Flow Chart: A Poem, page 14
except there they were arranged more brightly in schools; here, clusters
are the thing. School is for kids. I think I’ll go, Miss MacGregor, honest
I will, this time or bust? You have cleared out my lounge…
There is no place to talk, no amphitheater
under which we can put our heads, deducing all-too-violent theorems, yet
I quite like it, one is active. Besides, didn’t I hear you say our daddy was once picked up
here by the secret police, and shaved heads are no longer the thing inside the gates,
and the stand of birch is there, but it is all, there is nothing left over
to eat a sandwich next to? If he had tried too soon, if the sun…But plus or minus
is unimportant; beware of negative thoughts. The ewe and the prunes are mine
anyway; insistence on finer points is the stuff highwaymen’s dreams are made on, until
the lost chord; it sounded so brittle back there. Come to my desk, we’ll talk it out
and by George the next time it will come round, in a dress, and we’ll all thank our
premonitions and the power of staying up alone
in a rain-lashed stadium with the TV on. So much power, at such a distance. But it glows.
All along I had known what buttons to press, but don’t
you see, I had to experiment, not that my life depended on it,
but as a corrective to taking the train to find out where it wanted to go.
Then when I did that anyway, I was not so much charmed as horrified
by the construction put upon it by even some quite close friends,
some of whom accused me of being the “leopard man” who had been terrorizing
the community by making howl-like sounds at night, out of earshot
of the dance floor. Others, recognizing my disinterest, nonetheless accused
me of playing mind-games that only the skilled
should ever attempt. My reply, then as always, was that ignorance
of the law, far from being no excuse, is the law, and we’ll see who rakes in
the chips come Judgment Day. I can see why someone who didn’t know me
might be kind of appalled at this flip attitude, but was unprepared for the chorus
of condemnatory shrieks from the entourage, as though they hadn’t been through
much of it themselves, and could cast the first stone. Once upon a time,
however, I was new to it and felt the land catching up to me
as on the outskirts of a town where one is seeking a night’s lodging
unprepared for whatever consequences may befall. I spent a week once
in someone’s house in a small town in Pennsylvania, without ever
learning whose it was, or addressing anyone by name. Another time, in Maine,
I found myself face to face with a wolf at sunset. So you see, my
rationale is that I’ve taken my lumps as well as enjoyed the good times
now and then, and don’t see what difference it makes to old soldiers,
of which I’m proud to count myself one. On at least one occasion
when I felt I hadn’t slaked the lime sufficiently, so to speak, it all seemed
to be going from bad to worse. I had my companions, and my kit,
and was ready to pack it in as soon as morning arrived, glad
to escape with my skin intact. But then a curious thing happens:
an old guy comes up to you and tells you, reading your mind, what a magnificent
job you’ve done, chipping away at the noble experiment, and then, abruptly,
you change your plans, backtrack, cancel the rest of the trip
that was going to promise so much good health and diversion for you; you suddenly
see yourself as others see you, and it’s not such a pretty sight either, but at
least you know now, and can do something to repair the damage, perhaps by
looking deeper into the mirror, more thoroughly
to evaluate the pros and cons of your success and smilingly refuse all
offers of assistance, which would be the wrong kind anyway, no doubt, and set out
on your own at the eleventh hour, into the vast yawn or cusp that sits
always next door. And when we have succeeded, not know what to do with it
except break it into shards that get more ravishing as you keep pounding them. See,
I am now responsible though I didn’t make it. And you
can come back, I’m harmless now. Anyway, that’s how it pleases me to
detect myself. When the blossoms reappear, as they can, and the consumers,
someone must pay to keep it poignant. Otherwise one of you will remain an outrider.
Go finance the rigged deal then, and it can’t hurt.
It worked. Now both of us were attracted.
Let me by way of introduction hopefully
try to extricate myself from this peculiar bunch of circumstances,
the slough. Incidentally I am a gentleman
for some of my dealings. Nor do I believe in one set of laws for the rich,
another for the poor, nor in one thing over another, one mother-in-law,
one pasture for ducks, another for swans. Permit me to posit,
though, another way of looking at the situation, awful now,
as it has been in the past when they had less hygiene but more spirit of things
than is alas now the case. What if you let everything bounce off you except those
things whose nature it is to imbed themselves in you? Like a sharpened pencil forever
flailing the dark with one’s own tangles, one nears an edge. There are two possibilities:
ignore it or cross it anyway. In either case we’ll be
rid of our relatives’ nosiness and can get down to business quite quickly. I say “I”
because I’m the experimental model of which mankind is still dreaming, though to myself
I’m full of unworked-out bugs and stagefright, yet manfully I put aside those twenty years
to imagine some croft or bourne in which a few of us can weep, as flute-notes play,
and others can come round nodding approval and must then be on their way.
