Flow Chart: A Poem, page 19
and then parted on an amiable note, what I would call one. And all during the succeeding
weeks there was no word, nothing on the radio, what we call the wireless. You’d think a line
like “HUNT MISSING GIRL” might have turned up in the papers, but the actual situation
was otherwise. A standoff. A phantom so strange in its implications it defies
…classification. Otherwise, how his beans were cooked
made absolutely no difference to him. In fact he seemed to lose interest in his surroundings
daily. I remember including that in one of my reports. If he asked for a nail file
it would be to stab playfully at the pillow, or occasionally to clean his nails,
never to file them. Once I even saw him reading a detective novel upside down.
I was too upset to include that in my report, as you may imagine. And secretly he
wheedles favors out of us; the older nurses are more susceptible. If he wants to
wind up sidelined, in the dugout, that is OK with me, but I don’t see why I should be expected
to sign the warrant for his release. I have other, more important, things to do, besides.
Getting that bit of lacquer repaired is just one of them, but you get my drift,
I fear, then too I’ve traditionally been the indulgent, mild-mannered one,
who thought nothing of taking an afternoon off to play golf if the weather was right
as it is so seldom in this inclement land. When I asked about the new monitors
someone brought in I wasn’t expecting a sermon on the necessity of staking out one’s
territory the very same day, but there it came, with a hurricane in its pocket for good measure.
And when no one was betting on horses, there were the nags to feed,
the grooms’ quarters to be kept in proper order, liveries to be pressed—it all came
gushing down on me like a bushel of affectionate children. It is lucky I am
old enough to keep my head, faced with the demands on my time. Even a computer
would get riled sometimes. Now I am more interested in “easy living,”
though more than ever feeling a need to keep up appearances, impress the neighbors
with the latest electronic trouvaille. Yet I never let down my defenses
for a moment. I am what some people would call “hard,” though
I’m really a pussycat underneath the austere façade. Speaking of cats, when was the last
time you spoke to one, calling it by its name? Out here on the prairie things are much too quiet
though we all know each other and share memories and stratagems
for coping with loneliness and disloyalty from time to time. In some ways
it’s a life, or something you’d have no difficulty recognizing as such, but I wonder,
how are they going to fit me in at the end? Will my birdcage be draped
with some expensive Liberty fabric to suggest eternal peace, just as I was getting used
to the lively round of tea-parties and exhibits
some are over-attached to, but when you think
about it, what’s wrong with a little pudding? Sprinkled with coconut, perhaps?
And then in the evening you get down to business, but you can’t think clearer then.
Here there is no mist to admonish one, no pretzel sticks either,
and one knows very well what one wants to be
and can imagine a fancier existence anywhere. This has to get broken off here
for the reason things do get broken off: it’s amusing. Love,
The Human Pool Table.
Sometimes to stimulate interest in other titles we
try to encourage a different angle such as the Near East with its walled, secret gardens,
jacaranda petals that fall all day into the basin. And the hours,
peeled off one after the other like onion skin, yet there is always more:
some curve up ahead. In fact
we never see all there is to see
which is good for business too: keeps the public returning
these days of swiftly eroding brand loyalty, so you can say: I beat him up,
my competitor, and now I’m ready to do business with him again: such
is the interesting climate we live in, all
shocks one minute, all smiles and surprises the next. I think I’ll have the chicken salad oriental. I’ll
wager you haven’t one client in seven who can identify this, though the whole world knows of it,
this quite tiny key to success I hold in my hand. When the codger
returns I’ll brusquely bring the question up again and you’ll see. It’s cooler
over here; the light forms a film at the windows
I first took for a curtain, a rash that won’t wear off. Wait, now
he’s ready to talk business. I have, sir, a handle on the truth
that could be of keen interest to you, a matter of considerable importance.
You can feel it when the lake is up and swans go flapping off
on various absurd errands, or when the phone rings and you hear his voice
before picking up the receiver, saying, It’s me, I’m glad I waited
till you were in a different frame of mind, for truly this makes all the difference; no one
calls the woman who walks silently away, but later in the night
there are twists of tears and it seems as if someone shares your nervousness
about the awkward pauses that might ensue and has arrived at a plan of drastic action:
whisking the tablecloth off the laden table without disturbing a spoon is only part of it.
Giving up habits like compulsive hand-washing is another. Because you have no idea how
imperious their demands are; nothing can get closer to you as long as they are in the car-port
even though they too have nothing to say
and cannot justify their existence.
