Flow Chart: A Poem, page 20
A blast of gramophone music veers into the shutters from time to time. In those days and
in that time you had to have a sister and brother and be known. Now anyone
may play, but the stakes, alas, are much higher. Few
can afford to lose. Yet you see brothers, and sons, caught in the lure of it,
swapping new clothes for food, in short doing all the things you were warned against,
like talking to strangers. I like that. I only wish more of ’em would listen to me, but they
too have their business to attend to, curious as it seems, even as your mouth waters
at the sight of one of them, who hurries on, unfeeling. It’s at night they come back,
once they know they’ve got you, or can have you, and then the caterwauling begins
unchecked. How would you like a plastron front to wear with this? Of course you wouldn’t,
but that don’t keep none of them from trying to play the Ripper, more shitted against
than shitting, so then they do rise up, and it can be one hell of a sight,
especially for those unaccustomed to it. I prefer to sit here and “rest” my eyes.
Usually my hunches are good, but last week comes one of ’em, and they always
asks you for something, begs a little jam or some string, and once you give it
you’re in their power. But you knew that. Then the fun begins in earnest, blows rain
down from all over, chopping-block sounds, you think mechanically of Mary Stuart and Lady
Jane Grey, holding on to your forelock, cap in hand, of course. I don’t know how long
the mist and smog have overlain this city, the dreaded heat, rising out of the sewers,
that can seem like the odor of fresh-baked buttered rolls. Then you must go to it again
and fill out a new application, for they have mislaid the first.
We nightingales
sing boldly from our hearts, so listen to us:
First, a saxophone quartet told me we have lived too much
in the minds of others, have too much unguaranteed capital on deposit there.
Why are you here? Why did you scream?
Only that one told me a new-laid owl’s egg is sovereign
against the gripes, and now I find you here too. I have found you out. You seem
convinced the killer is one of us. Why? Did a drowned virgin
tell you that, or Tim the ostler, or the one-eyed hay-baler
with a hook for a hand? Or was it something else—some letter
you might have received from some distant land
where all is peace under the umbrella-pines and a serpent guards
the golden apples still? Seal it didst thou,
to send it back across the water as a sigh
to those unknowable?
I’ll be perfectly frank with you. Though the sun’s crisply charred
entrails have slumped behind yonder peak, no one has stepped forward to claim
the amazing sum promised by the clerk. You know not one minnesinger has ever
reneged on a pledge. Until today, that is. When by the loose curtain’s distracted
fall I spy the contour of an ankle, and the ferrous glint
of a meat-cleaver. Go to the judge! Tell him what you have told me
and your daughter! Implore his mercy! Then if you dare
look round to see what impression your sudden fit of sincerity hath produced. I’ll wager you
no one leaves the room, and that the tool chest be empty! Go on! Try it! Last one in’s
a rotten apple, or a—a booby. That’s my last offer. Chain me to the iron bedstead
and electrocute me, so help me, that’s all you’re going to get out of me, harden my arteries
to obsidian as they will, let the mostly empty bottles
be drained till not one drop remaineth in them. Now that the killer is caught
you can return the map to Mr. Isbark.
A little loathing,
a cautious wind that pads softly
like a cat about thine loin
and argues persuasively for a cease-fire, in which one might read
much if one were wide awake and made aware, in whose bright fire
hell’s thistle gleams, a league or so away. Marry, save that alibi
for your autobiography. Serve me fresh drink, I’ll drink on’t.
They were getting closer to your name in the list; now,
nothing will remove that stain. So how’s about a walk around the old neighborhood?
Eleanor’s here too. You remember Eleanor. So, nice and easy,
until it becomes something like grub, or a slug, something shapeless and horrible
you can talk back to, even scream invective at—you’ve got the time. And meanwhile our balls and
asses got to shamble on. But the daddies were keen on it.
They all liked it. Yon dork in the petting zoo,
Who, what, is it?
Two nights ago when I was complaining about all the weather we’ve been having lately,
and about how no one can do anything about it—much as I’d like to—
I was still happy, but today it turns out the drought has been secretly installed for weeks:
we’re only beginning to feel the brunt of it. Of course, measures will be taken
but that’s scarcely the point. It won’t like you any better for it.
And what about mud? If we lose it, we lose everything.
Distinctions would no longer get muddied. There’d be nothing in life to wriggle out of,
no ooze to drop back into. We need water, heaven knows, but mud—it’s so all over the place,
like air, that the thought of its not being there is even scarier.
