Flow Chart: A Poem, page 4
and later amends to both of us for having done so, for I am
short of the mark despite my bluster and my swaggering,
have no real home and no one to inhabit it except you
whom I am in danger of losing permanently as a bluefish slips off
the deck of a ship, as a tuna flounders, but say, you know all that.
What kind of a chump do you think I am, anyway? I would like your
attention, not just your eyes and face. I would like to tell you
how much I love you. I’m a sap for trying, but down deep
in the bowels of the ship we hear something, don’t you agree, that
tells us where we went off course and what we must do to
get back on it only now it’s too late, all the
spars have erupted like apple blossoms, hitting the reef: I would
like to go on for a while anyway, but wonder under the circumstances whether
it wouldn’t be like setting out on a long journey in rain so heavy
it takes your breath away. Even one step is out of the question,
I think, now. I no longer have the energy to breathe
on the windowpane so that the frost will transform it into garlands
of chiseled steel that draw one out
like a rapt interlocutrix. No it’s
heavy out here today; the wind serves only to remind one of other possible
beginnings and an end, if one were likely to pass this way again.
I see.
I’ll try another ticket. Meanwhile thanks for the harmonium: its
inoffensive chords swept me right off my feet near the railroad
and—nice—are returning to bloom tomorrow and each day after that.
I thought nobody needed a confessor any more, but I was wrong I guess,
so, old stump, I’m off until tomorrow or some day early next week, I mean
how much more can I say, giving myself away, without negating
the positive meaning of what I wanted to say and which has now subtly changed
back to an elementary precept or something else one doesn’t much want to hear:
how we flowered, and lost, and rose up thin again with our thoughts
to distract us but not too much and so approached the shambling
roadbed and placed one sole in front of another, slowly but not tentatively,
and then the lean-to, the buttercups and the ring of blue mountains hove
into view as though to say but that’s what I asked you last time
and now you will be forced to give a different answer
even though the wind has dropped. I thought I saw someone over there.
No, it’s just the wind egging the trees on
into battle with dusk, and I can
still see how it’s still you there, only with such a difference I almost
didn’t have time to trust my space. But we know now and have had it true
to be us, for the asking, for the begging, for the just one more time.
In winter it was generally a slow blizzard of piano rags, while in summer
or some such season gentian shadows on the tapioca fields looked themselves
good enough to eat, and always in a locker downstairs was this pocket
mirror with the thumbprint on it, a source of shame, but how
can I deny my true origin and nature even if it’s going to get me into a lot of
trouble later? At any rate, no notice was taken of anything and
maids pushed their prams and policemen stopped cars and it was getting to be spring
or it wasn’t, but the bare trees looked oddly barbed, and perhaps that
was something, and it seemed to be starting to rain. I sit here
wringing my hands but what good does it do
if I am the ghost this time despite
the reassuring activity that surrounds me? And if I am to be cast off, then
where? There has to be a space, even a negative one, a slot
for me, or does there? But if all space is contained within me, then
there is no place for me to go, I am not even here, and now, and can join
no choir or club, indeed I am the sawdust of what’s around but nobody can
even authorize that either. My Collected Letters will I somehow
feel vindicate me but even there the onion skin cannot be split and I’ll go on
being a postscript written in invisible ink until some day several centuries from now
when they open a time capsule and enthusiastic fresh air will rush out to inform
the world and one can rise from one’s nap in time for bed. The great apartment
fronts will put their heads together and sunset will seem an enormous conflagration,
but vindicate one at what price? Where are the children now who wanted
to hear that story? Why, the youngest of them passed away years ago
on the west coast surprised that anyone should remember and the slow
torrent of the glacier got piped in efficiently to fill the slightest hairline
fissure. Its job is done. We all live in the past now. And so the children
must still hang on somewhere, though no one is quite sure where or how many
or what paths there are to be taken in darkness. Only the fools, the severed heads, know.
So my old mother became a niche in time, and she, too, preferred not to get out of it:
as long as it was going to be, it wasn’t this bad, says the antique adage. And these
three or four others came of it. No one asked them in but they came in anyway,
prepared to play. And somehow a chapter was written about this. It all
boils down to keeping quiet and having a good time. As long as you don’t abuse
the orange trees standing in their pots so civil, well all will be yours next time too
and let’s hear it for those who never won anything, whose time came and went
like the tide leaving curious bones behind, and they were never cheated on and never
lied, without telling anyone the truth. And behind these, interlopers
and more interlopers, a vast frame of them, too facile to be derided.
