Flow Chart: A Poem, page 2
the still-fertile ground of our once-valid compact
with the ordinary and the true. It wants out and
we shall get it even with decreased services and an increased
number of spot-checks, since all of it, ourselves included,
is in our own interests to speak up for and deny when the proper
moment arrives. Now, nothing further remains to be done except
to sleep and pray, saving the pieces for a slightly
later time when they shall be recognized as holy remnants of the burnished
mirror in which the Almighty once saw Himself, and wept,
realizing how all His prophecies had come true for His people
at last and no one was any wiser for it as they walked the wide
shadowless streets with no eyelids or memory when it came to
intersecting the itineraries of other, similarly blessed creatures
(blessed for having no name, no preconceived strategies
unless they lay underground, too unprofitable to dig up
until the requisite technologies had been developed some
decades down the road and nodding as though in acknowledgment of
an acquaintance one doesn’t remember yet is not sure of
having ever formally renounced either: was it on land or at sea
that that bird first came to one, many miles from the nearest anything?).
What we are to each other is both less urgent and more
perturbing, having no discernible root, no raison d’être, or else flowing
backward into an origin like the primordial soup it’s so easy to pin
anything on, like a carnation to one’s lapel. So it seems we must
stay in an uneasy relationship, not quite fitting
together, not precisely friends or lovers though certainly not enemies, if
the buoyancy of the spongy terrain on which we exist is to be experienced
as an ichor, not a commentary on all that is missing from the reflection
in the mirror. Did I say that? Can this be me? Otherwise the treaty will
seem premature, the peace unearned, and one might as well slink back
into the solitude of the kennel, for the blunder to be read as anything
but willful, self-indulgent. And meanwhile everything around us is already
prepared for this resolution; the temperature, the season are exactly right
for it all not to be awash with sentiments expelled from some impossibly
distant situation; some episode from your childhood nobody knows about and
even you can’t remember accurately. It is time for the long beds
then, and the extra hours to be spent in them, but surely somebody can
find something spontaneous to say before it all fizzles, before the incandescent
tongs are slaked in mud and the tender yellow shoots of the willow
dry up instead of maturing having concluded that the moment
is inappropriate, the heroes gone to their rest, and all the plain
folk of history foundered in the subjective reading of their lives
as expendable, the stuff of ordinary heresy, shards of common crockery
interesting only because unearthed long after the time had come for a
decision on what to do at the very moment they disappeared into timelessness,
one of innumerable such tramping exits that no one hears,
so long as they may be promptly and justly forgotten,
subtracted like the soul we never knew we had and replaced with something
young, and easier, climate of any day and of all the days, postmillenarian.
Just so, some argue, some still are
nurtured by their innocence, a wanton
formula a nursemaid gives them. They grow up to be slim,
and tall, but often it seems something is lacking,
some point of concentration around which a person can collect itself,
and be neither conscious nor uncaring, be neutral.
And when the pitcher
is emptied of milk, it is not refilled, but washed and put away on a shelf.
Conversations are still initiated,
haltingly, under the leaves, around an outdoor table,
but they insist on nothing and are remembered
only as disquieting examples of how life might be
in that other halting yet prosperous time
when games of strength were put away.
And each guest rises
abruptly from the table, a star at his or her shoulder.
For then, in smeared night, no blotch or defect can erase it,
the wonderful greeting you heard in the morning
and heard yourself reply to.
But at times such as
these late ones, a moaning in copper beeches is heard, of regret,
not for what happened, or even for what could conceivably have happened, but
for what never happened and which therefore exists, as dark
and transparent as a dream. A dream from nowhere. A dream
with no place to go, all dressed up with no place to go, that an axe
menaces, off and on, throughout eternity. Or ships, lands
which no one sees, islands scattered like pebbles
across the immense surface of the ocean; this is what it is
to believe and not see, to implore dreaming, then to arrive home
by cunning, stricken and exhausted, a framed picture of oneself. The ads
didn’t tell you this, they were too busy with their own professional sleight-of-hand
to notice those farther out in deep water (“when such a destin’d wretch
as I, wash’d headlong from on board”), decorating the maelstrom with
someone’s (I wish I knew whose) notion of what is right, or cute.