Like a home that must be abandoned quickly, whose carpets and wallpaper get that faintly
distressed look, earth would go on without us, leave us waiting in space
for a connection that never comes. Somehow we’d survive—we always do—but at what cost
of mud and cosmetics. Different forms of address
would have to be adopted. Manners would become pallid, and the plot of one’s life
like a thin membrane in which one can still recognize the shapes
that brought us here, and lure us on, but stronger too, to survive business,
and that would wreck our average partygoing.
I live at the bottom of the sea now.
But I can still sense a stranger
even when far off
and count the threads of partings still to be formalized.
And later when we stayed talking quietly apart
in the roofless outdoor room, she had discovered
my beloved: “Well! Improvvisatore! It would seem God’s wrath
has taken us both down a peg. I have my money. And you, I suppose, will wing it
as in the past of windy Marches and stifling Augusts we have known
together, nor regretted them once past, but say,
if not some thread, a token then, a coupon
for pats and fondlings? Was this thy gratitude for pats and fondlings,
to die like any other mortal ass?
And why, O dearest, could’st not keep thy legs,
that sacred pair, sacred to sacred me?” Why, then, risk it?
Why go after it? Anyhow, I left it in the crypt.
And all that time was much fussing, to-ing and fro-ing, and above all waiting
to see the result on the street next day. As it happened, it was a lady
in yellow, with nice legs, who turned to me and said: “Haven’t you anything better to do?”
I wanted to cry back at her: “Yes! And these are those things! Let’s
discuss your legs!” But I knew she couldn’t imagine herself
filling more than the allotted space, one for her and one for herself,
so I said nothing, and she resumed her walking. You
understand it, though, don’t you? I mean how objects, including people, can be one thing
and mean something else, and therefore these two are subtly disconnected? I don’t see how
a bunch of attributes can go walking around with a coatrack labeled “person” loosely tied
to it with apron strings. That blows my mind. I see that you want to mean it, though.
Yes, I love it, but that doesn’t mean…
A girl named Christine asked me why I have so much trouble at the office.
It’s just that I don’t enjoy taking orders from my inferiors, and besides,
there are so many other, nicer things to be doing! Sleeping while the navigator
is poised, adrift, and sucking each other’s dicks is only one.
Travel is another. Dinard! Was ever such a place? And when you are tired
but not yet ready to return home, you can be that person again, the one who dragged you
here. And we made love on a car-seat
in the moonlight, except there wasn’t much of it. And I was the only one!
These adventures had passed through my head while I was alone
and I thought I was having them. But you need an audience
for them to reach the third dimension. Spooks in the manor
won’t do, no pre-school-age children. That night in the car, though…
Then we clambered down some rocks. There was a girl there who spoke of finance, of how
it’s going to be the next most important thing. I said nothing, but wondered if I could
take my stories with me when that happens, maybe read them to others
who would appreciate them in the new financial age that offers better reception
to things of the future, like mine. False dewdrops starred her eyelashes,
and I realized we were no better off in this age than in any other, except
perhaps the Ice Age. How if we are always going to be doing things for each other
why then of course we’ll miss the point, since what happens, happens off in a trailer
and we really know no more of each other than ever, and that is what
ought to be our tree, our piece of happening.
My standing, in the French sense of the word. How everybody accepts me
and knows they are going to see a nice sight. Forget it. None of it matters
except what I am as I am to others. Trees floating around. Hard-ons
and what to do about them. But it is arranged so that you cannot begin to play.
Knowing the rules doesn’t help, in fact it’s better if you don’t. You have to
be in on it already. And if you aren’t you can die very quickly, or spend the decades
shattered. Out of touch even with yourself.
How can I tell them that…or that La Fille mal gardée is my favorite piece of music?
I’m sorry. Look guys. In the interests of not disturbing my fragile ecological balance
I can tell you a story about something. The expression will be just right, for it will be adjusted
to the demands of the form, and the form itself shall be timeless though
hitherto unsuspected. It will take us down to about now,
though a few beautiful archaisms will be allowed to flutter in it—“complaint,”
for one. You will be amazed at how touched you will be because of it, yet
not tempted to find fault with the author for doing so superlative a job that it leaves
his willing but breathless readers on the sidelines, like people waiting for hours
beside a village street to see the cross-country bicycle riders come zipping through
in their yellow or silver liveries, and it’s all over so fast you’re not sure
you even saw it, and go home and eat a dish of plain vanilla ice cream. Noises that bit me,
would-be fanciers skulking around, after an autograph or a piece of your hair, no doubt.
And indeed there’s no point in worrying about the author’s tender feelings as he streaks along
and sees no shame in it, nor any point in your concern for his injured vanity, not that you don’t
already love him enough, more than any writer deserves. He won’t thank you for it.
