Flow Chart: A Poem, page 22
for as long as you wish to stay and abide by the rules. Still,
the doubling impulse that draws me toward it like some insane sexual attraction can
not be realized here. For that to take shape one would have to be able to conceive a linear
space independent of laws in which blunted gestures toward communication could advance or recede
without actually moving from the spot to which they are rooted; in other words, destiny could
happen all the time, vanish or repeat itself ad infinitum, and no one would be affected, one’s
real interests being points that define us, the line, which is dimensionless and without desire.
Thus, all things would happen simultaneously and on the same plane, and existence, freed
from the chain of causality, could work on important projects unconnected to itself and so
conceive a new architecture that would be nowhere, a hunger for nothing, desire desiring itself,
play organized according to theology with a cut-off date, before large façades. And these
urges, if that’s what they are, would exist already without propriety, without the need
or possibility of fulfillment, what the bass clarinet is to the orchestra, though of course we
would all get along very much as we do now, since human perfectibility would not
be sacrificed but on the contrary get promoted to the first desk, where it belongs,
and everybody would be free to draw his or her own conclusions and take them home like homework
provided the constellations remained inalterable, which is another question, and the
concept of beauty were abolished, which is another and possibly more important one. Anyway,
it looks like a nice day for all this, and I invite you to start revving up your VCR’s;
who knows what may happen? In the meantime, look sharp, and sharply at what is around you; there is
always the possibility something may come of something, and that is our
fondest wish though it says here I’m not supposed to say so, not now, not
in this place of wood and sunlight, this stable or retiring room or whatever you want to call it.
Excuse me while I fart. There, that’s better. I actually feel relieved.
Who knew at the time how froward they would be
later on, and in what circumstances we would be meeting again,
and how others with the names of heroes of boys’ adventure novels would be replacing us
on the perilously steep escalator of destiny that only lurches upward,
ever unsatisfied, forever finding fault? Some of this crowd
were about right. But it can never stop raining. There are places you drive through
and people who come out to see what’s going on, but in the end these are effects
merely. The truly vitiated look haggard and mean, whether they be socially
acceptable or no, and still the perquisite authority hasn’t been distilled;
it is everyone’s, for everyone to see. I will show you fear in a handful of specialists. Furthermore
the burliest male is but as a handmaiden to the suspicion of his own history:
he’s got it right, OK? And so have a few others, while the waiting’s been going on. But enough of
this self-congratulation in Aegean sunrises. Who are we, after all? And who needs profundity?
The moment I came down here I knew it was going to get better. There were autographs to sign,
and contracts, many of them in sextuplicate, and so I knew I was in for a good rest
after a long drive, and they’d leave me in peace, though not forget about me. Alas,
how sparsely furnished it all looks now. Chatterton’s garret? And how much harder it is to pinpoint
the single, modestly important thing, now that we know its freight would be
long in coming, and much harder to decipher than any
entity before now. But of course! That’s the solution! We know ourselves and everything
of the past. The one thing we don’t know is how silly it’s going to look in about five
minutes, like an eighteenth-century cherub atop a globe. You fuck me, I’ll
fix you. You give me that, and I’ll give you this. It’s all so important yet so excruciatingly
banal, isn’t it, darling? Then we’ll have come home and there will be an end to it,
and they that have found it already shall have it taken away from them, and we who
never knew what a good thing we were on to shall be reproached and rewarded
with the viceroy’s attention, though we must stand outside, I think. Fortify my ignorance
then, I shan’t be doing anything to anybody but must not for this
reason stand alone, uninspired by hope. Three seasons shall pass before anybody gets up the nerve to jump,
by which time a perverse
order shall reign and those who have inspired us shall take their places in it
like latecomers ushered to their seats at the opera once the overture is finished. You can’t
can it and sell it, that’s for sure, but it is a commodity, and someday all
will be wiser for it. And the paradoxically strong sense of personal loss that overwhelms you
when you hear about the death of someone you barely knew will answer for it too: you’ll
be exonerated and no one will ever make fun of you again, or turn aside
when your name is mentioned. Meanwhile you’ll be slightly happy when they
see how much your standing in this rigid matriarchal society has been enhanced
by the little you do, trying to scrape out a living and keeping your sense of humor,
which is, assuredly, not always easy. Anyway, someone will care.
They’d better. And the funk take over. The generations collapse like floors
in a burning building, and it will all somehow be…appropriate. Er, yes. We is rich
and handsome, as it were. HOWEVER,
I’ll face the world alone. Bad cats will want to eat me. Autos
will run over me. Dogs will chase me. Chickens, hawks, tigers, lions…Perhaps
I’d better ride up with you. You understand, of course.
