a flummoxed present that seeps into the past,
making a whole life seem regrettable.” No,
I cannot condone your offer, the thick answer is for later.
Meanwhile I shall try to pacify my eyeballs
with the mist leaking from the ceiling.
That proved sufficient, caressing the knocker,
a goblin’s face, that drew us back a hundred years
even as it gazed at us in surprise, speechless
as a field of daisies, to a time when we too were out of step
and the whole sentient world offered to bathe us—
pale bluster, flubbing today again and again.
STANZAS BEFORE TIME
Quietly as if it could be
otherwise, the ocean turns
and slinks back into her panties.
Reefs must know something of this,
and all the incurious red fish
that float ditsily in schools,
wondering which school is best.
I’d take you for a drive
in my flivver, Miss Ocean, honest, if I could.
A POSTCARD FROM PONTEVEDRA
Just how I feel
I feel today.
The witch stirred the soup
with a magic spoon.
She said, “We can make this happen.
We can never make this happen?”
Excuse me? I was waking up
at the Maison Duck you see.
People are walking past me,
faster and faster—it seems they are running toward something.
Call me old-fashioned. No, don’t,
on second thought. We’ll call an ambulance
instead. I was waking up with this humming in my ears—
sound of the sea, of a basket of nettles.
It’s O.K. to ride, to not go along. I’m not sure
where Pontevedra is. If I was I’d have to ask myself
so many other questions, ones you never
taste in the brightness of your day,
though they answer me
like the risen sea.
A SUIT
The audience was scattered forever, and the story left untold.
—from the film Careful, by Guy Maddin
Maybe it only looks bedraggled.
Let’s take it up to the fifth floor and see.
One can look quite far in that light, into the corners
of experiences we never knew we had, that is to say most of them.
But the city is new. The new apartment building, now vacant,
circles like a moth that as yet has no idea
it’s trapped in a spider’s web, that the indelible
will soon come to pass. For a few moments now
we can drink tea and talk of the famous doll collection
in the museum of a small European spa.
Shadows on the tent alert us: Breathing isn’t going to be as easy
as we’d thought once. Mr. Cheeseworth is always so right
in his calculations, yet when one comes to believe him, where is he?
It has been a life of qualification and delay.
Yet we knew we were on the right track; something surged in us,
telling us otherwise, that we’d arrive too early at the airport
or something about the drips on the taxi in the dusk.
We doctored it all up,
and I think I have an explanation for the manna
that falls softly as pollen, and tastes like coconut or some other
unaccountable sherbet. It seems clothes never do fit.
Yes, I could have told you that some time ago.
CROSSROADS IN THE PAST
That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes,
but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction.
“That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction?
‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do
when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.”
I tell you, something went wrong there a while back.
Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject.
No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know
exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could
seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong?
I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone
with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel
with the other. And then something like braids will stand out,
on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious.
We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house,
talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know
that’s probably what’s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean.
I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some
sometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater
had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards
drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves
sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly
crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully
know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly
amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.
THE WATER INSPECTOR
Scramble the “Believer” buttons. Silence the chickens. We have more important things, like intelligence. We say so many cruel things in a lifetime, and yet. In a whorehouse, young, I obfuscated. Destiny was this and that, no it was about this and that. Do you see what I’m saying? Nobody needs the whole truth.
Even so we exact repetition. The beat goes on. Terribly surprised about the report, about your father’s death, but these things happen. Often the dead are found next day, alive but shaken, wondering what it was that happened to them, trembling beneath a cellar door. And we too wonder what happens when the sky as we know it cracks in two. Beetle voices serenade us. The earth and its fountains can’t do enough for us, yet we remember, shaken too, like in the old days.
We were reading and there came a knock at the door. The water inspector, we thought, and of course no one was there. Stung, and stung again. So we proceed, always on course, always begging the stars to tell us what happened, whether we were clean really, were we on course. Always the silence says yes, you can go home now, round up your playmates, head for the nearest wooded area if you think that will help.