And bananas stand around stiffly, at attention. Is this
the gray way I once knew? And if so, where are the standard bearers? Why
have our values been lost? Who is going to pay for any of this?
Pottsville is too small for a man of your caliber. Full many a flower
is born to blush unseen, and waste its fragrance on the arctic air
outside the Shady Octopus saloon, and then some.
If all is going to be reorganized, the charming irregularities of the days
ahead may as well go too, the song of plaintive songs choke off the ingress
while alleviating the drip, as the old man, hypotenuse-like, touches
an extremity that soon burns out of control, surrounds
the town on the down and all rush together, those who
hated each other suddenly finding good reason for the slobbering embrace.
Whether it’s more fun to feel in one’s own underpants
or strike out on the highroad to professional success, all pavilions a-flutter,
all portholes glinting, before the thing sinks in the mouth of the river, memory
has been transformed into corpses and while we stand discussing the news the unmanageable
outline of something much bigger and more profuse is struggling to understand
itself (it will be years before it gets around to us and by then
what faces will we be? Who’s going to take care of the association headquarters
and, likelier still, revert with us to the narrow-gauge railroad track that steals
through yellow viburnum and buried cinders as though to point the finger of guilt
at the very beginning, the origin that is still a baby, learning to cry
as the lights are blown out and darkness like a swift film of oil closes down
to the brilliant crack at the horizon’s outcome?). No two employees know it.
I thought, and this much remained hidden from me:
the beloved canker that was always there, willing to give you all of “Queen Mab”
for a quarter, or turn on the rusty heel of one boot and be off, whistling
into such nether parts of the sky as are deemed scarcely fit for consumption
here on our poor earth; the Christmas lights, each blinking in the triumph of its
individual color toward the benefit of the whole; the stars and so on brought forth
each night as a sop to the unweeded intellect, though much
more remains to be read into them; polar bears, relaxing each on his floe in the arctic section
of the zoo or rolling off it into the green, greasy water; people with pencils
in their hands; a selection of erotic attractions for this week including stiletto heels
and rubber miniskirts; carloads of whatever thundered past in the night; juleps
on porches; and the most extravagant collection of whodunit compliments one
was ever gifted with, out of the nightfall of a dream, freeflowing as the meanders
of a great stream, and every bit as meaningless and ominous; and finally a choice
of purgations, each not necessarily appropriate to the instance; i.e., electrocution for the theft
of a needle; simple tears for aggravated manslaughter; a necklace of boar’s teeth
for blaspheming; added lines in the forehead for poaching, or preaching; a fountain
of mud on the front lawn of one who fondled his daughter’s best friend’s breasts;
and, for the discreetly ambitious, a monotonous horizon. As it all bore in
on me I started to awake, then thought better of it, then rushed to the phone to call
my broker, but it was too late: an osselet of meaning in the lizard’s tail
of eternity had clicked into place, become pure and unattainable, while I, goof
that I am, simultaneously realized just how sensational it was and how a fortune could
be made by being first with the revelation as the bank closed its doors and the market suspended operations.
True, they managed to save Hitler’s brain before it destroyed the world
with zuppa inglese. (Just look in the milk can and you’ll find out why.) But sometimes
walking away from a cure may not be the best way to get rid of it. Sure, you feel
fine. Today, and tomorrow as well. By next week you’re feeling better
than you have in a long time. And as the medication gradually dissipates, the feeling of
well-being takes over, an arbiter for generations to come. Only long after your death
will the life you so busily led be imputed to the cornerstone of rot that was
the secret, driving force in it: something everyone at the time found to be OK.
And as gravel sinks slowly with the aquifer’s depletion, those
not in the know will begin to stir in their sleep; it will gradually dawn on them
(in dreams of “cheese, toasted mostly”) how the ingenious theory was flawed; indeed
it was flaws that produced the dazzling quicksilver sheen that attracted
so many to it for so long. If that’s the case, why tarry on rutted goat-paths
from whence even the nearest foothills are shrouded, by mists, from view? The animals
are incredible; there’s even a dog named Bruce. One can retool the context, but slowly,
slowly, and of course there is no positive guarantee of a successful outcome; one
should think of it as a virtuoso spinning-song whose relentless roulades promise minor
disturbances among the cobwebbed rafters but perhaps nothing much to weave
one-armed nightshirts with for the wild swans, your brothers: only
try to forget the slow upward
path to perfectness and let its mirror-image
come to install its truly sensitive surface within you, during the night
of deft dreams and bad brushes with dolor. Fear of the dark causes it,
but by then to have been around and been of it will have carried over into lunch.
Do you think there’s some connection between this and that which happened before?
