reached the proper consistency, better still is it to join the stampede
away from it once it’s finished. Which, as of now,
it is. Wait a minute! You told us eternal flux
was the ordering principle here, and in the next breath you disavow
open-endedness. What kind of clucks
do you take us for, anyway? Everyone knows that once something’s finished,
decay sets in. But we were going to outwit all that. So
where’s your panacea now? The snake oil? Smoke and mirrors? Diminished
expectations can never supplant the still-moist, half-hesitant tableau
we thought to be included in, and to pursue
our private interests and destinies in, till doomsday. Well, I
never said my system was foolproof. You did too! I did not. Did too!
Did not. Did too. Did not. Did too. Hell, I
only said let’s wait awhile and see what happens, maybe
something will, and if it doesn’t, well, our personal
investment in the thing hasn’t been that enormous, you crybaby;
we can still emerge unscathed. These are exceptional
times, after all. And all along I thought I was pointed
in the right direction, that if I just kept my seat
I’d get to a destination. I knew the instructions were disjointed,
garbled, but imagined we’d eventually make up the lost time. Yet one deadbeat
can pollute a whole universe. The sensuous green mounds
I’d been anticipating are nowhere to be seen. Instead, a dull
urban waste reveals itself, vistas of broken masonry, out of bounds
to the ordinary time traveler. How, then, did he lull
us, me and the others, into signing on for the trip?
By exposing himself, and pretending
not to see. Solar wind sandpapers the airstrip,
while only a few hundred yards away, bending
hostesses coddle stranded voyagers with canapés
and rum punch. To have had this in the early stage,
not the earliest, but the one right after the days
began to shorten imperceptibly! And one’s rage
was a good thing, good for oneself and even
for others, at that critical juncture. Dryness
of the mouth was seldom a problem. Winking asides would leaven
the dullest textbook. Your highness
knows all this, yet if she will but indulge
my wobbling fancies a bit longer, I’ll … Where was I? Oh, and then
a great hurricane came, and took away the leaves. The bulge
in the calceolaria bush was gone. By all the gods, when
next I saw him, he was gay, gay as any jackanapes. Is
this really what you had in mind, I asked.
But he merely smiled and replied, “None of your biz,”
and walked out onto the little peninsula and basked
as though he meant it. And in a funny kind of way, the nifty
feeling of those years has returned. I can’t explain it,
but perhaps it means that once you’re over fifty
you’re rid of a lot of decibels. You’ve got a tiger; so unchain it
and then see what explanations they give. Walk through
your foot to the place behind it, the air
will frizz your whiskers. You’re still young enough to talk through
the night, among friends, the way you used to do somewhere.
An alphabet is forming words. We who watch them
never imagine pronouncing them, and another opportunity
is missed. You must be awake to snatch them—
them, and the scent they give off with impunity.
We all tagged along, and in the end there was nothing
to see—nothing and a lot. A lot in terms of contour, texture,
world. That sort of thing. The real fun and its clothing.
You can forget that. Next, you’re
planning a brief trip. Perhaps a visit to Paul Bunyan
and Babe, the blue ox. There’s time now. Piranhas
dream, at peace with themselves and with the floating world. A grunion
slips nervously past. The heat, the stillness are oppressive. Iguanas …
Twilight Park
Surely the lodger hadn’t returned yet.
He had, but she hadn’t heard him.
He was waiting five steps below the landing:
a black cloth in one black-gloved hand,
a band of light from the streetlamp like masking tape
across his eyes. He wanted to write something that would sell,
and this seemed the only way.
Desperate are the remedies
when one is broke, and no longer all that young or handsome.
Attention, secondary characters, and that means you,
Edith Fernandez: The snow is no longer pallid enough
to sum up your footfalls. One is ever so impatient;
now the tape falls, now carnival music
bashes in the front door. One can never be wholly
right, or wrong: catsup or ketchup? We must reread this.
The ending is considered particularly fine.
In this childhood you can
sort of tell by manners, like tomatoes,
who looked to be—may be—
like cute monsters who don’t go away
but are never any trouble,
but what’s behind it, this anything?
Is anything behind what we say
when we are not alone, not too far apart,
otherwise constricted?
Like a novel read on shipboard
or an old play with complicated stage directions
that may never have been carried out.