I was once surprised but lay and brooded, my life at my back now, my discourse like weeds far out on a lake. It must have come to me, it always does, part of my profound business.
I think in the think tank, always elegant in my thinking, far away. Far from what I consider. Once it was all grace in the lifting. Awkward, yes, and not a little disconcerting.
CINÉMA VÉRITÉ
Be kind to your web-footed friends, I murmur to myself half anxiously, hurrying to the movies. After all, a duck may be somebody’s uncle. Or niece. I am lost. I ask directions of a horse-faced policeman who gives no satisfying reply. Or is it? “Somewhere up there ... You’ll be sure to find it,” he offers. I’d like to wipe the smug expression off his cheeks. Or is it a kindly and beatific smile? I continue along what I think is my way and come to a grassy riviera, a few rusted hotels browsing among smug new ones. A large red and yellow plastic sign says, “Cinema.”
Those rocks have a basalt look about them. I was here before once. I can tell by the way the breeze scurries by, patting my cheek as it does so. O solemn breeze! You are the one thing I wanted to have happen to me, the only thing that matters in this concrete canyon of years, so why can’t I get close to you? Already you have made off with the chickens I was taking to the cinema, planning to have them for dinner later. Now I shall go hungry, for you and for them, telling my adventures to anyone who will listen, outside on
the slippery alabaster stairs. Or in the roomful of people?
THE OLD HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY
The walls are whitish. Is it cold enough in here? No,
it’s the statuary I came to see. And the gizzards, you wanted the gizzards
too? No, it was buzzards
I’d mentioned in my letter of introduction, which you seem to have lost,
but I was reminded too of ancient blizzards
that used to infest these parts. Ah, but gizzards
breed sapience, there can be no other way.
Allow me to pass in front of you
while I keep you waiting in the draft that is colder
than the room it besmirches.
Now we can see eye to eye, and it is a good thing.
I would not have thought it easy to set off the smoke alarms
had we been closer together.
“Now is the time for escape, you fool.”
Don’t you see it another way
back in the ridges that bore you, that nature knitted for you?
I don’t know, but something keeps getting in the way
of our orderly patrolling of these rooms.
I suppose it’s that I want to go back, really ...
And so you shall, on the 7:19. Meanwhile examine this bronze.
I’ll get Biddy to set out the tea-things
and that will save us some time.
AUTUMN BASEMENT
I lost my notes, or they were useless. Luckily
I had scribbled down this number on the baggage claim.
The countess remarked, and with reason, that they
only hold you up if you appear to have been dipped
in aspic. Alas, such was my case. Two hedgerows
further and I’d have made it. Now a rag chairperson gives me the runaround,
thinks we met once on a breakwater—
I say, a glass of tea would clash with the silence
of the conundrums, keeping your clatter from me,
safe from me, that is. Would you—er—mind?
So each gets immobilized with a diamond stickpin
under the barrel vault that was invented at just about that time—
notice its groin—and there’ll be capers with rabbit for supper
again. I don’t know how much longer I can stand August,
though September was always his favorite month, and here
it comes with a packet of unscented breeze.
Yet it always seems that salt should be savory,
the embers more at ease. The moving picture lights, and having lit
perfects a new way out of the shimmering maze. Pity we can’t
lingo here forever, but no one lives forever,
or so I’ve been told.
HANG-UP CALL
Preposterous. That was the word she used,
one much admired for its overtones of thrift and conviction.
I let her go where she wanted with it.
After all, I wasn’t there to hear it,
looking somewhat dazed amid the regatta
and its ships—or are they one and the same?
Every restful person pauses here
to ask me a question. I have a few ideas
but they wouldn’t interest you by a country mile,
not by a million of ’em. Some day I’ll have to release my antidote
for disappearing ink (hint: it contains mummy)
and a few other of the brilliant ideas
I’ve managed to put aside in this old life of mine,
but until that day comes I see no reason to get excited—
hey, wait, you were the one who was asking me!
That’s antenna-dust sparkling on the shoulder
of your silk patchwork bolero. I wasn’t even going
to be part of this, remember? I never signed on.
