blame me for the ethics issue. Meanwhile can’t you
see that children, young adolescents really, are waking
under apple trees, picking up their bookbags listlessly
and traipsing down the road that presumably leads to school?
There they’ll read about what we—you and I—have
said to each other on important occasions.
No one will be any wiser. Twenty scarlet nuns
came in and led them off in the direction
of the forest, whence issues a medley of big-band
tunes by forgotten composers from the turn of the century.
Now another century is turning. Will it be pretty or depressed?
What have you to say for that jacket you’re wearing, those baggy
pants the color of scarlet elm-leaves?
It will turn out to be a popular color in the new century.
They will call it “white.”
SLUMBERER
Bug-eyed at the possibilities
she slumbers.
I mean there were more of us on anthrax
than not.
Out of the coal bin
lumbers
our governor. He hasn’t been getting too much sleep of late.
Something puzzles him. I know—it’s the seepage
of ink in the dairy trough. It bothers him, I now know.
Our way,
that way and in.
Besides, it’s elsewhere.
Adventurous.
Wind your way to
the floor.
Noggins were getting a workout,
and all we wanted was the way to the zoo.
We wanted to free the flamingos
but they took off and flew right over our heads,
almost grazing them.
I thought I was going to get knocked down.
Then a kind zoo attendant came over. “It’s natural,”
he explained, “at your age (cough, cough), to want to do something
for these pests, or pets, but it’s really better to do nothing
for them or anybody. See, they’re used to a certain profundity
and get all riled when it’s disturbed
even by a well-intentioned impulse such as yours, especially
if it’s well intentioned. Such, I fear,
is the essence of the tragi-comic. But who could live without it?”
You may well ask, you
who have never done a lick of work save clang metal gates in people’s pusses.
Point taken, though. We live in an old soup of the tragi-comic.
Werewolves circle us, wishing they were us.
We, on the other hand, wish only that we were somewhere else.
Now are you going to let us into the cage, or what?
Swiftly it was done. A swarm of passenger pigeons whooshed past,
some of them dropping like mayflies, for they were after all extinct,
only some of them hadn’t heard about it yet. Other rarae aves
were nowhere to be seen, though the label on the cage
indicated otherwise. But it was old and rusted,
like the cage itself. Hey, does anybody take care of this place?
It’s like a ghost-zoo.
Aye, and so it is, my son.
You’ve only just noticed? Well, we come up with some pretty
extraordinary things down this way—smouldering peat-bog golf courses
with skeleton golfers, hoping for that hole in one
that comes all too regularly.
We have academies for the undistinguished
with long waiting lists, and subscriptions to the opera,
only you wouldn’t want to hear any of ’em, not if I was you.
Our pre-schoolers are famished, and the grade school is full of microbes.
I could carry you on my back,
I suppose, across the smouldering turf to the nineteenth hole
where we could wet whistles with some sake and dim sum,
only I wouldn’t advise you to stay around much after sunset.
Oh, not that anything funny goes on. Nothing ever does,
that refocuses you on yourself like a truant lens
in some aged Kodak, and you see all you can or ever wanted to be,
laid out on the gravel littoral, drying in the sun,
as if there wasn’t enough to stink up the place as it is.
Well, I’ll be paying my respects to your missus,
who, no offense, knows me better than she may have let on.
But who cares? Life is a carnival,
I think. Besides, it’s elsewhere.
Night started to shrivel as he departed.
We were wondering what on earth we were doing here, and how
to extricate ourselves, should we ever really want to.
POT LUCK
You always leave me where we left off.
You bring me every little thing,
which is probably a mistake.
You shaved my canary once.
I am anxious to be out by the speedway.
At least, almost nothing happens there.
I was drugged by a cat once
on the edge of Lake Lucerne. Woke
feeling like a businessman without portfolio.
Wait, here goes a new one. He’ll examine the fork
to see if it’s rooted. Well, it is. In danger.
In the past, which is much the same thing.
So we dance the bolero in times like these.
I believe I am slimmer than my last bathing suit.
Tommy sat on the step, looking so cute. It was
run for your lives, now or never. Now
I don’t feel so much better. I had dropped off the letter
at the office, thinking it would be quicker.
Perhaps the editor never got it. I enjoy playing
the glass harmonica, am slender and look half my age.
Catcher in the Rye is my all-time favorite book.