Perhaps the snow scene was too difficult,
the bison stampede too compromising.
We wake and are physical, the morning and
a thousand nerve endings are chiding,
clamoring … and all for what?
These files have nothing on you.
What the Plants Say
Don’t cry it’s lentil soup!
Kind doll rush us away
to a situation where the hay is mortgaged.
It was in fact time for a roll in the hay
so beautifully reflected in the color Polaroid
in the estate agent’s window, but it
wasn’t time to go. And she channels us
out over the silver plain’s mush—
no wonder everybody wanted Karelia,
chiggers and all, and then it was
time, time for dusk.
If only one outrageous jeweler thought it
why then it must be true. A Cadillac
with a platinum pretzel hood ornament—
why not! You and all
you’re taking me to must be true,
and silent, bodacious. That’s the way
I like ’em—mystery girls
with buttermilk braids and a microchip of plain
caring, over the deserted wall.
So much rubbish! or trash …
Well, the bird flew down the well
and that was the last ointment anyone wanted.
For sure we got to go. Now’s
the time, Ida.
When All Her Neighbors Came
the most beautiful combination appeared
on the game board. Normally we don’t do these things
to each other. There’s always a little kissing,
ha ha. Of that you may be sure. Yes, but mostly
they don’t go round together, tethered to a median
that takes itself for the Judgment. Well I can’t be
picking apples and playing the piano simultaneously,
now, can I? A withered little bird applauds. Some day,
it says,
you may go back to the glasshouse and fiddle
what we all were taught, from day one. Your ale-colored
shirt is only an onus. Inside the others are dry.
The “give and take” of the other schools
isn’t what I had in mind, thank you. A snake,
perfect in its horror, is. And the bondsmen drift off,
the decision buried in papers for a century or two,
and we, why then we are too, frugal of spirit,
reacting to the latest news. This lady of costmary
is the essential spoon. We may live more patently,
more expectantly, now.
Where It Was Decided We Should Be Taken
Your name here invisible as a headache
starts it off again and we are rolling
helplessly between the trees—we should
have seen it coming, but not many
are able to do just that. So we
dusted off our knees it was nice
to hear from you again over so many moons
with stars in them and now it has
become time for you to become comfortable again
which is not romantic as hydrangeas
aren’t romantic until you imagine
a shed for them to be in to be in
the darkness like lilies, overspending
their light it seems, always on the carpet
for something, on the incoming tide
that many faces surround.
Say it was
in some burrow you could hear planes overhead
but nothing was nasty this time, everybody
wanted to contribute to a general effort
which was being made
by a general on the other side of Kit Carson country.
Did I tell you about my hobby? It’s—
Well, we can talk about my dreams if you wish.
I had a good one the other night
when everything was still
and in the morning I awoke with a red nightcap
on, really a dunce cap, of which
no one has ever seen one. I have a friend who
wants to collect them for a certain room in a
castle. But he can’t.
There aren’t any.
Another day I was out with Miss Peevish
paying calls, it seems like nobody’s home anymore
and you have to walk so far to leave a card
over a stile and then a frog’s in the
middle of the path—“Confrontational,”
she murmured. If only they asked one.
Cakes are optional, and credit.
They moved closer toward the sphere
of the lighthouse, the overcoat slid off,
revealing—in some way the boy gets in the way
all the time. Reason and habit
have beaten a path he’s always circumnavigating,
but this! No one would ever—
These accents let us down
gently onto the torso of a wood
where birdcatchers yodel and bobwhites cheep.
It’s not going very far, it’s like going to the door
after the salesmen have slid into the universal pit.
And when one goes out it’s time to go too,
as though Mother and the piano had never exited
and those china knobs you never put away.
Feed the horse on brambles the moon
is coming
Woman Leaning
However it may come back to you
it’ll seem all right. At first.
Till the ones who do the realizing
realize, and call you to their office
at one in the morning.
I said fix the radiator.
These gray grapes are spread out before us
in a feast situation. Yet who can explain
why we should banquet here?
Then, in she plops—
a soloist trained to lead us
out of the briar patch of history,
trap that was always here.
And we, we listen. That’s obvious.
There was more said in the tent,
but what I remember only has to do with paddling.
Then, inexplicably, we’re safe.
No one loves us for it, yet
they can dictate to us now
from a striped sofa that was years in the making.