All I remember is press gangs working the bars in Bristol
and waking up on a heap of moldy straw
with a lump the size of a duck’s egg on my cranium
and a taste of iodine in my mouth.
But it wasn’t me we were going to discuss, remember?
As far as I’m concerned there have been no arguments;
ergo, I have never lost or won any.
Now give me my pants and money and let me go
back and join the others. They’re crying, you know.
LOST PROFILE
I had a voice once,
braid falling over the front
of my forehead-house and down the sides.
No need for cream separators here
someone said. My guide took it as a compliment.
Anyway, we got here. Somehow. Now the question
is losing relevance since water is everywhere,
like a transparent mine. I lost my voice a long time ago.
Voices of children ripple endlessly,
endorsing new products. The lizard-god explodes.
The lady on the next bar-stool
but one didn’t seem to understand
you when you spoke of “old dark house” movies—
she thought there must be an old dark house somewhere
and you wanted to take her there.
Still, my arrival flabbergasted her,
since it suggested you had no such thing in mind,
at least for the present.
And today I am a mad Chinese monk
chasing after his temple. Which way did it go?
Around that corner of bushes? Or was there ever
a temple? It seemed more and more likely
that it was a figment of your imagination, a figment
perhaps like many another, only a little more underripe.
Undeterred, I chase it in the madness of the gathering dusk
that crashes into ponds, trees, scared bridges.
It had to have been back here somewhere—
As if the air were pure lightning
and the earth, its consort, benevolent thunder,
Light shrinks from the edges of my fingernails
and armpits. This is a page that got bound in the diary
by mistake. It seems we were so happy once, just for a minute.
Then the sky got clouded, no one was happy or unhappy
forever, and the dream of the oppressor had come true.
HOW DANGEROUS
Like a summer kangaroo, each of us is a part
of the sun in its tumbling commotion. Like us
it made no move to right things, basking where the spent stream
trickled into the painted grotto.
Yes, and the snow-covered steppe, part of the same opera,
stretched into dimness, awaiting the tenor’s aria
of hopelessness. Yet no shadow fell across any of it.
It might have been real. Perhaps it was. Stranger tales
have been spun by travelers in unreassuring inns
while the last embers collapse one into the other, waking
no riposte. “It was at a garrison in central Tadzhikistan.”
And then sort of get used to it, and then not be there.
Each noted with pleasure that the other had aged,
realizing as well that new scenery would have to be sent for
and transported thousands of miles over narrow-gauge railroads—
a fountain in a park, a comforting school interior,
a happy hospital—and that, yes, it would be worth waiting for.
HUMBLE PIE
Various flavors recite us.
Meanwhile the inevitable Casper David Friedrich painting
of a ship pointing somehow upward has slipped in like fog,
surrounding us with vowels of regret
for the things we did not do
rising like a great shout above the barrel.
I was going to say I kissed you once
when you were asleep, and that you took no
notice.
Since that day I have been as a traveler
who scurries to and fro among nettles, never sure
of where he wants to end up, a Wandering Jew
with attitude.
All this time the sun had its eye on us
as it was going down. Finally, when it hit the horizon,
it had something to say. Something like pick up your two weeks’ salary
on your way out
and don’t ever let me catch you on this planet again.
Fine, but on what token shore
are we to be misted? We all have to end up somewhere together.
Might as well be in last week’s parish newsletter
or in the elbows of a nubian concubine.
I mean, we are right, somehow right, which is the same
thing only more so. Sticks and tokens
are my hymn to the sun that has gone,
never to return, it seems,
though.
MORE HOCKETING
The fear was that they would not come.
The sea is getting rougher.
There is a different language singing from the wall.
No singing from the wall.
The fear was that they would come.
Here, have one of these.
Have this one. No, have this one.
To have followed an adage
almost from the beginning of life, through
suburban pleats and undergrowth shrugged
off like underwear on a dinner plate.
Then to emerge fast
into where it’s taken you:
no more figs, pretzels. Breakfast’s