Flow Chart: A Poem, page 6
into a set-up storefront. Here, it all ends. Not so fast—we may have other information
to absolve wage-earners of paying dues
to your rotten club with all its intimate signs and shivers
of remorseless joy. Thought you had me. You’ll face the Luftwaffe—alone. Now there’s
a young woman outside says she has some important information about Mrs. Butterfield.
Young lady, is this a trick? What about the spiders that drilled all day, maneuvers
that took up so much time the judge never got around to depositing the check and the
bingo night went kerflooey, what with the sounds of drenching rain, leaks in the shutters,
pivotal oilcloth sentiments peeling, junked party ornaments, a woman who says he’s a size 11
and other gadabouts, listless ones, too revealing to report on? The chimney seemed about to collapse,
disguising the fact that a mountain of sludge was moving on
the hysterical town, all of whose gaily decorated ridgepoles were in danger, only now no one
stopped to think about it, the more massive southwestern face being turned toward one
and all, who, mesmerized by the silence of death, made sure their seams
were straight. It seemed but a few moments later though actually it was probably more like
years that the evangelist profited and whispered: all of his
town made sense, his relatives enjoyed positions of respect, and so
what trouble could there be? No, there is no knocking in the walls, nothing
like that. The operation is a success from the point of view of the furthest tangle
of violet cliff-face that sometimes flashes toward one, far across the valley, as though revealing
an ecstatic, deep-buried message. This is the price we have to pay,
it seems to say, and though all future debts will have been incurred gladly, one must
shoulder the burden of the interest payments NOW, otherwise there’ll be such a scare
in the curriculum as only the oldest ones will want to get out, the others
impeded or impeached by the books they have a right to read
in this our own time. Only I say to you, don’t look askance at the singers
just because they’re not responsible for the awful libretto, bearing in mind the tropes
each had to traverse to get here, and now their music delights the eye
and the mind as well as the ear, they have surely calibrated their longings to us;
there will be more surprises to come and the well-nursed fantasy expands, blooms
with the hair of their yearning, turning desire to a trick and love to its own advantage.
Yet come speak with me behind the screen of the waterfall’s Holophane, yet be not too
distant lest the muggers suspect us and the children bear away our burden, our only
secret. For nurseries have their news agencies as surely as garlic repels vampires
among others. Today a tree talked to us. What it said was don’t
plunge too deeply into the microbe-infested waters, there may be an alternate plan
which will allow us to save more lives and so become our own resurrection of sorts
on the simple chart. Pin it here, it says, this place is the most valuable and least
congested with shit and other rungs of the ladder of hysterical flight
from the pages of a magazine to the dime-store trophy that is your secret, haunted
by memories both reluctant and relaxed, as long as it wants to take you away. But beware
the instant in which it doesn’t: utopias can crumble
in that split-second, and you may wake up finding you have more than you ever wanted to own,
but by that time the dream is falling in on itself in slow motion or someone is dismantling it.
Here at Shadowlawn the question is always: O what awful thing are they doing now?
What make-believe? Idiotic proposals are advanced, then they blab it,
it won’t work. It doesn’t work. Not that anyone is what I would call conceited, or
outgoing either, I guess. There’s a certain image…But that went out in 1971. No one has
been back there since. A small road leads to it, called “the esplanade.” In small groups
they recur, since the fence was last painted, and are up to discussing it—who knows,
maybe an interesting idea will emerge, yet the handwriting on the wall seems to indicate otherwise:
return to your abstractions, it said, life
has no need of you just yet. I was sitting in my car
and suddenly I could see down the whole distance I had come, and the fog-shrouded destination
became clear again, as it has so many times over the past weeks. I thought I should
sharpen my appearance, for that way lies light, lies life, and yes I am
talking about new clothes as well. He wore a black suit—
that’s what image those threads project? Arts & leisure—80 bucks! As quiet as my
contentment is the voice at my shoulder: make it over. Perhaps not a total
from-the-ground-up rehab, perhaps only a few cosmetic touches
would have an earth-shaking impact, in this instance. It’s what you can do that matters
more than the whole picture, but the older we grow, the more unused to the idea of dying—
and I’m sorry I brought the subject up—we become. We are set in our ways. The breath
of autumn is vast again, we see vague but kind-hearted auguries
in it, then forget. It’s the way our silhouette gets projected on invisible nature
that seduces one to come down from the top of the leaf-pile. By then it’s dark,
of course. One’s sedan’s not on schedule, and the rear-view mirror is brittle, too
polished to shine, just visible enough to see the hairs
on one’s face by. Is it going to cripple
our image of our self-esteem? Where were we in the dark? Can you see it? Positive?