But you won’t mind that either, since his literature will have performed its duty
by setting you gently down in a new place and then speeding off before
you have a chance to thank it. We’ve got to find a new name for him. “Writer” seems
totally inadequate; yet it is writing, you read it before you knew it. And besides,
if it weren’t, it wouldn’t have done the unexpected and by doing so proved that it was quite
the thing to do, and if it happened all right for you, but wasn’t the way you
thought it was going to be, why still
that is called fulfilling part of the bargain. And by doing so
he has erased your eternal debt to him. You are free. You can go now.
But the last word is always the author’s so you might want to dwell a bit
more on the perfections of form adjusted to content, and vice versa too, by Jove! The gate
to the corral is open, and he’s in there now, running around and around it
in a paroxysm of arrival that holds the attention of every last member of that little audience.
We’re interested in the language, that you call breath,
if breath is what we are to become, and we think it is, the southpaw said. Throwing her
a bone sometimes, sometimes expressing, sometimes expressing something like mild concern, the way
has been so hollowed out by travelers it has become cavernous. It leads to death.
We know that, yet for a limited time only we wish to pluck the sunflower,
transport it from where it stood, proud, erect, under a bungalow-blue sky, grasping at the sun,
and bring it inside, as all others sink into the common mold. The day
had begun inauspiciously, yet improved as it went along, until at bed-
time it was seen that we had prospered, I and thee.
Our early frustrated attempts at communicating were in any event long since dead.
Yet I had prayed for some civility from the air before setting out, as indeed my ancestors had done
and it hadn’t hurt them any. And I purposely refrained from consulting me,
the culte du moi being a dead thing, a shambles. That’s what led to me.
Early in the morning, rushing to see what has changed during the night, one stops to catch one’s breath.
The older the presence, we now see, the more it has turned into thee
with a candle at thy side. Were I to proceed as my ancestors had done
we all might be looking around now for a place to escape from death,
for he has grown older and wiser. But if it please God to let me live until my name-day
I shall place bangles at the forehead of her who becomes my poetry, showing her
teeth as she smiles, like sun-stabs through raindrops. Drawing with a finger in my bed,
she explains how it was all necessary, how it was good I didn’t break down on my way
to the showers, and afterwards when many were dead
who were thought to be living, the sun
came out for just a little while, and patted the sunflower
on its grizzled head. It likes me the way I am, thought the sunflower.
Therefore we all ought to concentrate on being more “me,”
for just as nobody could get along without the sun, the sun
would tumble from the heavens if we were to look up, still self-absorbed, and not see death.
It doesn’t matter which day of the week you decide to set out on your journey. The day
will be there. And once you are off and running, it will be there still. The breath
you decide to catch comes at the far end of that day’s slope, when her
vision is not so clear anymore. You say goodbye to her anyway, for the way
gleams up ahead. You don’t need the day to see it by. And though millions are already dead
what matters is that they didn’t break up the fight before I was able to get to thee,
to warn thee what would be done
to thee if more than one were found occupying the same bed.
Which is how we came to spend the night in the famous bed
that James VI of Scotland had once slept in. On its head the imperial sunflower
was inscribed, amid a shower of shooting stars. I say “imperial,” though by day
he was a king like any other, only a little more decent perhaps. And next morning the sun
came slashing through the crimson drapes, and I was like to have died. Although my death
would have encouraged a few, it did not happen then, or now, and still that me
as I like to call him saunters on, caring little for the others, the past a dead
letter as far as he’s concerned. So that I wrote to her
asking if she cared anything about the way
he was going about it, and did she know what others had done
to stop him in similar circumstances. Her reply, brought to me late at night, when no breath
of wind stirred in the treetops outside, caught me unawares. “If to thee
he offers neither apology nor protest, then for him it is a good thing. For thee,
on the contrary, it augurs ill. If I were thee I’d stay in bed
from dawn to evening, waiting, at least until the sun
disappears from our heavens and goes to hector those cringing in the house of the dead.
There can be no luck in harvest-time, no tipping of the scales, while yet he draws breath.”
I thanked her emissary and tiptoed out without telling him what I thought of her.
How extraordinary that as soon as one settles on a plan of action, whether it be day
or darkest midnight, someone will always try to discourage you, citing death
as a possible side-effect. Yet I could not, would not, dismiss my beloved boy. No way
would I proceed along the sea with no one to bounce my ideas off of but me.
And so we two rode together. It was almost late afternoon by the time we reached “The Sunflower,”
as the gigantic, decaying apartment complex was named. A noted architect had done
it right once, with open spaces, communal nurseries, walkways. Yet when he had done,