Other pleasures are folding the pillow and gazing mournfully into the face of the electric clock
when everything springs apart quite naturally and scrawled forms of people
are seen pacing the square in different directions; sometimes
one will hold on to another’s head and then let go: it’s my Sonata
of Experience, and I wrote it for you. Here’s how it goes: the first theme is announced,
then fooled around with for a while and goes and sits over there. Soon the second
arrives, less appealing than the first or so it seems but after you get to know it you find
it deeper and somehow more human, like the plain face of an old lady who has seen much
but who has never been known to utter an opinion on anything that happens to her: quite
extraordinary, in fact. Then comes a hiatus in the manuscript:
the last bits of it keep seeming to move farther and farther away, like houses
on a beach one is leaving in a speeding motorboat: wait, though!
isn’t that them we’re approaching now? Of course—we had been going around in a circle
all the time, and now we have arrived at the place of resolution. The stakes are high
now, but you couldn’t tell it from the glum air of things: bored crows, seedlings.
And then, what passion
brought you to your knees? Suddenly your whole face is bathed in tears, though no one
saw you cry. This kind of makes me review my whole plan of action up to now; fishing around
for a handkerchief to hand someone does that to a person, I think, don’t you?
And it will mean staying up later which in turn will screw up
tomorrow’s well-laid plans, and then suddenly everything ends in a climax, or a cataract.
I think this is the way it was supposed to be, though I can’t be sure now, so much has happened;
it will look better on a cassette, which is where I wanted it anyway, so I guess
we can go home now, each to his own bed, for each of us has one: that’s what “calling it a night” means.
But I never meant to disturb anything, or harm a hair on your head: that would have been false
to our beginnings, and nothing could stand up to that, nothing good I mean.
As it builds, the power changes too, but in the
same direction it was carelessly aimed in long ago, before any of us got involved
with what we now consider our living, when it was free. And the strain grows, steadily,
though there are many scenes played for comic relief and the classic agendas are still
re-enacted when people get together. Not quite late-twentieth-century panic, but sobering in its
simple difference which can scarcely be demonstrated. All the people we knew and the songs
we sang are on our side, sinking imperceptibly
along with us into Old Home Week. Except it’s not. And we cannot see the bottom
of these issues; they have outgrown us; which made the eye in the church shine even brighter
when it finally opened. Meanwhile, over the scruffy skies of New York, a doubt hangs
like a jewel, a melancholy melon-color that could be the correct shade of mourning
in heaven, pitting all that we said against us. Why, it’s right there in the procès verbal,
only I don’t feel too good. I just want to be absorbed in countries you were never
allowed to develop a taste for, yet I have no reason to go anywhere,
to be at your side, every place seems as mortally insipid
as every other place, and I’ve got used to living, like a toothache; I can stand
what’s coming, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have to like it. Some mornings are quite pleasant:
a Florentine wonderment drips from the sky as putti with picnic baskets descend
to the enameled sward, and I don’t have to ask you how near you think that lighthouse is,
or the blond warehouse: you find me in them. Is it asking too much
to want to be loved, just a little, and then to be satisfied with that? Of course not,
but the police are everywhere. You can’t even order a drink without feeling one of them breathing
down your neck. And you apologize profusely, like the ridiculous twit you are.
Where is it written that men must go out in the afternoon without a hat?
In the real world things were going along about as well as could be expected, that is,
not quite satisfactorily. We were deceived in our reckoning,
but could still salvage some things like a decent emolument and self-respect. But in many ways
things were different now. Even the coastline had changed,
and the protective vacuum-packing around long-established major confrontations was no longer
mandatory. One sat at a kind of grillwork that used to be the kitchen table,
while outside hives exploded and buzzing insects darkened the air and we thought we knew
the year we graduated from high school, yet everything was suspended in an agitated trance.
Only, I knew where I wanted to go: to some mountains in the south covered with pine forests
and creeper. There, the silence causes you to will what you wanted to know without
exactly knowing if it was OK.
Here, curvaceous rocks brandish us; the squeals of “Put me down!”