Not so nice now, as the deep cranberry-colored berries linger
on the trees though shriveled and cold—surely not till summer? But that’s
ages away and I have to finish my story, and character
is what I forgot to add. O but it will change
the negative nature of it, put in something we don’t need all right,
gigantic though it be. Still, and though the leaves are only threaded on the branches now,
someone has to look after it. I never had a servant. Always, I was accustomed
to doing my own cleaning, even as others were not. Heck, what creeps
are these? And I forgot the way back, forgot the back of the story,
perhaps for the better, since I was refreshed and could remember nothing,
nothing of what happened so long ago, on a certain evening
in July. We called across
shallow lagoons to each other; it seemed to help. Now to expunge
the revenge-motif, and get it all right for once. Life is an embroidery-frame, and what you put
into it gets left there, there are so many kinds of designs, literally millions of them
and the combinations of these—well. So perhaps what happened at Nuremberg in 1658 is
of some importance to me, but surely
the burden of proof doesn’t rest on you. It’s all I can do
for you baby now that I have to get going, but think
of the diminishing tiers of clouds clustered to the ever-more-distant horizon: do you want
our heritage? Or should you invest in something? And as one tendril
after another unclasps, what more is there to say? I can see you
in the ski-picture, as dazed and clean as in the old days behind the laundry,
and yet each word of what we said to each other matters, pulls, I don’t know, away
like a sheet from the substance, and what are you going to get after that?
What me, huh?
I wish I could hear birdsong in those old days,
you know, the kind there used to be. It seemed every thorn was alight.
Here there is nowhere near the expansive atmosphere
we imagine we miss. Only a sullen waiter
in a soiled white jacket who slams down the coffee cups in front of you and then walks away.
I was told about it on a Sunday. By Monday the dogs were back, fighting over some used
excrement, half in the water. Wow. What a dumb thing. Only I hear he used to go behind
the other building, and no one knew him. But he can’t say for sure. It’s like a chicken.
I’m sure Babs remembers the time of the arguments we used to go through.
That’s ancient history now, though. And, like history, it has a definite interest,
like Thebes. Curiously I was just talking
about it professor, to get it not quite wrong again, and you came up and asked me
how my theorem was and I blurted out the truth. It’s all okay. It’s not going to be divided,
not divided up among several participants anyway.
It was decided to proceed another way
while I was out of the room.
The startling freshness of it blinkered me
opposing me to many angles of lights
that fell before the door frame. A weathered quince
asked to be included. Round shrubs duly unwrapped
after winter and how do you get hold of these? Sipping a glass of brandy
my mother high above the city shooed
inset chimes to their places; how far
and how many balloons see the light of morning each time this year
and one must have a peg to hang it on, and something to walk upon,
yet it got no worse,
the time between the horse’s lazily but abruptly twitched tail to
the flies from off the stable:
fellows who hurry by you,
they are taking you, out of the catalog, to
obnoxious rendezvous. Meetings. Was it ever a catbird that called thus,
got us late after school, how much we were loving it, instant
in each other’s arms, and one thin one called down, that was a wave of air
to take the place away. And you and I, in our sun-kit,
we must have mastered many foreign dances,
been seen tall at the fair, for one or more of them to recognize us outside
the precinct, and to have got off scot-free for a wad
of cloth, roll of hair brushed from the comb, that’s
all we were meant to see. But in the dark you see more,
especially if you’re a child, and know instinctively what goes on there,
how matchbooks are bent open backwards, what warts they all
came to learn, in thin haze
out over San Francisco. I said you are my teacher Herr Schmidt,
I am the toad and pupil, you are after all all
you set out to be and it’s true isn’t it? It’s come true, look? And his puppy-eyes
appraised mine, I was won over instantly, from that day
never thought forward, looked backward, rain
or shine, from that anointed moment
I first kissed a king in you. What reflections!
We are lucky to have this
yet one doesn’t want to go, makes
excuses not to, toe twisting in door-jamb.
You flattered me I was higher up on the ladder
than any of the other pupils, and when I came to be eight, straight
as two twigs in the barn after love,
the waters receded and left.
Now’s the time. But my fatal shyness overcame me
once again. I hurried out, threw
myself down the street. You see I wasn’t going to be a good boy.
They just came. Took me. Now I angle pleasantly
toward the surface, thinking a good, fat dream: oh to be stuck
in there again. But the fire-engine
won’t let me, the banging hurtling toward a concussion
on rocks, a broken pedestal and here,
here we stand, the breeze is pleasant so let’s take
our time and sing one more song, eyes rolling,
and roam at will, timeless:
indeed I have no doubt it can be so.
