too, but until we have done with hopscotch, the little girl
crawls away and twin sinkers emerge like blobs
out of the twilight, there is no point to the crash, and no end.
The house is very revealing. She said it ought to. Oh my
first fears, leaders, never
turning over, never looking back, what is it on tomorrow’s
agenda? What would you have done?
A SEDENTARY EXISTENCE
Sometimes you overhear them discussing it:
the truth—that thing I thought I was telling.
What could it have been that I said?
To be more or less like other men and women
and then to not be at all—it’s
like writing a book that is both beautiful and disgusting.
Because we can’t do it now. Yet this space
between me and what I had to say
is inspiring. There’s a freshness
to the air; the crowds on Fifth Avenue
are pertinent, and the days up ahead,
still formless, unseen.
To be more or less unravelling
one’s own kindness, noting
the look on others’ faces, why
that’s the ticket. It is all the expression
of today, and you know how we keep an eye on
today. It left on a speeding ship.
EREBUS
I/
Tonight we are going to try a different dish
some worried savior brought us:
a vanilla-flavored tragedy
on how the market closed.
Waving from a window: that’s nice.
One hears the sheeted dead
braying in a box of pencils
by that curve in the creek,
and wonders how worse things can get.
Surely there are worse things
than reading, late at night, in bed.
I would like to write a Victorian novel
of terror about a crossing-sweeper’s revenge
on life, somewhat in the vein of
Lady Audley’s Secret. They can can you for that
or for drawing smoke in puffs the way
it does come out of chimneys only forget
about it. The truth isn’t what’s wanted.
Penguin races are. Yes but you knew someone
who once knew a penguin. That doesn’t matter:
put it all in your book, what you were going
to say, and wake up with a shadow,
something less meaningful on the wall.
II/
Too bad the way children
on their way to school get mislaid
and the market closes.
The honeyed wind claws at your throat.
I thought you were a fair-weather friend
but I find you here now, in tears,
begging me to give up that stratagem
I’ve fought a lifetime to perfect,
and I’d rather do it—for you—than bask on
the rampart of some accomplishment: always
no work, no tears, and if children
play this way, then it’s all right.
I wasn’t mistaken
except in dreams.
Then, Nordic champions come
to tell you how you failed
by a hair,
a breath. And you go on,
believing them. And you go on believing them
for what silver
night incurs in the pockets
of all those waiting desperately for a sequel.
But it comes round
to this: what is comic is no longer
fatuous, and you’re the first to learn
about it and can keep silent about it
and make a killing. In the mean-
time your door is white as snow.
THE OLD COMPLEX
As structures go, it wasn’t such a bad one,
and it filled the space before the eye
with loving, sinister patches. A modest
eyesore. It reduced them to a sort of paste
wherein each finds his account, goes off
to live among the shore’s bashed-in hulks.
Of course you have to actually take the medicine.
For it to work, I mean. Spending much time upstairs
now, I can regulate the solitude,
the rugged blade of anger, note
the occasional black steed. Evening warbles away.
You are free to go now, to go free.
Still, it would help if you’d stay one more day.
I press her hand, strange thing.
WHERE WE WENT FOR LUNCH
I/
The boss made it official.
Then a cherub came out and sassed us.
“Why do you listen to all this chamber music?
Why don’t you ever listen to church music?”
Indeed, I thought I had always done so,
but now I had other things to worry about.
“Other things to worry about”—he keeps repeating that phrase
as though it were an escutcheon on a portcullis.
What manner of ridicule is this? Of course
there’s nothing to worry about, except your response,
which is precisely what dissolves in music—you know the kind,
that keeps coming round again, like a customer
to a neighborhood bar, and some good exchanges
take place between a couple of fiddles, who then decide to walk home together.
Shit, if this were New York …
In the next episode he sees me with the eyes of a cat.
“You remembered … to bring … the gold stuff?”
Oh sure, but I’m not a catalog, nor
what’s wanted here. I’m a Belgian
with lots of Belgian things to think about
such as newspapers and old shoes stuffed with same—say I think
I’ll get out of here too. I don’t know about you. This
cement sidewalk looks pretty steep to me, though it’s broad …
(Hah, that part always fools them.) I say,
what if we took a turn through the thicket down there—
might clear our eyes out, if you know what I mean.
I do. But I keep returning to what is in dreams
for me, not certain I’m correct, that this place is suitable.