And how about you? Do you, too, come out here
with your family on Saturday afternoons, hoping
for a little rest and relaxation, far
from the city and its desks? Here they have daffodils.
Look, there is one over there by the city.
They have a name for it. “Detroit.”
And all the time I thought I was being a pest
someone was desperately in love with me.
The person sickened and apparently died
in a hospital far away. Now I have no one,
no friends to gripe with or call coaxing names to.
I was definitely born at the wrong time
or in the wrong city. Pot-luck dinners were shared.
I thought I had gone to hell. Too bad I woke up in time.
SHORT-TERM MEMORY
A few things came to observe me:
a terrible explosion,
flowers, dustiness in the boroughs,
planners plagued by increasingly goofy proposals.
I could have pretended not to be in.
Instead I came to the door in shirtsleeves,
extending a hand to the vexed guests. “What about those Orioles,
this terribly warm weather we’ve been having?” Truthfully,
I was suffering from the heat and didn’t know it.
It was enough just then to perceive life as a sandbar,
or a mirage of one, that the tide is frantically
trying to erase so as to cover its tracks.
Broken discoveries invaded my short-term memory,
but not so you’d notice. Continuing the polite
palaver I asked after the health of this one and that one,
how little Lois was doing in school, what Howie was up to
in his treehouse. It was as though no one cared.
Or had seen me. They shuffled aimlessl
y away
to come alive later no doubt in some sex sequence,
while here leaves are browning before the end of summer
and the groundskeeper waits.
What about your immortal soul?
I may have lost it, just this once, but other chapters
will arrive, bright as a child’s watercolor,
and you’d want to be around me.
VENDANGES
A tall building in the fifteenth arrondissement faded away slowly and then completely vanished. Toward November the weather grew very bitter. No one knew why or even noticed. I forgot to tell you your hat looked perky.
A new way of falling asleep has been discovered. Senior citizens snoop around to impose that sleep. You awake feeling refreshed but something has changed. Perhaps it’s the children singing too much. Sophie shouldn’t have taken them to the concert. I pleaded with her at the time, to no avail. Also, they have the run of the yard. Someone else might want to use it, or have it be empty. All the chairs were sat on in one night.
And I was pale and restless. The actors walked with the to the cabins. I knew that someone was about to lose or destroy my life’s work, or invention. Yet something urged calm on me.
There is an occasional friend left, yes. Married men, hand to mouth. I went down to the exhibition. We came back and listened to some records. Strange, I hadn’t noticed the lava pouring. But it’s there, she said, every night of the year, like a river. I guess I notice things less now than I used to,
when I was young.
And the arbitrariness of so much of it, like sheep’s wool from a carding comb. You can’t afford to be vigilant, she said. You must stay this way, always, open and vulnerable. Like a body cavity. Then if you are noticed it will be too late to file the architectural pants. We must, as you say, keep in touch. Not to be noticed. If it was for this I was born, I murmured under my breath. What have I been doing around here, all this month? Waiting for the repairman, I suppose.
Where were you when the last droplets dribbled? Fastening my garter belt to my panty hose. The whole thing was over in less time than you could say Jack Robinson and we were back at base camp, one little thing after another gone wrong, yet on the whole life is spiritual. Still, it is time to pull up stakes. Probably we’ll meet a hooded stranger on the path who will point out a direction for us to take, and that will be okay too, interesting even if it’s boring.
I remember the world of cherry blossoms looking up at the sun and wondering, what have I done to deserve this or anything else?
SMALL CITY
Small city where I lived for some years in total darkness,
whose pale terminology took over
my varied instincts for right and wrong.
Sometimes in the long evenings one would stop talking,
then, if the topic was, say, shoes
the others would mouth their assent. I cannot go in or out
of doors to this day without recalling your vocabulary
of dirty words that no longer count. I mean they are clean now.
The working dead pitch in at seven.
A new table had taken your hands.
You should move into it, dining space,
letting the wine of your spit wander over and muzzle
the hollow square of guards out in the square.
One was always missing, or so it seemed,
but they had ingenious ways of disguising it,
like a pretty girl in a shawl was sent to the doctor’s
to reclaim some suds, and nobody noticed her by the
time we’d realized she was gone. The antlers over the vitrine
however grew clammy and trembled—
no doubt at the thought of some sport
infinitely postponed, or curtailed.
Yet we followed where her eyes led dancing, wild topic.