are mere grace-notes in this battle of stupid titans. Strangely, a few amenities do survive,
enough to seem to give the lie to so much stinking chaos which, since it hasn’t overturned
everything, is therefore perhaps not what its pennant in the sky proclaims it to be:
walks by creeks, for instance. Yet by enabling all creatures to become something different,
not necessarily their opposite, the proposed bifurcating leads in time to impossible
extremities one could never apostrophize anticipating a benign outcome due to the dreamlike
imaginings at the center that produced them. Waves, like weather currents on the map,
drift and coagulate above us, like “the swan-winged horses of the skies,
with summer’s music in their manes,” absolving the map of all responsibility to present itself,
to be read as a guide, and offering in its stead only the inane fumes of incense
spiritual masturbation set alight, long ago, and this is the bread, the palaces of the present,
a time that cannot tend itself. Each year the summer dwindles noticeably, but the Reagan
administration insists we cannot go to heaven without drinking caustic soda on the floor
of Death Valley as long as others pay their rent and have somewhere to go without thinking,
behind the curtain of closing down all operations. It’s all right, I
like doing the housework naked and can see nothing wrong with it,
nor do I feel ashamed of it. I’ll be all right when the government goes away; its
police state may not recognize me, or, if it does, may just shrug. What can I want,
anyway? Besides cashing in my federal insurance policy, that is. But as usual life is a dream
of blackbirds slowly flying, of people who come to your door needing help or merely
wanting to attack you so they can go away and say contact was made and it’s
your day in the barrel.
Those of us who did manage to keep control over our personal affairs
before it was all over are obviously not going to testify anyway. What would we have said?
That we confronted the monster eyeball to eyeball and blinked first but only
after a decent interval had elapsed and were then excused from completing the examination
before defenestration became an issue? I thought I knew all about you and everything
everybody could do to me but this hiatus is sui generis and I know not how to read it
like braille and must forever remain behind in my solicitations, derelict in my duties,
until a child explains it all to me. And then I’ll weep
at mountainscapes, if it isn’t too late. But say,
where are you going, and why do you walk that way? Oh, I’ll be all right, provided
you shut up and don’t read too much into the dog’s picture. After all,
the mutt said he wanted it taken, and in the backyard, so how was I to know
there’d be hell to pay for even this seeming indulgence? And how did I get away
after fourteen years? I’m afraid that’s one you’ll have to save for the answer man, besides,
my time is up and nothing too terrible has happened, only clouds, wind, stone, sometimes
a distant engine, purring in the morning fog, before the others are up, but I can see it.
It unwinds shelteringly.
But there were dreams to sell, ill didst thou buy:
not the man walking, the woman sitting on the toilet, the tuba-player unscrewing the mouthpiece
of his instrument and blowing into it, not the azaleas blooming in tubs; but the three policemen and the man
scratching his groin, turning to say something to someone you couldn’t see; the women
who wandered up to you at a cookout, waiting for you to give them an affectionate
peck on the cheek; the marching band in Rio, and the one in New Orleans, who knew
the music very well, and played it as they walked; the African violets you called violettes
du Cap, white, pink and blue, doing nicely in a northern window: these, for your trouble,
you may have mastered and accomplished much else besides, not least turning yourself from a
slightly unruly child into a sophisticated and cultivated adult with a number of books
to his credit and many more projects in the works; as well as the unattractive dreamer,
stained with sleep, who grasps at these as they elude him, and grasps at still others
which elude him not, all the time swilling the taste of one in his mouth. Forgetful,
you hang up the receiver allowing others to get through: in your garden
there may have been much confusion but also attentive things growing, now cut adrift,
floundering for lack of direction from you. And we see it even in the tall houses
that fan out from here: each has its family
who are not much concerned with you, but to whom a truce was offered, and who missed out on it
because of misplaced consideration for you; and then in the dark forests that slant down
ravines quite close to the town, whose emptiness you could have peopled
merely by taking them up, in conversation; and the vast, greenish-gray seas punctuated
with scudding whitecaps that are a mystery and will always remain so, but you could have
addressed yourself to that, at least, included them in some memorial address
at the proper time, and so saved a speck of righteousness for your otherwise unproductive antics, summoned
dazed spirits “out of hell’s murky haze, heaven’s blue hall,” accommodated them even
as you sat beside me, reading or listening to music. Thus, it becomes time to relax
e’en so. Funny, isn’t it? The last thing on your list, and now
it is being approached even as afternoon makes room for evening, when all our
aspirations shall be quietened. And if no post arrives, no hens cluck,
then it shall be just as if it had happened. Why? Because it’s completed. Don’t you
see the light, seeing the light? Now you see it, now you don’t,
is about right, having given up all lust, all hope.
There is a time for trying on new clothes.
Yet the spirits are still angry that you woke them, if that’s what you did.
Dreaming a dream to prize—way to go, Thomas L. It matters not how puke-encrusted
the areaway, how charged with punishments the jazz-inflected scroll—this is your time, by golly,
so change your clothes and get it right. THIS IS AN ILLUSTRATION OF SOMETHING.
What people never really wanted to talk about—Stonehenge. Last year it was a phantom’s
breath upset you. Incorporate it—no second chance will be given
but what an old man said, quietly sitting at a coffee table, eyes shielded from the light.