Soon the dark chairs and tables stand out sharply in front of strange
green-striped walls, gulls circle in the sky, smoke
from piles of old tires set alight at strategic points throughout the city
sifts through the crack where the pane doesn’t quite join the sill—
is this, I ask you, a mute entreaty on the part of some well-intentioned
but shy deity meant to take the temperature of the lives being squandered
by the few left here below? Ask, rather, why the clock slows down
a little more each day, necessitating double, triple and even quadruple tintinnabulations
in order for its fundamentally banal intentions to be elucidated
so that one may settle down to enjoying the usufruct of the sparse,
shattering seconds, the while looking forward to retiring at ninety
on a comfortable income without rueing the day one first took up the odd
gambit that has projected us into a lifetime of self-loathing and shallow interests.
One lives thus, plucking a mean sort of living from the rubbish heaps
of history, unaware that the parallel daintiness of the lives of the rich,
like fish in an ocean whose bottom is dotted with the rusted engines and debris
of long-forgotten wrecks, unfolds; yes, “And I in greater depths than he,” I suppose,
yet it doesn’t help deliver one back either to the after all sane and helpful blank square
one is always setting out from, having in the meantime forgotten those other
precepts, sane and insane, that intrude as soon as one begins to think
about anything at all. It is always on the rim of some fleshpot briefly
mentioned in the Bible one is seen to squirm, a pinned worm, so that
one is pitted against others as against oneself: lonesome, hungry,
and a little bit thirsty until the day of doom universally misconstrued as a
time of relief and pillars of dust rising straight up out of the desert valleys
where one’s feet take one, and all that mythology of broken tracks,
jettisoned equipment, and the long-uninhabited wadi whose watering-trough
is merely mud now and a few puddles of camel-stale, materializes.
Latest reports show that the government
still controls everything but that the location of the blond captive
has been pinpointed thanks to urgent needling from the backwoods constituency
and the population in general is alive and well. But can we dwell
on any of it? Our privacy ends where the clouds’ begins, just here, just at
this bit of anonymity on the seashore. And we have the right
to be confirmed, just as animals or even plants do, provided we go away and leave
every essential piece of the architecture of us behind. Surely then, what we work for must be met
with approval sometime even though we haven’t the right to issue any
such thing. There are caves and caves, and almost none
of them has been explored yet. That doesn’t give us much
to go on, yet we insistently cry that someone else’s rondo is already
being played, and that over and over, so how come nobody does anything about it,
relaxes us in our shoes and tells us about bedtime? Surely, in my younger
days people acted differently about it. There was no barnstorming, just quiet
people going about their business and not worrying too much about
being rewarded at the end when it came down to that. No, we were wandering
away, too busy for such things, toward the altar,
or better yet into the nave whose fruit-and-flower
decoration led unostentatiously and facilely into the outdoors it
anticipated. No use just sitting around juicing the lemon
or the orange for that matter as long as one was intending to get up and play
again. And now that the time of reckoning nears, it wears a changed coat;
its color is brighter. No but there must be some structural difference as well
in the ordering of the colors and how they were laid on, only
no one can conceivably care enough about this to talk about it. Well I do
and can, but the un-nice fractions almost always assert themselves
above the din of this great city and I have trouble remembering
even my name until some passing girl kindles its fancy, what my name was
to me when I first began to think about other things. There is not postage for this boredom either really so that it keeps
returning, might be said never to have gone away at all,
except for the media with which it keeps getting compared. I say, the other
reaches really tickle you, when you have a chance. And all this time
I thought he was only farting around disinclined to have a serious opinion
on anything, and even more so to give it vent or utterance. And my sight clears
for the first time in a thousand years and it’s true, I can see up ahead
where no one waits and the long flags flap and droop in the dust of sunsets
and so may it be forever and ever till we get it right. Mine’s isn’t the option to
show you how to escape or comfort you unduly but with a little time
and a little patience we shall make this thing work. Even though you thought
everything you touched was doomed to fall apart or not start, time has
a few surprises up its sleeve and deserves to be spat on for not having more,
or would, if it didn’t. Yet it does. There are promises clad with the finest
silk you can imagine and silver ornaments hitherto undreamed of, if only you can
match them with something of equal loveliness and curiosity from your own
secret collection. And of course this does take time, but in the end one
senses it more richly bedizened than ever before, and in line for a promotion
out of the ranks of futility into the narrow furrows of bliss and total sublimity
crystallized in good humor that took over early on in the century. Of course,
no one is aware of this. Yet. But give
everybody time, even no-shows, and it will all flow backwards, that
caparisoned night, a trial for some, and otherwise it all gets out
into your childhood and the beach that was its launching pad before
hunger and fears took over even as delight fostered the notion that
there was going to be enough for everybody, for children to pause
and have a happy home no one talks about anymore. Best to rest, sleep and laugh
about it to someone who no longer matters and then you’ll find that you are indeed
in it and have been all along, only that the show was on a kind of treadmill moving
at the same leaden pace as your jokes and ambitions, which is why you
never knew about it and therefore consented to come along anyway
on this dangerous outing to the very sources of time. Don’t
excuse yourself, nothing could.