And what they tell us to write makes no difference
but is enough light for us to see by.
Everyone jumped over the fence safely.
All that was left was a book under a weeping
willow, in whose table of contents the glottal insistence
of the stream was repeated endlessly, like tears
for our benefit, if we should ever get to know them.
Yes, Dr. Grenzmer. How May I
Be of Assistance to You? What!
You Say the Patient Has Escaped?
We were staying at the Golden Something-or-Other.
Anyway, what does it matter now?
The boats have rolled up their colored sails.
The city is like a hinge. In the morning its glass
girders are flushed with light that gets drained
in the afternoon, but then something funny happens:
The westward-looking buildings reflect the sun’s
rays more fiercely than they are projected.
They become a rival sunset in the east. That’s heresy,
or at any rate bigamy. Tall buildings
“to suckle fools and chronicle small beer”; such is my story,
but I’m glad to be having this chance to tell it to you
even though we are in a silent movie and can speak only words
painted with milk. Yet someone comes to care about them:
There is always someone to care, somewhere,
but the sheriff vandalizes the day they return.
I didn’t let you dream about it.
It is for this I am being punished
by reforms harder than the ones in Congress.
They have rules to go by, sins to atone for:
I, I have only weightlessness
and a vague feeling that I should be spending my time
doing other things—sweeping the apartment,
washing out a child’s mouth with soap.
It was nugatory. They fed us delicacies
while we waited for the order of quilts to arrive—
or was it kilts? Joshua had this haunted feeling
he’d never finalized it at the start, when all
should have been beginning, but instead was pleased to slosh around
in mid-harbor. Anyway, there were invoices. Of that
he was almost certain. And a number of young girls
came and stood around the tree in which he was sitting—
were they the ones who had placed orders for the kilts?
Or were they mere raisin fanciers? “You’ll see
when the weather gets dry and yellow the raisins
will form all by themselves, alone on the branches,
and no one will care. And those that like to eat them
real fast out of boxes won’t have a clue
as to why that old horse-collar is draped over a branch
of the weeping willow, causing it to weep (that is,
bestir its leaves) even harder. Some people somewhere are prepared
for a few things to happen, but that’s not counting us or our
immediate families. An apple-green boxcar slithers along
a distant railway, yearning for something
unnameable at the end of the canyon. Not a
handful of raisins, probably, but you catch my drift.”
Soon all was drift. They had a feeling
they had better go inside, yet none could make a move
in that direction. All remained transfixed. “Tell them,”
the skald continued, “but only if they ask,
how this situation came about. We’ll see then
what jury will convict me, just because I feel like a woman
trapped in a man’s body, but only a little—not enough
to want to wear a skirt, but enough
to make me feel like putting on a kilt, and even then
only in Scotland, if I should be so lucky
as to find myself there some day.” Tremors
stirred the little band; there was obvious sympathy
for his plight, mingled with something more acidulous,
like pickling spices. And all the girls turned away
to weep, but were changed to ivy
and stuff like that. Why am I telling you this?
To assuage my conscience, perhaps, hoping the bad dreams
will go away, or at least become more liberally mixed
with the good, for none are totally good
or bad, just like the people who keep walking into
them, and the scenery, familiar or obvious though it be.
Besides, I’ve raised one major issue—
at least credit me with that. It will be a long time
before this turns to nothing, and in the meantime
we can sit upon the ground, and tell sad stories
of the lives of pets, as the ground freezes and thaws
many times—it is past caring. And what goes on within us
will be inscribed by the dancing needle on our chart,
for others to consult and be derived from.
I thought it would all end casually on a bank
of flowers, but alas, a real bank was growing out of it
with tellers and guards. Who liked the flowers.
Yesterday, for Instance
No longer available is the hare
with milky fur grazing on the clover of memory.
O beautiful basketballs! How far stretch the docks,
farther than my bonny sailor is from me.
The pigeons shift. The sky is syrup and pink gold.
I can no longer lie. I must tell it “like it is.”
But where is the raincoat that will hustle me
to the forest crossing? For it is a convenience
to know and to learn, and haply no good is in me.
I must claw the ground for grace. These poor root-systems
are in faith no better. I must see about clobbering
the backstairs monster on his toes, let him cover
my rail of defense with dandelion slips. Then I’ll be off