Find hordes! Or else it was all over in the suburbs
whose furious light beat like an ornery orrery.
The band marched in and played the doctor symphony
while we were talking amongst ourselves. What to do next?
There was bread in the breadbox
but all the shoe stores were closed.
We like our pixillated selves
in that tertiary period, yet always
a vague dissatisfaction gnawed at our tripes.
There was mewing between the thunderclaps.
We were sure we wouldn’t get out alive,
yet we always did, somehow. Someone must have told on us, though,
for we were made to stand in the basement
as the hours oozed through the window grill.
We knew we could catch up
someday when foam would caress the weir
and black-eyed susans stumbled.
It is not a happy place to be
until after the rain has ended.
VINTAGE MASQUERADE
That article I’d meant to read—
you saw it first, a while ago, in some magazine,
perused it and forgot its major tenets.
Only the ghost of its prose rhythms served you,
like water at the base of a log
some minnow undermines.
So they never came for us in the suburbs
of what city we were living in at that time.
We lived undisturbed, in the manner of the great dead writers:
metallic coffee in the morning, then work until almost noon
with a couple of poached eggs on rye toast then, then more
of the same till afternoon shadows lengthened, and it was time
to go for a long walk and play ambush. Stealthily we’d return,
sampling the largesse of unknown ancestors,
admiring the way those rocks look on business trips,
blush that suffuses the whole earth. Tell me,
can you remember any of this? I, who put it all down,
I cannot, and so let the living choose my books
at the rental library, evening’s salad from the greengrocer’s.
If there is more to remember, I gift you with it
because of the eternal person you were sometimes, and the loveliness
of your being, shaken clear of you like duck feathers.
TO GOOD PEOPLE WHO SHOULD BE GOING SOMEWHERE ELSE
Apricots: “Oh, there won’t be any again this year.”
—Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas
Many couldn’t stop being in love with you,
and that in a decade. In the pileup every noble
impulse is disgraced, every overture rebuffed,
no matter how insincere. A wall of plums towers
over the effort at tilling. Usually they paint it up
so you can see it in the haze. Not today.
A freckled girl misunderstands me and laughs,
as though I were part of her explanation.
“You see, the boys drive right through you.
And I thought I was invisible.” Hon, it’s your hat,
not your fault, that evening headlines tilt at.
Everywhere is a great fuss, though there were parishes
of tranquillity only last week. They decided to change things
just because things ought to change, or else because they do, anyway.
Peace in the distance is merely a metallic whine,
the fruit concurs. And now very seldom.
ANOTHER AARDVARK
I cannot recommend your curls too highly—
that is, I cannot recommend them. Sometimes
I wish I could, whenas in silks
you go, past the cat’s dish
and on into the living room. I wish
there was some way to add a story-line, or patter,
melody, whatever you want to call it,
but there just isn’t. Something greater
than us approaches, calls down to us:
Has he left the building? Is the theater empty,
really empty, its rows of red velvet seats
devoid of a single guest, or ghost?
There was a party last night but I didn’t go,
couldn’t stand the ruckus, the questions
people put to you: How do you like living
in your new house? Fine. I moved there twenty-five
years ago, but it all still seems new to me,
the sink especially. Then you spend a lot of time
in the bathroom? No, it was my books I was talking about,
my treasured library. I don’t see how anyone can read
too many books, do you? Am I delusional? Is it a forest
that’s approaching, with its format of shadows,
wind among its grasses? And all this time
I thought you were asleep. I took a long walk.
Ended up next door. Ed had been hitting the sneaky pete
again. And I have things to do, walks to shovel,
before the next train, and the grain
that is sure to follow in its wake.
HAS TO BE SOMEWHERE
Having escaped the first box,
I wandered into a fenced-off arena
from which the distance, peach-blue, could be ascertained:
convenient for my adventures
at this period of my life. Yet I wriggled farther into an indeterminate space
that was actually a mood, or many moods, one overlaying another
like gift wrap.
This is actually what was supposed to take place:
a duet of duelling cuckoos, at the close of which the winner
gets to stand next to me for the photo-op.
Alas, things went terribly wrong.
For I can now claim no space as rightfully mine
and must stand at the edge of the crowd like a ghost
for an unforeseeable length of time.
All this because I meant to be polite to someone.
We had met in the desert, you see, and he wished for a warm place