Flow Chart: A Poem, page 21
no one liked it. People refused to move in. It was cold and impersonal. To thee,
however, it seemed a paradise. The long, alienating corridors which the sun
sliced through at regular intervals were as confusing as a casbah; the dead
tennis-courts and watchtowers seemed a present sent by death
to distract you while you waited, always for her
touch. That said, there was plenty to do at night, while during the day-
long siesta one dreamed, and brooded not, and felt fairly good. No hog’s breath
stirred the rusting weeds in the little yard in front of the veranda. Like me
you too chose to put a better construction on these things than perhaps the case warranted; at any rate, bed
always solves everything, at least for the time being. I went out and plucked a sunflower
but it was empty, the birds had eaten all the seeds. Surely there’s a way
to avoid feeling lonesome and sorry for oneself, but up until today, no way
has opened before me, I’m both those things, though one would suffice. What’s done
is done, they say, yet I can’t help wondering whether, on a different day,
you might have turned around and walked back to where I was lying face down in bed
and told me all the love, all the respect you had for me, that was like a shining in you at me,
and we could have gone off to analyze our situation and add up the particulars. Your breath
was your own private property, of course, and you cared little for mine, but in the case of her
father being in the news and so many other officials who had turned out to be dead,
perhaps in a few years’ time we would have forgotten all that, to live, sunflower
and sun, in periods of rain and drought, as they do in Africa, and never fear the sun.
It is written, and played on the African thumb-piano, that those who to thee
go, and return, unremembering, are earmarked for a lonely, unpleasant death,
and those to whom thou goest never grumble, even at the prospect of death.
Therefore it is urgent that we all, pursuers and pursued, be moving in the common way,
for that is the only way to outwit death, none-too-clever though he may be. To thee,
I say, stand, as though on a ladder picking apricots; your back should be to the sun,
and all will pass. You’ll be satisfied, you’ll see. No need to shake the sunflower
husk for dried kernels. Indeed, all the grasses are long dead;
the reaching angles of the thorn-tree branches barely jerk erratically in the breath
of the savannah. If I thought for one instant that the day
of the week spelled out protection for me, or that my own misdeed would trickle off me
like water from a duck’s back, sure and I’d have done what any decent-minded preacher would have done:
I’d place bunches of fresh rue and meadowsweet in glass jars filled with water near the bed.
I’d point with my stick not at her sins but to the shy, closed flower of her womanhood, her
puckered glen of swansdown, and there would have been an end to it, unless her
parents had some say in the matter. We two have lasted almost until death,
and still nothing shields us from the aspirations of the sunflower;
even at night you can hear its ever-unquiet breath
that makes of life a station on some suburban railway.
Too bad you did what you did; I, meanwhile, was lying in bed
and caught the rumble of the vans of approaching day.
“This is my day, even though it belong as well to many who are dead.
I say it not in a spirit of possessiveness, only as a fact. Indeed, I pass it to thee
as generations of aspiring lovers and writers before me have done.
Look, this is what was done to me, written on me. Take it from me.”
She stood up and began to do a little dance, then as abruptly stopped, noting the sun
had passed the zenith, and was waiting to be relieved by a replacement-sun.
In all our lives I still continue to try to make headway, and though to her
what I do never makes much sense, I do it anyway, for thee.
Scratching around one is sure to uncover bits of the ancient way;
meanwhile I am reasonably well-fed, clothed and happy and spend nights in a bed
that seems beautiful to me. We used to laugh; with every breath
we’d take, some new funny thing would point a moral and adorn the day,
until at last the earth lay baking in the heat, and the sunflower
had the last laugh. “Be strong, you that are now past your prime! When you are dead
we’ll talk again and see how you understand this thing men call death,
that is in reality but a shadow of what God has done
to others, to the sun and to me.”
I awoke, yet I dreamed still. It seemed that all had been destined for me
all along, and as I had traveled in fear, and alone, always the sun
traveled with me. At night one sleeps in fear of wetting the bed
but he makes amends for that by pointing to our eventual death
as a teacher would point with a wand to the solution of a problem on a blackboard. His way
is as inscrutable as a fox’s. He brings to full bloom the cornflower and the sunflower,
then lets them slip into oblivion. Why? If I knew the answer, I wouldst tell thee,
but since thou sufferest much, I’ll vouchsafe that the way of the dead
is as a lightness to our dreaming, a sense of gaiety, of irresponsibility. She in her
longing realizes much, and would tell it to us, but the breath
is gone. Still, there’ll come a time and not too far off when all we have done
returns to charm us; we can go back, taste, repeat it any day.