But—by heaven!—I think we almost knew just then what it meant to be together
without too many people around, how it could challenge the universe’s bluster,
the hee-hawing ages in the time it takes to put an idea together
from its unlikely components, package it, and go on being the genius one was anyway
but not for too long, or without general consent. It’s enough if—
my friend’s mother is the one who believes in me and understands me better
than anybody, but I’m not going to let it delude me. There’s a world out there.
So, drunk, we come back to the dollhouse open to the elements,
its scuffed paper furniture, to try to feed on newsprint once more,
unsuccessfully. But the old lady wants to explain what happened, indeed
there’s no way to ignore her account of what happened, so let’s just
sit still and listen. This, according to her, is what did:
slippery harmonies abound. In fact, I can’t be sure I’m not addressing myself
to one or within one right now, but that’s no matter. I’ve got to tell this
in whatever time remains to me. You and I were young, at lunch, we jumped up
in that mad way one has of wanting to see how things will react, wanting to see them
turn out, as it were—an ancient, though harmless, temptation. Wait, there was more:
after the gentleman had gone, leaving me his card, I stood in the hall
for a long time, unable to go back to the kitchen or up the stairs
I knew so well. I reflected on all the ways we have of quietly
getting each other’s goat, of stewing over inconsequential things. The morning
had passed without event, and now, on the threshold of afternoon, I could lean out
into the bowl of eternity, like a poster
plastered to the wall of a house, advertising a brand of cigars, as the future
came dripping back with intent, impregnating me like a wick with its contradictory
or spurious commands, futile innuendo, explosions of choices before one is ready
to choose, like team-colors. And as I stood, contemplating the card, sinking
into the primness of outline for which I seemed to have turned into a walking or
at any rate standing testimonial, and the years mounted the wick, I see I am as ever
a terminus of sorts, that is, lots of people arrive in me and switch directions but no one
moves on any farther; this being, in effect, the end of the line, a branch-line
at that, and no one is interested in guessing, in passing through you
or fancying they spy more copious rewards you are presumably keeping them from accepting,
once they have come of age. True, a few dawdlers will move on briskly, then turn
back officiously to salute you, as though polite gestures could dilute the heavy
water of eternity, or what’s left of it, which, it is naturally assumed, is inferior
to what has gone before—and then manage to insult your prudence by ignoring it
on this windblown platform you share with pigeons, not even
another bona fide passenger. And one’s dream of escaping weighs on your
shoulders, like a yoke of steel. Could one even contemplate it
now? Now that so many other things and soldiers are coming to be
what must be, and in fact has always been? A towering tree? But, speechless,
we make it over into miniatures of itself, like miniature automobiles. Then
a perfectly sweet, sickly stench bears this notion over to the main table,
numbers it, sets it down with the others, while the concept of an alphabet can
still be sustained (but the curtain is falling on that particular misunderstanding, and on
much else as well, including some factors I would like to conserve in the new,
stripped-down, presumably more functional civilization the alphabet-wand
seemed to want to announce), walks hurriedly out of the great gare, without
so much as a backward glance, into a post-Wagnerian, impressionist world of rivers
and dreaming washerwomen, and stones at the edge. Well, whose maelstrom
was it, and what are you talking about? I think to see a bulb blooming; a little mote
in the sunlight, if that’s it, would be fine for this morning. (Oh, you do,
do you?) And afterwards shut up about it. It’s in the mail anyway.
A fine thing that nobody talks to me or his parents. How am I supposed to know which
ticket goes with which entrance portal? And the woman with orange-pink hair stood silently by.
And, not knowing, to whose parents am I to address the grievance form?
Believe that a change infuses the young, though they aren’t enthusiastic.
For it is not a shifting of gears nor a vrooming of motors that is the note
one hungers after, but just as the distracted dripping of a stalactite produces,
in the fullness of time, a perfectly viable stalagmite, so one’s fretting and anxious
reverberations are but the negative space that gives birth to this invisible but densely
compacted mass of fibers that filter truth: the Last Judgment (text enclosed).