I certainly don’t want to live next to a taxidermist. Miss Gale, I may need you later.
Then in the car he proposed to me. In the back seat. We drank sacrificial wine.
It was so good. And underneath I was saying,
all men are rogues, but I guess I like them,
if that’s what they are. Then we went out and a cloud like a magician’s cape
covered the sun. I’ll never forget that. And we walked on
awhile and I was trying to explain my embarrassing
tendency not to be able to distinguish things that happened to me years ago
from recent dreams. He was cool for a while after that. Men
never seem to know how much to erase, and afterward it’s bedlam, greed and self-interest take over
to a point where they actually cancel each other out, and one is left
hungry for one’s greed, at least it was something, and now, why no
one has anything left to be impatient about. It’s like damp weather.
And everybody said no wonder. It’s an hour to find you.
You, so belated in the past, your comments could never be
interpreted as part of history, or so you said, and that’s what we thought.
I’m just a copier. You are the history, the book. In time I think
it’ll get you straight and all peoples will see what we’re up to. In the past they chided you:
no more. I’m sending for your things, your books and things, we’ll go over
it again in the morning. First get a good night’s sleep. There are people who think nothing of
writing out a check for the full amount and handing it to you. I mean we’re talking
debts canceled, a link to the future, daybreak…Well I thought so too and
still I’ve had it with those who want to own you, as it were,
and give you nothing in return. Still, if it were possible to come to some agreement
or other, I think I’d be content, and they too. Here, it says in the bar
how much we’re going to spend, and then we’ll be equidistant from base camp and the
summit and have some voice in our lives and how much the future matters
to us, and to others as well. Boy, I’ll say so. Meanwhile, do you
think they’re going to kill us in cold blood? Naw, I don’t think so, besides
it’s too risky, and we’re on this side of the great river, they
on the other. I’d like to thank you for what you just said, but I could never
find the words.
Oh, that’s all right.
A soft rain,
a sudden shower. Why shouldn’t it?
And of all the ones I like
this is the most promising. Here in the dry
it is, anyway. It likes us, saying, “We’ll get you over
this one, then hand you back the tiller. The others
are all love and lovers, sometimes.” We won’t bite,
though, having been deceived so often in the past. The fact that the
happy ending’s only waiting your approval dooms it; you shall go off the deep end
once more and ultimately, and, not to put too fine a deconstruction on it, be redeemed only
in a distant future no one cares to look into. There’s so much of it going round
now that no one wants to look farther than his or her pocket mirror. It’s funny how certain natural
calamities bring people together at times, separate them at others. Rampant “me tooism”’s certainly
the order of the day, and such a tall order; one can view oneself framed, silhouetted, dead, and
still only think in terms of surfaces, boundaries; the very heavens
have lifted off for destinations unknown, and as we can sit
here, we do. It isn’t uncold. Whence comes Iceland’s beam? But suppose you know someone who’s
got a vested interest, an urge to show you how your hostility is what’s aborting
the final, suave wrap-up, with the guts to stand up and say so—then
aren’t we uniting, and isn’t something due
to come of it when the last tears stain the oak flooring, and the roasted swans, the pineapples,
are sent away untasted. How many of us does that make?
Two, surely, but there is something like flowers in the room, and that makes it
a magic number, confounding calculations, canceling reports,
bringing in other unknown elements that are a form of art, at least
as long as they stay that way. True, that puts us in one another’s way; we can no longer
aim at that destination on the wall, that hill outside the window, that seemed to promise
indefinite relief, but at least, being boxed in, can thwart the unknown at home, swear
fidelity and probably mean it this time. And meanwhile the tottering parade of ancient red
double-decker London buses winds past the window like a shriek
of victory but in reality contradicting itself: no carnival could be this atrocious and
unfrequented, at least it seems so to me. And one fits exactly the space of the mind
opposite one; there is no
sequel and no blank pages. As far as I’m concerned it’s a draw, and a decent one at that
if you keep your mind off it.
Voices of autumn in full, heavy summer;
algae spangling a pool. A lot remains to be done, doesn’t it?