Perhaps not. Perhaps there is none, but the Patagonians will like it, all 499,500 of ’em.
Without further ado bring on the subject of these
negotiations. They all would like to collect it always, but since
that’s impossible, the Logos alone will have to suffice.
A pity, since no one has seen it recently. Others crowded the opening, hoping
to catch a glimpse, but the majority saw the occluded expatriate ragtag
representation and
decided to not even try. To this day no one knows the shape or heft of the thing,
and that’s the honest truth thrown out of court, exhibiting abrasions,
muffled. And the story of how we ran out of it.
So, “marrying little with less,” meliora probant, deteriora
sequuntur, they footdrag in oblivion, lingering over steaks to analyze
the latest inquiry.
My biological father thought enough of it to see that I was posited, demanding
names omitted from the roster, either from carelessness or intent to harm: we’ll
see that the thing gets done! And moreover, as I was asking her about her car
a quiet moment of fatigue slipped in leaving faces drained, moments of pleasure
unexamined. It was all because I told him he should change his shirt. He got mad
and went out and I didn’t see him again for thirty years, by which time both of us had aged
considerably but were still reasonably attractive, some might even say more so. I
reminded him of the shirt thing and he just laughed, said supermarkets sell them now
and besides you shouldn’t worry about a little dirt, it’s the spice of life, he said.
And we had set aside Siberia
for us and for a few beloved friends
but the bureaucracy and the logistics of it all defeated us, why we were tied
up in red tape for 2½ years and after that I just wanted out, no
place is worth that much worry. Besides it’s quite quiet and confusing at home, thank you
very much. Yet I was still hung up on his idea of me, I thought I was becoming that person
I didn’t even know or want to know very much about, and all of my
déjà-vus were ones that could have occurred to him. Still, life is reasonably absorbing
and there’s a lot of nice people around. Most days are well fed
and relaxing, and one can improve one’s mind a little
by going out to a film or having a chat with that special friend; and before
you know it it’s time to brush your teeth and go to bed. Why then, does that feeling
of emptiness keep turning up like a stranger you’ve seen dozens of times, out-of-focus
usually, standing toward the rear of the bus or fishing for coins at the newsstand? I’m
sure it’s all coincidence, but it
does have a way of rattling things, like a constant draft through the house, rustling
papers, riveting one’s eye on the clock. So what’s
to feel nervous about? We all know that we have to live for a certain time and then
unfortunately we must die, and after that no one is sure what happens. Accounts vary. But we
most of us feel we’ll be made comfortable for much of the time after that, and get credit
for the (admittedly) few nice things we did, and no one is going to make too much
of a fuss over those we’d rather draw the curtain over, and besides, we can’t see
much that was wrong in them, there are two sides to every question. Yet the facts
fascinate one, we become one of those persons who are only satisfied with thoroughly
reliable information—the truth, if there ever could be such a thing. Our journey
flows past us like ice chunks, maybe it is we that are stationary.
O so much God to police everything and still be left over to flatter one’s
harmless idiosyncrasies, the things that make us us, which is precisely
what is fading like paint on a sign, no matter how much one pretends it’s the same
as yesterday. And children talk to us—that, surely, must be a plus?
It’s the lunatic frequency this time. One man, taking his kids to the ball
game, reverted and was found playing cards at a friend’s house. In spring the tips of
the apple branches graze the trailer and it’s time for a new round
robin of progressive delicacies and returned thank-you letters. Out in the open
by the gym it was never a question of keep your pants on we’re all getting someplace, getting
to be someone. Those were perspectives too limned to shoot along and the people thanked
the baseball player who invented them. Inactivity is as a syrup to these people, some of them,
they bank on mistrust and in the end are amazed to find their land has been overgrazed
by herds of yak, each of the quadrupeds spaced almost equidistant from its
nearest neighbor, as far as the eye can see, to Labrador and beyond
into the topaz twilight of the Urals. Oh some will say
you can’t trust them let alone see them coming, let alone avoid a collision
with jarring implications for the future of humanity. Even its garish exterior
isn’t as uncompromising as one might
at first conclude, and then they have ashtrays and can see, no one makes extraordinary
demands on them as long as they go on living, and in April
that doesn’t seem an impossible feat. To those residing on the outskirts of some
city or suburb it gets to be even more of a tease—were they included in the survey, and,
if so, who are they? Shooting-gallery ducks waiting to be flattened, probably.
What if one crosses the sea
to descend at the pier where one’s sweetheart bade farewell to one several years ago and finds
her there to greet one, not all that changed? And if the parents of both parties pronounce it