I’ve never really considered telling you. And now. He hated
doing it—he wasn’t sure why. And so just as the mirthless sequel was being
disinterred, a feeling of rage came over him, but also of relief, because
you couldn’t do it now. They’re lost somewhere out there between the trees
and muck, besides all cars have them now. And the colorful glasses and telephone
are there; he came for a fitting. It was proper, and in its time. But no
matter what you do someone will be malevolent about it, and try to stop you,
though there is no stopping them. He came for the fitting and tried
it on and it fit, just like that. What a laugh. Oh yes she laughed out
of the closet I’ll be there in a minute dear. You see
how fond of him she was, and he, well he just took it,
like most things, change, pretzels. And she thought he was
so good at it it kind of faked her when the last windshield whizzed
by and it was all over as though in a rush. And as meat is sung,
and lips only slowly parted for the alphabet of night chimes to come
clanging down like an immense ring of keys, so with the gale-
whipped morsel, notion of itself, that dogs us and all humans, and we never
quite get out from under it, there is always a thread of it attached to you
and when you remove that, another one as though magnetized takes its place.
Begorrah it was dumb to be in the pit with him, for then the sentence…
But who knows what all they may have tried before, what
avenues exhausted before it was time to mend and really be the interloper,
and for all its sparks it was never considered dangerous.
Everybody gets such ideas on occasion, but here was the little shot-glass
of night, all ready to drink, and you spread out in it
even before it radiates in you. It doesn’t matter whether or not
you like the striations, because, in the time it takes to consider them,
they will have merged, the rich man’s house become a kettle, the wreath
in the sink turned to something else, and still the potion holds,
prominent. And you want to see it and to have it be talked about this way,
not drool aimless compassion. So on that night we were almost boarded up,
packed off to a vacation—where? Moreover no men heard of it,
only teen-age girls and male adolescents with fruited complexions and scalps,
who were going to make it difficult for one should an occasion arise.
But a funny
thing happened, none of us were around to count, all incommensurate with our
duties as we should forever be, and not wanting much training. The dark
was like nectar that evening, rising in the mouth; you thought you had never heard
so pretty a sound. Then, of course, quietism was again broached
and that soon, and quite soon the pink of the salmon ignited the whey
of the plover’s egg and the black of old, scarred metal; then, how it
feels relaxes one like a warm, numbing bath, and her argument, and yours,
and all of theirs—why, why not just consider, or better yet, just
hold, hold on to them? For the speed of light is far away,
and you, sooner or later, must return
to a deteriorated situation, and, placing your hand in the fire, say
just what it means to you to be connected
and over, and kiss the burning edges of the unfolded, stiff
card, and be unable to avoid doing anything about it or acknowledging it
when we have passed, when all is past.
And why did
he, by what was he it? Why, we push our little tales around
and back and forth and so on
by which time it literally implodes, I mean by then he was settling in
and no one called his attention to it. In your repertory of groans is one
glottal one—you’ll feel the difference. And if it can’t liberate itself from us,
just turns to dust in the air floating with the kind of negative majesty one thought
one would not see again in one’s life. But I had the horn—we had a deal we agreed on, yet
no record of its existence is sketched, and I am all I am
in the meanwhile and 13,000 fucking miles away like a planter
on his porch. And so I am unaware of the flambeaux and, possibly, the stealth
that brought me here. And abandoned me—I—
I’m awfully sorry, big boy, but my plans concern George and his wife over by the other side
of the lake slipping into a nervous breakdown, and I, we, well as you know, we
sit here determined, not like the rind
of the melon but not liking to say anything about it into the miraculous dawn
that—gasp—gathers us into its stocking. A pervasive air about him of studious
lyricism avoided us, and he turned, ever so quickly, to the hen house, and off
in the open was seen running, and then, it’s so easy, was probably not recorded
except between the trees of a clearing. And who, what patron saint, will pick up
the pieces of the glittering lighthouse and restore us to them in a kind