I haven’t even begun to turn myself inside-out yet, and that
has to precede even an informal beginning. Try making up those childish itineraries we were once
so apt at, and you’ll see. Even my diary has become an omen to me,
and I know how I’ll have to go on writing it; it would be disappointed
otherwise. And those days we have to get through! Afternoons at the store,
and when bluish evening, the color of television
in a window high above the street, comes on, who has the strength to
judge it all according to a pre-existing set of criteria and then live with it,
let alone enjoy it and aim it at being a force for good, in one’s life and that of those
we share, for a time, this earth with, and later on to judge the after-effect of those fruits of it
which may no longer exist except as examples and increasingly dim ones at that? Why
it’s enough to make you want to leave home, strike out on your own
at midnight: “Why Girls Leave Home,” “The Trial of Mary Dugan”: maybe these were the things
they were saying then in the theater or writing about in novels so that
people would understand and thereby save themselves a lot of trouble
and floundering. In the unprincipled mire we walk about in today, nobody bothers even
to warn you about the perils of white slavery (to cite an extreme example), but then again
nobody is forcing you to save yourself either. That would be uncouth. Yet it would be nice
to think that years afterward one might have a good laugh about it,
and that assurance is precisely what we lack today. The fact is that no one even cares
what’s it all about. They see only shoe-leather
thinning into the future, and the inexorable dawn
shading into dusk, and know that’s what they’re made of, like it
or not. That’s what everybody’s made of,
and it comes as no shock to find out that the present is, after all, brittle
as glass in a burning conservatory. Listening to the dance music from outside
is all that matters. Really. Stockings are of secondary importance.
There was a strange, scorched taste to the soup,
I thought. Had you?
Otherwise who would believe us when we came
home to taste the soup, and cry a little, not wanting much?
Like little girls pretending to understand each other
when they talk like adults, we’d see that living
on this alternate rail was possible but not
eminently desirable, though definitely possible.
O in that winter what tore my thought was the shiny poem
I was about to read and recite, and write: a lacquered thing
with an even more exciting nimbus that spelt out possibilities
in all the tales we were going to be told, all the wrongs
inflicted on us and in turn by us on all those
around us, neither more nor less fortunate than we.
Trying to drum up business one begins explaining recklessly
one’s family and the dates in one’s house, the little
plum tree visible in the enclosure. The path one made
forcing oneself. And now these are out of date and exactly what is
required here. Let’s pass on them without analyzing them,
and others who sang here, knowing justice mysterious, and out of the way,
the way a moth sings in the house. A letting go,
as finger by finger unclasps. But we told it the way we wanted it to go.
So what about your story? And the fires that made you, better
than you wanted, still not worth dying for? I placed an ad,
it was wrong of me, and how should I go?
There—it’s over. And what a blessed relief. I have always loved the
sight of women sewing, and holly at the eaves, sometimes a look that
spears you through the darkness: you are the unaccountable one
but there are acres of us just now. And I thought I came off looking lewd.
No, but with the dock ahead, and that man in pinstripes
and bowler. We knew there’d be repercussions, but they were soft
as cotton candy when they came, and respectful, like dreams
put away, like money in the bank.
Time was when weather seemed a release. Today it’s screwed down
all the way, like a cap on a jar, yet it mirrors something
in each one of us, something we had been trying to find out
without much success as dogs came and went across
dull afternoons—the “dear, dead days” as someone called them.
It’s there, but with a new intensity. Everything is landscaped
for one’s greater peace of mind, the furnaces within banked
for greater authoritativeness. I would like to
come out on the plus side, I wants us to, and amid the
explosions of careless lovemaking I suppose that’s possible.
What’s the catch? No doubt it lies somewhere along the way
of overreacting to these minute meteorological changes,
a slight twist to the horizon’s lip or the ghost
of a frown that could have seen anything, such as the V of a bird
disappearing desultorily into a cloud. And meanwhile
there are rooms to be put back in order.
How does one explain that by never looking back one is always
seeing backward, into the scarves, the times that never were,
and that placing one foot before the other is only a sign
to the unconscious guides to follow, and that one’s destination
is the empty stockade, not this crowded landing? So it is when children
forget to grow and they are suddenly looking at being older,
not recognizing much? Or when people decide to migrate
from the village that has held them all these years like a spot
and uncomplainingly releases them to fall back
into the dreams that are the very fabric of our maturing,
now that we’ve got one, assuming it’s still there, on permanent loan?
The sound the water made
when I brushed my teeth seemed a good idea. Later the sources
became clear, as in a picture. There was nobody to go to that day.
Yet as long as the pins held, here was where I
would someday be—no kidding. And O I
held you through the long winter, held to you.
The numismatic triumphs, the snakes and ladders