Paganini on his cloud fiddles; lambs gambol; appealing nonsense would seem to have
had the last word again. Yet when you see from a great distance how it forms a
pattern, then other conditions have to be taken into account, their probability admitted
into the record, a court order produced putting it all on hold and speedily overruled as the
dynamics gets into your blood and you find you can live without it. Yes, but
meaningfully? No, the hold order is still in effect, though it was supposed
to have been lifted; the tape is blank. But I thought those were
unimportant details somebody else was supposed to see about? Sure they were
but time is up now, and the pugilists have returned to their corners. Write about it,
if you were going to be interested in it, right now, if not
otherwise involved with its destiny. It’s the old “elaborate charade” accusation
again, and I’m not going to have any truck with it, or with you either. I don’t
know how many times I’ve spelled the B-word accurately without being credited,
so in the time of doppelgangers I be a lost bairn—without spelling, I mean,
though I used to do well in the spelling bees.
Which reminds me,
how are Alf and Al? Did I leave anything out? Does the lagoon
still stink? Or did somebody drain it after all those years of miasma
and not-too-amusing going about one’s business, sometimes
with a handshake or a smile?
But if one’s destiny is enclosed in one’s brain, or brain pan, how about free will
and predestination, to say nothing of self-determination? Just how do they
fit together? I know I explained this once but
that was a cold while ago and now this upstart rephrasing of it seems to be
causing a lot of attention, I don’t know why. It’s only a re-working, a scissors- and-paste
job; the wording is almost identical, and still there are some benighted souls
who follow it, day by day in its lumbering, tumbrel-like progress across edifices,
burial sites, unnamed and unnamable sumps, for all the world
to see in its glory, for all the world as though something were emerging
and they were going to a circus or a party. Too bad the old people couldn’t have
known about it before it was actually announced. Some of the young too were
tempted to skip until I stepped down from my soap-box to have a go at lecturing them
in real earnest, though with a joke or two added as leavening, or gilding the
pill as you might say. For if they had known first
they wouldn’t have minded not knowing after it had all happened, in vain,
one supposes, again. It’s too bad there aren’t more students
or even a few customers. The weather and the rushes scare tourists away
and waste sets in. The season is spectacular. Here, take my viola
da gamba, that dump again, it had a…Sipping ouzo is something.
But in all the thirty-nine territorial states drains are backing up;
for the first time something like resentment is making itself felt
in the trees, on the lawns. It’s still possible to chat with one’s neighbor over
the back fence, but the quality of life has been imperceptibly diminished
by too much arguing over the status of life today—that is, how is it felt subtly
in one’s veins, how does it differ from before, how is it that one day we think we see it
and the next day it seems gone, gone forever? Yet we do go on living—how does
that work? In the next field, a farmer is driving a rig of some kind—who is
expected to pay for the difference between what he sees up close and what is in the skies
now, with better labeling? More importantly, are they gone, the old familiar faces?
In time living on into a new share of English promise, some of
the junior ones went over the wall, and that was the last we saw of them.
Still, it’s a chance. One can easily side with some who offer no
moral incentive to cling together, who are, in their own words, “racked up,”
meaning blighted, for as long as cosmopolitan history chooses to entertain them, and no
offense either. That is, some are neanderthal diehards, you always get a few, but in
a notable number of instances there is no or not much prejudice; the eyes, wiped clean,
are ready for the prepared statement as it sings in the street like a serpent.
There isn’t much you can do, and it’s
a little darker. Tell it the time. And on no account lose your bearings
unless you want to wash up like a piece of polyester at the gulf’s
festering edge. That tanker took on more water. The consensus was there would be a
symposium, if anyone could be found to host it. Meanwhile things are getting a little better
on that front too, which includes romance. It too
is highly nutritious. Homey. Just in time for some fun, pranks, feelings; it may
be time to get off now, to swap it for a bigger parcel, trade up
to new ruthless schoolroom dreams while keeping the coded receipt just in case
we may make another big slip and water cannot satisfy competing demands.
We’ll still have an area with water, but like I say, juvenile bombast and highjinks bid fair
to drown out the other uproar, domesticate it and pass it on to their offspring
in Rome, where the dahlias blow, and sweet crocuses and cats by the score as the spring
billboard begins again. But durch ein ander. Smell it yourself he said my gosh.
And admit of sexual practices? Proclivities? The right to kill and maim? I suppose…
Night was floral at that post. It was fashionable to throw out last year’s buggery
along with the rented skis, and hope no one saw you. Besides, what could be said
about those mosaics? That they looked on, wore down, smooth as old storks’ nests,
witnesses to so much casual butchery, that a stringy music rose out of it
to command our measured pace back into history and then see it alive, tobacco- and
offal-stained, till we knew not who we were but only what we had to do.
The thunder could be heard all over the city.
Sometimes it is taken to extremes; the “extreme mind” thinks it can
understand what it means to it. The peculiar magic
of our idiom so enchanted her, with the vacuum of each thought,
that it even seemed permissible to escape around the edges and start running away,
though that is another story. What matters to us is that an unstable air