I think I’ll lie on the shore, fighting with the sand,
for a little, if you don’t mind. And then one of those parrots—
we might see one, eh? Oh he thinks he’s Crusoe now.
So much for the general populace’s idea of loneliness—
I thought they’d abandoned it years ago, but they still
like to keep up the pretense. “You think you’re alone?”
No, I never said that, you are deliberately twisting my words,
but twist them you must, if you think you must.
Right now I’d like a long cool twist of something.
Sure, she goes out with some men.
But that don’t mean you … Oh, hell,
there I go trying to make something of something
again. Time to pull in one’s horns, me buckoes, if you
catch my drift. And if we don’t? Then it will catch you, sure as
wavelets nibble little by little at the sandbar
they have no idea of covering completely in fewer minutes
than it takes to play an old 78 r.p.m. record, say,
make it nice this time, how about Dvorak’s Humoreske?
I was just going to ask you about that word. They don’t
make ’em any more. We don’t have any in stock.
We are about a shout.
Why, when it comes time to saunter, why
we’ll do that too. I was first desk at the Vienna Musikyerein.
It was during the second Viennese school. Why do poets
like to eat?
Why, you do something, you want people to know about it, it’s as
simple as that, at least it seems so to me, but
I could be wrong, I have been in the past, and about more things
than you, Horatio. By the way, how’s that bridge coming along?
II/
When We Sleep we see sweet things
and are wiser next day.
I forgot to play
yesterday. I’m all stiff today.
III/
Seriously, what were we made to talk about? Just casters on a floor, that always leave something of a mark nevertheless. I will have to have my will read to you. That’s as close to a tease as we ever get. This elevator just dropped seven floors and no one knew anything about it. Nobody thought they were going to die. Can you stand stupid people? Yes, me too, there’s something so, well, stupid about them, they’re like earthworms coming through a mound of dirt, you just have to love them. They’re the ones with the passion. Now, there’s something I’d like to have. Many’s the time I’ve been chided for my presumed lack of it, and rightly too. Oh I know what I’d do if I had some, who I’d go over and see first. But if you can’t have it you can’t get it. That’s where this thing called “intelligence” comes in. See, there’s more to it than you thought—than I thought. If we can find our intelligence, and everybody has some, we can use it to make little stick figures out of Plasticine whose elbows we can bend, and then there is no expression more touching, my God I’m getting all crazy-eyed just thinking about it. We can make our own little race, and they have cars to fit. But I’m getting ahead of myself, my story, really. But I’ve told it to you. We can just look at each other and blink. Or not. We can just sleep together.
And when I was having lunch
I heard this voice singing
about the breath of other planets blowing.
I mean, who needs to be reminded?
I am at your doorstep after all,
sliding down the door, I pick up the knocker and replace it softly.
There seems nowhere to go,
nothing to do.
I can ask you out on some pretext,
only don’t be lonely,
see?
There are enough unhappy people in this gyre.
But I was never one of them and now you will be too.
AS OFT IT CHANCETH
You had but to look at a mound or nut
after the invention of perspective for it to become a rut.
Everybody was seeing and doing it.
That is why some few choose disorder
as scenery befitting the positive melancholy of their stance,
which means to get things done in a climate of awkwardness.
The perfidious sky tore past them,
its ribbons streaming revolt, and soon,
not right away, it would be time to go down to the street
to inhabit that walking shell of you
that by this time is all either of us knows of the other,
but it is something.
Pick up your room.
Your visitor is coming up the walk,
the door-chime sounds. Now if only in a second I could invent
the leagues of prosperous businessmen I mean to have commerce with; but no,
it is allegory still. The house on the hill,
the bramble bush, the neighbor, disappearing
along that appropriate perspective.
You believed it if it was convenient; otherwise
you may have believed it anyway, and it was all
shaken out, like clothes.
But in the room the guardians of same will have it
their way. And though this will never cause the temperature to change,
there are still others filling up the anteroom
with the breath of fog, with wishes not voiced
for a while, until it becomes obnoxious and incinerating not to
have them, in their way, as they crest down
on us. Anybody could’ve thought it up, but, funny,
no one ever did until that elaborate hour
wherein we go on seeing, and our order is taken.
RETABLO
After it had jiggled down it came out OK.
