece of backcloth,
Plummeted into the space under the stage
Through a trapdoor carelessly left open,
Joining other manifestations of human stick-to-itiveness
In a “semi-retirement” which has its own rewards
Except the solution only comes about much later, and then
Won’t entirely fit all the clues of the atmosphere
(Books, dishes and bathrooms), but is
Empty and vigilant, but too late to make the train,
And at night stands like tall buildings, disembodied,
Vaporous, rhapsodic, going on and on about something
That happened in the past, at the point where the recent
Past ends and the darker one begins.
HE
But since “we know what we are, but know not
What we may be,” and it’s later now, the romance
Of moderation takes over again. Something has to be
Living, not everyone can afford the luxury of
Just being, not alive but being, at the center,
The perfumed, patterned center. Perhaps it’s all fun
But we won’t know till we see it, as on a windless day
It suddenly becomes obvious how wonderful the fields are
Before it all sickens and fades to a mélange
Of half-truths, this gray dump. Then double trouble
Arrives, Beppo and Zeppo confront one
Out of a hurricane of colored dots, twin
Windshield wipers dealing the accessories:
Woe, wrack, wet—probably another kingdom.
SHE
I was going to say that the sky
Could never become that totally self-absorbed, bachelor’s-
Button blue, yet it has, and nothing is any safer for it,
Though the outlines of what we did stay just a second longer
On the etching of the forest, and we know enough not
To go there. If brimstone were the same as the truth
A gate deep in the ground would unlock to the fumbling
Of a certain key and the dogs at the dog races
Would circumambulate each in his allotted groove
Casting an exaggeratedly long shadow, while other
Malcontents, troublemakers, esprits frondeurs moved up
To dissolve in the brightness of the footlights. I would
Withstand, bow in hand, to grieve them. So it is time
To wake up, to commingle with the little walking presences, all
Somehow related, to each other and through each other to us,
Characters in the opera The Flood, by the great anonymous composer.
HE
Mostly they are
Shoals, even tricks of the light, armies
In debacle, helter skelter, pell mell,
Fleeing us who sometime did us seek,
And there is no place, nothing
To hide in, if it took weeks and months
With time running out. Nothing could be done.
Those ramparts, granular as Saturn’s rings,
That seem some tomb of pleasures, a Sans Souci,
Are absent clouds. The real diversions on the ground
Are shrub and nettle, planing the way
For asking me to come down, and the snow, the frost, the rain,
The cold, the heat, for dry or wet
We must lodge on the plain…. Later, dying
“Of complications,” only it must really have been much later, her hair
Had that whited look. Now it’s darker.
SHE
And an intruder is present.
But it always winds down like this
To the rut of night. Boats no longer come
Plying along the sides of docks in this part
Of the world. We are alone. Only by climbing
A low bluff does the intent get filled in
Along the edge, and then only subtly.
Evening weaves along these open tracts almost
Until the solemn tolling of a bell
Launches its moment of pain and obscurity, wider
Than any net can seize, or star presage. Further on it says
That all the missing parts must be tracked down
By coal-light or igloo-light because
In so doing we navigate these our passages,
And take sides on certain issues, are
Emphatically pro or con about what concerns us,
Such as the strangeness of our architecture,
The diffuse quality of our literature.
HE
Or does each tense fit, and each desire
Drown in the lake of one vague one, featureless
And indeterminate? Which is why one’s own wish
Keeps getting granted for someone else? In the forest
Are no clean sheets, no other house
But leaves and boughs. How many
Other things can one want? Nice hair
And eyes, galoshes on a rainy day? For those who go
Under the green helm know it lets itself
Become known, at different moments, under different aspects.
SHE
Unless some movie did it first, or
A stranger came to the door and then the change
Was real until it went away. Or is it
Like a landscape in its inner folds, relaxed
And with the sense of there being about to be some more
Until the first part is digested and then it twists
Only because this is the way we can see things?
It is revisionism in that you are
Always trying to put some part of the past back in,
And although it fits it doesn’t belong in the
Dark blue glass ocean of having been remembered again.
From earliest times we were cautioned not to get excited
About things, so this quality shows up so far only in
Slightly deeper tree-shadows that anticipate this PACING THE FLOOR
That takes in the walls, the window and the woods.
HE
The product of a discretion lodged far back in the past,
Blotted them against a wall of haze.
Pursuing time this way, as a dog nudges a bone,
You find it has doubled back, the flanges
Of night having now replaced the big daffy gray clouds.
O now no longer speak, but rather seem
In the way of gardens long ago turned away from,
And now no one any more will have to believe anything
He or she doesn’t want to as golden light wholly
Saturates a wooden fence and speaks for everybody
In a native accent that sounds new and foreign.
But the hesitation stayed on, and came to be permanent
Because they were thinking about each other.
SHE
That’s an unusual … As though a new crescent
Reached out and lapped at a succession of multitudes,
Diminished now, but still lively and true.
It seems to say: there are lots of differences inside.
There were differences when only you knew them.
Now they are an element, not themselves,
And hands are idle, or weigh the head
Like an outsize grapefruit, or an ocarina
Closes today with a comical wail.
Go in to them, see
What the session was about, how much they destroyed
And what preserved of what was meant to shuffle
Along in its time: hunched red shoulders
Of huntsmen, what they were doing
There in the grass, ribbons of time fluttering
From the four corners of a square masonry tower.
HE
Having draped ourselves in villas, across verandas
For so many years, having sampled
Rose petals and newspapers, we know that the eye of the storm,
As it moves majestically to engulf us, is alive
With the spirit of confusion, and that these birds
Are stamped with the same dream of exaltation moving
Toward the end. ’Tis said of old, soon
Hot, soon cold. There are other kinds of privacy
Coming in now, and soon,
In three or four months, enough leisure
To examine the claim of each
And to reward each according to his claim
On a sliding scale coinciding with the rush
Into later blue sun-divided weather.
SHE
No, but I dug these out of bureau drawers for you,
Told you which ones meant a lot to me,
Which ones I was frankly dubious about, and
Which were destined to blow away.
Who are we to suffer after this?
The fragrant cunt, the stubborn penis, winding
Paths of despair and memory, reproach in
The stairwell, and new confidence: “We’ll
Do something about that,” until a later date
When pines march stiffly right down to the edge of the water.
And after all this, finding
Someone at home, as though memory
Had placed chairs around
So that these seem to come and go in the present
And will escape the anger of a fixed
Destiny causing them to lean all the way over to one side
Like wind-heaped foam.
HE
It’s enough that they are had,
Allowed to run loose.
As I was walking all alone,
The idea of a field of particulars—that
Each is shaped, illustratable, accountable
To us and to no man—leached into the pervading
Gray-blue sense of moving somewhere with coevals,
Palmers and pardoners, a raucous yet erasable
Rout pent in the glimmer of
An American Bar. Whereupon Barry Sullivan-type avers
To Bruce Bennett-type that inert wet blackness is
Superior to boudoir light in which
Dull separateness blazes and is shriven and
Knows it isn’t right.
SHE
And shall, like a Moebius strip
Of a tapestry, play to our absences and soothe them,