So for the moment, although tomorrow is our day,
the sun shines through the meshes. You can have me
for anything I am, or want to be, and I’ll replace you with me, introduce you to the sun.
When summer calls, and people wish they only had a way,
and nights are too thick, and days have barely begun to be spoiled, I’ll riddle thee
about what we heard before we came here, how much is already done.
The moral of the story however is that the ubiquitous sunflower
knows the secret and cares. As a door on its hinges, so he in his bed
turns and turns, and in his turning unlocks the rusted padlock of death,
that flies apart and at once I am shriven. Take me in, teach me her
ways, but above all don’t leave me for dead:
I live, though I draw only a little breath.
The story that she told me simmers in me still, though she is dead
these several months, lying as on a bed. The things we used to do, I to thee,
thou to me, matter still, but the sun points the way inexorably to death,
though it be but his, not our way. Funny the way the sun
can bring you around to her. And as you pause for breath,
remember it, now that it is done, and seeds flare in the sunflower.
And left it that way, and then it kind of got shelved. It was a missing increment,
but as long as no one realized it was missing, calm prevailed. When they did, it was well
on the way to being a back number of itself. So while people cared, and some even wept,
it was realized that this was a classic, even a generic, case, and soon
they called attention to other aspects of the affair. No one ever explained how a trained
competitor of long standing would just bar itself from the case that way, there being no
evidence of self-interest, except insofar as loving a sun constitutes one. They shied away
from this one, and it was with no love
or self-pity in its heart that it betook itself then down the few stone steps leading
to the crypt. Here, at least, peace of a sort reigned, better than the indifferent bog
of schnorrers and nay-sayers it had kept company with for so long, a whole season, and the unlovely
atmosphere that had soured that season at its close was not recognized here: it was a currency
no one had any use for. If this left one like sailcloth, with the grained and toned
texture of one who has seen much, and still wishes to help, why all the better: one could go
farther and fare worse than entertain the possibility of such a journey, a voyage d’affaires
that will consistently be fun at any given moment. And so, though stalks heavy with the
mothy, mopheaded bloom may tremble next August, that is a thing of the past; the sun
purges its mind of all negative thoughts, granting
equanimity with the largesse of one who has too much, and
causes people to re-examine their attitudes. Maybe get some rain?
Are sherbets more glorious now than formerly? So this small, piecemeal uncurling exposes
vast sheets of preoccupations that the sun’s firmness can in many cases
cause to evaporate before their expiration date. A hound-shaped fragment of cloud rises
abruptly to the impressive center of the heavens only to fold itself
behind itself and fade into the distance even as it advances
bearing news of the channel coast. That is the archetypal kind of development
we’re interested in here at the window girls move past continually. Something
must be happening beyond the point where they turn
and become mere fragments. But to find out what that is,
we should be forced to relinquish this vantage point, so
deeply fought for, hardly won.
VI
Yes, others chorused, and
we’ll see to it that good use is made of it once they find you. Sea
so dark, O harvester, is it possible they could have brought you and me together
after so long, only to be separated in an instant? There must have been some purpose to this,
some idea hiding in the vacuity, the regular oblongs that comprise
your adverse assessment of my capabilities, like building blocks? But no,
it says, please sit down, you’re upsetting the others. With my cant,
my stammer, I suppose? Oh all right, I’ll go peaceably, but when you next see me,
rigged out in nickel armor to do battle with the henchpersons—it doesn’t matter
whose—you’ll descry in me a note of alarming mildness that I was saving
for just such an occasion. After all, I
can go on living here, and I don’t mind emptiness, but you
must fill your days with satisfying chatter. Then, just as the moon’s cloak
grazes the tits of some remote foothills, we’ll engage
each other constructively, your energy will flow into me and vice versa, and behold,
all will have been in vain, the warring, the contusions, the peacemongering:
we’ll have only ourselves, and only ourselves to blame.
Excellent is the peach, and stirring the tales
of battle, the calls to emulation. But excellent also is the spat-out pit, the ideal
of zero growth, when it comes to that. I think all men should argue, and then give in, for it
takes time to really make up one’s mind about certain matters. Days of mourning
in particular.
Then when somebody comes to ask you if you have freshened up, or would like to,
the whole freight train of associations is set in motion, lumbers gracelessly
along the clacking tracks, and it isn’t so much as if you had made up your mind, indeed
had done so quite some time ago, thank you, but as if it’s all off
and running: the race to the pageant, stiff competition among the ushers,
the stagehands. And now I want it to be the way
it was. I’m very particular about the trivia I associate with,
but for which I’d long ago have passed out from boredom. Which brings me to you: how do you
like it, and could you care if you saw a sample of it escaping from the mass
to go inform other, unenlightened souls of whom we spoke and thought were past
redemption and caring but who shine like the night breezes
in this direction, the dew on them is genuine, and are those
tears? Who said it that way? I’ll go another way. And she’ll have me
then, there’ll be no recourse, and we shall be happy after all, that’s all there is to it, you’ll
see.