Drugstores sold it. You to whom this awful mission has been
entrusted are barred, of course, from commenting
while it is held up in the courts
and none of your family or lawyers can, either,
which is unfortunate at a time
when such a lot depends on being supple and risky, the way
you always were, of course,
except that now it isn’t quite enough, is it,
as was the case on certain days
gray and blustery, but otherwise quite undistinguished, quite
unmemorable. You had to choose.
Did I forget to mention that? It came with the package
and had to be peeled off and mailed back, but even that
foretaste of doom didn’t rate a footnote, while other, less
notable and possibly less objectionable aspects dropped
out of the stone forehead, leaving it black,
something to be pitied, almost.
So much more came untied during the swinging
of the bell ropes and of course the maddening pandemonium of the bells
themselves—they get right inside your head—
that someone would invariably stop to ask, Hey what is this
redemption stuff anyway, all this talk about bonds and escrow—
wasn’t it supposed to be on a more spiritual shelf
where presences of sages nod and fall on each other,
falling asleep all over each other,
treehouses were meant for someone else who would fit them out
differently, all spare and nautical? Captain, you’ve got to tell me,
what is this insane voyage about? I haven’t even bought a ticket
and besides am on dry land heading back to see my aunts and cousin, aw,
have a heart will you? And these garbage-flecked
shoals beyond the barrier reef, you can’t tell me those orange-
haired floozies are sirens! Hell, I can hear ’em.
And I’m going nowhere, that’s for damn sure, as I know you
know in this vacuum you label interest in other people’s lives,
in seeing how they accomplish what they set out to do.
Probably the rain never got loose
for all you know, but it did, it was like cellophane noodles escaping
from a slashed envelope. I had a transparent raincoat to prove it,
but it wasn’t enough, that wasn’t enough, nothing was enough to be quiet
in the little schoolhouse, but it was enough to know the last
class was over many seasons ago. There was something learned once but
it had drained out through a ring of rust in the middle of the floor,
and besides the desk-captains never kept such good time
any more, but of course there was less to know in those days:
only a few harness-bells, and a heap of dust and straw.
Which reminds me: why are you shivering under that horse-blanket
when there’s so much to be done by way of filing
the last perennials, each in its separate slipcase, and of not letting Jack get away.
He’s got more to do; there’s more to be done
than any of us ever dreamed of, whole pockets and mountains
of it, let into the side of a cloud hill.
Then the worrying starts, a fresh leak of pain
squirts through the tape and soon the bandage is loosened,
useless in the grass where I was standing all along, a picture
to myself. So the long rain waves drain;
there’s a sense of compac
tness, or even nothing, though all the ships
have returned from Iceland, with stars, and with the scarves that sent them there.
A MOURNING FORBIDDING VALEDICTION
And who, when all is said and done,
Cares for thee like me? I know. Thy name
Is known to me, and if thou sufferest like a squall
That sirens rend, I’ll be confident and of the other
Persuasion. Perfume that drenches like a pall
Is the old scent, and dear, true; its fame
Waxeth with the sun
And is not like, moreover, a lost brother.
When glory’s steed pawed the ground,
Frozen and flinty the hour, yet for some
It was command out of the deepest basin, and who shall say
Which recombinant molecules have memorized the next rote
And when the reciters have fall’n, on a day
Stuck in time’s craw, that merriment is a crumb
Unfit for sharing, only a sound
Like itself, endless fishy smell or zygote.
Nothing’s here; the year
Is ripe, and frozen, all about me stand
Censors—veiled, tumescent husks who at the last
Come clean in the moulting of the season, and make no bones
About their city of origin. Them too, held fast
In Memory’s drizzle, the Place St. Ferdinand
Negates, and surrounding highrises, mere
Chaff, or the power which breeds stones
And shall have much to say, come night-
Fall, and all around us awful blisters concur
In melting trusses, stalk the errant ptarmigan
Or deed no entry to fools and nimble savants beyond the moat
That weeps for times when the green cardigan
Of duckweed shrouded it, and, all exemplary, her
Nose protruded beyond the outline of the bight
Some saw beyond, and her raincoat.
To scrape the habit from our stand of being, and, once
It’s accomplished, rescue it from shyness, out of a burrow
Of pleasure up toward greater mounds of pleasure, is to a name
What places are, and so be it
If trace elements are added and rules from the game
Subtracted little by little. Ergo,
Someone’s won it. Dunce
Am I? So’s your old man, you stupid shit.
Gallons and gallons of water slid over the weir