Oh I don’t know, do you?
What is it makes the window-maker go off on his own, if not
this sacred season of lips,
gray moisture that squeezes down on us so hard. And we are never
on our own. Because someone decreed we were not to be. And in glacial
pockets of this repercussion were still not meant to be ourselves, until
some cruel stranger forces us to be, and leaves. Ah, but then, what new
problems, taxis, taking years to get an accounting, while daffodils, long dead, continue
to droop sideways. Meanwhile the same film strip
is projected endlessly across one’s forehead. One has seen it so many times!
Yet one dares to admit there are details, each time, that escaped one before,
like the title on the spine of the book laying on the table: The Taming of the Shrew. Once
mastered all this can still instruct far into the pale vacuum
one wants so much to come to know. It is strangely familiar, like a woodcutter
eating bread dans un bois solitaire: O my friends and sisters, haven’t you
ever taken the position that what knows, grows? And familiar noodles are served.
One wants, not to like, but to live in, the structure of things, and this is
the first great mistake, from which all the others, down to the tiniest
speck, bead of snot on a child’s nose, proceed in brisk military fashion, encouraging
to some on a chilly afternoon in March. What they have to say about you never recurs;
the fräulein, in the nadir of a pause, takes up some other subject. It’s jewels.
Or a foray into the unexplained outside. We can never have tears enough,
in fact, so why regret the sun’s pointing
these acerated surfaces? Once, a whale will be kind, and no other grief can exist after
that. You just have to choose, making sure all the choices are wrong, and the sky then
of your own privacy caves in on you, collapses, is comfortable as sleep. In that distant
forest nothing can live separate, and it’s a dream. A difficulty. For one.
For one exchanging one neutral memory for another.
And one fans out over the abyss. This is spring, the warning:
herring may never happen again, and if one gray suit bulges before your eyes be sure
to take it in again: others may be found wanting, the gold rush having resumed, and operas
are once again in demand. By the time I got to the movies it was incredibly
quiet in the dark, only birds peeped, the silent man turned, and the chrome angle
of one’s glasses inaccurately suggested the thirties to legions half-ignorant of their own
birthplaces, let alone metal screening. One has done so much for others; must it be?
No hint of lavender, of cirrus, of citrus? No but the lemmings trot back, you can see for yourself
how much potential was invested there, and what came of it.
It’s time to swing out on one’s own and, if perennial pathos isn’t your dish,
make a stew of something else—nimbus, or limbo. Anything so long as it’s not caused by neighbors
whose potential for wrecking your life is greater now than at any point in the future
provided you let them get away with it and are not angry to relinquish
the paws that go on escaping. Talk it over with your gardener, see
the bright shoots, forget that you will live long, that all thrives, apace and at the same rate.
Or bright facets could interrupt, reflectors
left out on lawns not live to see the dawning of new, earthen flowers
and yet be called to resume again, for dull
is not dull enough and we wish these stones to have duration even as fatigue palls
on the island in the sunset,
and flamingos fall over each other in the luxury of getting away.
I would assemble
landscapes from insect-tunneled wood and go live in a hole somewhere
lest pleasant anomalies impose bumptious charades promoting peace to others and to all comers,
seal it in a chest, rip it open, scatter the powder of life on the dead sawdust
to watch it blink, and then pound with my fists as hard as I can on the saga of
the sheepgirl and her friend the pelican merchant: how they became friends long after
ceasing to know each other, when both were blind and living in unfatally dingy
circumstances somewhere near Clapham Common: when autumn flickers, curves in
on the unfinished lunch, may it rest established early. To graduate
from sultry “other woman” parts to hell itself, which is infinitely more far-reaching
and beautiful than you might ever imagine, isn’t the first step,
but something more like the emerging at the top of the monument, that lets you see
in the vastest if not the least clotted vistas and places
no value-judgment on your being there, on the fact of your being there, though
it might if you weren’t alone, innocent
as a lintel. Back into the past, they sob, the others; it’s necessary in order to
flush out the present as it were, yet one can’t envy them the pained, coming-apart-in-high-velocity-winds feeling
or be surprised that one’s reassurances are ignored. That would belong to an earlier
grand idea of the importance of one’s actions, while now
almost any input is suspect, even the most cost-efficient, so that it seems other men’s
gardens get all the moisture and sunlight. We on the other hand have
only sterile notions of staying included to ruffle through, and one never tires
of this retrograde motion, even as one fears the consequences of standing still
and becoming like an old chromo on a wall.
And yet, dozens
of others experience it, no stigma is attached, only rolling over and over like a marble