It will never make any difference now, but
it remains to note how the change will affect your work. Empty slots in the zodiac
presage no good, nor the giant pebble at its center, but who knows, with patience
and a little hunger one makes one’s way. From here you can see the town,
bustling with various kinds of sleepy activity. Old trucks in the squares.
Above it a few celestial blips, comparing different depths in space, how it feels
against a sky of tinfoil, and seemingly just emptied, but it has always been thus.
Gradually, heads appear around the rim of the crater, blotted in the sunlight.
Just gentle, happy suds, and the time to be missing:
all the time in the world, he liked to say,
and I’d recriminate too if I had escaped but it’s not clear that I have. I stumbled
into an abandoned pigpen just now, and they are watching, which is all
anybody ever does. If I had books here I’d read.
Characterizing this rebuttal as “hogwash,” the senator strode swiftly through the marble rotunda,
commenting the day’s happenings without missing a beat. We have seen that the police
charge you more for delivering a baby when it’s clement outdoors. We have seen
signs of life in the land of waiting, but it’s too soon to rejoice; we’ll
let you know. Others may have been after him to unzip the course, which wouldn’t explain
dance orchestras in the rainy plaza or the unquestioning look of one child whose doll
came in second. In the hayloft the air was pure and fresh
and I could remember how once all of existence was as painfully expectant, careless of duration
as the mayflies trying to just get by, and how this curdled at evening with the smell of socks
and underarm deodorant so that that desperate patch seemed a nice place to be. Anyway it
had tested our mettle, whatever that is. Warnings boiled up seemingly out of the ground
but it was difficult to know what to make of them, or even to know who they were meant for.
Was it the last train? No pass to the way home from school? It was hard too to decode the missing,
who had apparently been seen as recently as this morning, turning away after being turned away.
Their locks are always a little more opalescent, their gussets straighter. Hygiene
is always a problem in the jungle, but you can stay here for decades and never appear
flushed, or flustered. Something about the thinness of the topsoil. They stand you
up and march you away and nobody looks afraid, just bored, and the majesty of the larkspur
performs annually. Refreshments are on a first-come, first-served basis. We have seen the cage
and the humdrum animals it contains. We have seen the house of the leader,
a little farther off. And the numbered apples on his trees.
It can never be anything but symbolic.
By that I mean it can never cause utterance in outsiders,
only second thoughts and self-doubt. For the discourse (and by discourse I mean lively discourse)
to take place on a meaningful level, that is, outside someone’s brain, a state of artificial
sleep would have to be induced, first of all. Then the skills for measuring reflexive
response would have to be sharply honed. Finally, the patient’s automatic, and therefore healthy,
impulse toward duplicity would have to be sorted out, strand by strand, in order that the
viable negative attempts to ward off phenomena like the empurpled dais of the approaching
twilit gloom might be measured, both as to sincerity and effectiveness. This technically
not unrealizable state of affairs would then bring us closer, but only a little, to a vantage
point from which the abiding, negative (but in the sense of “passive”) sheathing of the soul might
offer an overview of what might be mounted inside that, but the view our telescope afforded
would be that of an episode which happened several trillion light-years ago, a fleeting
one at that, a grace-note in some cosmic oratorio from which one would then try to extrapolate
a sense of all that comes after, and how it jibes with the average mind of today,
its feeding habits, outbursts, and so on. The attempt is certainly worth making, even
if it only corroborates the central dark thesis about the purely symbolic, anti-functional
nature of the universe as a setting for the countless doomed initiatives that flourish
in it to supply compost for the core-concept, a somewhat antiquated but still functioning
regulatory system that organizes us in some semblance of order, binding some of us loosely,
baling others of us together like straw, but always there is a connection, albeit sometimes an
extremely loose one like a tendril that brushes against one, a lock of hair that falls over
the eye or a buzzing insect that is never too far away. And though the armature
that supports all these varied and indeed desperate initiatives has begun
to exhibit signs of metal fatigue it is nonetheless sound and beautiful in its capacity to perform
functions and imagine new ones when appropriate, the best model anyone has thought up
so far, like a poplar that bends and bends and is always capable of straightening itself
after the wind has gone; in short it is my home, and you are welcome in it
