Flow Chart: A Poem, page 7
that can never stop rolling and here we are, still doing it only advised of our interlocutor’s
growing lack of patience, and permanently eager for the end of the run,
dog bite dog, it doesn’t so much say it on the advertisement as
what do you think, where do you come from; more doses of advice
from shaggy-haired strangers.
And all lock themselves in at night,
desperately vamping where a half-turn to see who’s behind in that tree might
have been deemed more appropriate, if equally ineffective. What brio in your chat, how
do you keep going next time?
And I told him for half a dime I’d quit and screw
you too, only that’s not done, the very
pillars of our civilization would crumble and Osiris would again have to punish
the unwary who danced jigs in our shadow, we the keepers of the trust who have to
somehow find the missing key that at this moment is within the grasp of a leper
who plays with it, not knowing.
And flies still tax us with their lessons: when will we give up? In order to land on that shred
of inhospitable strand one is forced to jettison certain
much-beloved possessions, including, I’m afraid, that key. O if only one belonged to something,
life would be harder perhaps but we’d have the strength to go along with whatever they
wanted us to say and we’d have rivalry at the end, sure, but cunning as well in the abstract
clockface of accusations from the various points of the compass, and who knows, if one got
away, how much sicker the other would get? Perhaps not much. Perhaps if you had
a little compassion in your yard things would grow staler and the calm
of the original compact wouldn’t capsize it, leading to distant benefits and premises.
I told you his name was Max you were the one who thought otherwise and well
it’s just as well as the gunwale unkisses faster the tires nailed to the dock
of departure and all our plans and ammo were scuttled, at the threshold
of this adamantine resort where two
can lie but no more, reprisals splash into the night. It must surely have come
from over there, those dried grasses. More power to them, for what must never
seem to have taken place on an afternoon once. As we kindle interest in that old past, what
astonishing trills one hears, what blistering swamp flowers thrust open; furry
sea-creatures invade the royal compound and next week the clock will strike
exactly at twelve o’clock, you’ll be free of a long-tendered obligation.
Since then I’ve been sleeping better too, but your shoes aren’t getting fed properly, there are
spots on whatever one is called to drink, and curse it, no
water in the watering-trough. Yes but the horse said he didn’t want any, besides
his harness is torn and angry,
a proverb for the industrious. Oh we’ve known a long time how much her
trail was costing her and others and now it’s time for definitive common knowledge, only
nothing is so sure anymore it wants to be reminded. Maybe it never knew at all. Maybe
we deduced it out of guilt, and now it’s we on the run, my goodness how the unrolling
scenery veers past. Was it even we
who were meant to start on this race? Might it have been for the others, all for them,
and so one is let off lightly, or so it seems, with a reprimand
and a startling dream? I told someone at the start of this
I wouldn’t play faster than my nearest neighbor. Now look
what’s become of him. I wouldn’t want to end up at a finish line unwashed
and looking like that. I go. I come later. You all land at the bottom of a crowded funnel
and so whatever joke is cracked coincides with your defense. Not everyone was made to wear
what we choose to wear. The colors, rinsed, insistent, return; the pink is for you,
not just to wash and wish desperately into something else that in any case
was probably never meant to be understood, and it smiles, and salvages
what little it can from the eternal barren beginning of March. Just two;
the alibi would only cover two; it’s over; we are lost
in the habit, smiling in a foxglove tent; but the doves requested permission to weave over us
like psalms and sometimes the sun is good, but it just seems like it won’t go away
the way a song does, leaving a slightly hollowed path behind. We could follow,
but the brimming lake on the horizon is more likely to join us if we
don’t absolve ourselves, recklessly dreaming. In time all excuses merge in an arch
whose keystone overlooks heaven, and
we must be patient if we are to live that far, at our own expense, this time, without that.
Bet there was some falling off there; still, amid the hoo-ha concerning new appointments and
such there was no time to discern; new people there, android sleep rains down
on pinched neighbors like ingots of silver, and there’s no mess, only a poking among reeds.
The last recognizable mentor left; it was up to the remains of his flock to reconstitute,
but left to their own devices many fled the comparative safety of the coop for used-
car lots, car washes, drive-in banks, in order so to speak to get their heads together.
I was the only one of my squadron to count them as they left in single file,
but not being able to do much about it, or keep records, soon I too was lost—well, not exactly,
but tethered expectations always result when you go a little too far in one direction, not
enough in another, and betimes one spots the calendar on the office wall: think, it says.
Like a plangent river my life has unrolled this far, to a fraction of this place,
and I have commandeered motor launches, but it has all been in vain, this celebration: listen,
what do children think of you now? Suddenly everyone is younger, and many of them not all
that young, either, and who, do you suppose, loves you? It’s a variant of the shell game
again; not all its premises are suicidal, but where is the one who takes out the ashes,
leaves the key behind? Up through the frantic town he rages (“It works, it’s bent
but it works!”) like the wing of a plane but we always knew it was here, sure we did, Ma I’ll tell you later
in the meantime and lilac bushes are a kind of promise. Aren’t they? And wine,
and noisemakers, and all the little things we thought good at a hinge in space: they’re
not like that now, are they? And all the kids, and people who came over: now salted
in their time, and we try to break out of ours, I guess, and still the animals stampede toward
headquarters. I was depressed when I wrote that. Don’t read it. Still, if you must, take
note of certain exemptions in the
fourth paragraph where I was high: they said it shouldn’t enter, but I succeeded in decoding the big top
so that someday all children should live like this, have what was at last ours,
only I succeeded and a train roared by: that man, it seems to say. And then it is past,
after it is flagged down. A sore spot in my memory undoes what I have just written
as fast as I can write; weave, and it shall be unraveled; talk, and the listener response
will take your breath away, so it is decreed. And I shall be traveling on
a little farther to a favorite spot of mine, O you’d like it, but no one can go there. The mummy
said so. I have to keep in the shadows yet a little longer, until you will wisely see how I
fit under here and so must leave any day now.
The boskets were blue, I remember; only
a few ships in the distance now, and a tall flag beckons
me in another direction. Dammit, I’ll stick to this one, this is the one they meant
for me to take all along, and I don’t see why I should take that other one. My child,
you must do as you wish; to do otherwise would insult God’s rule, and you do
care for Him, don’t you? Only give no thought to the morrow—
it will presently arrive and take care of itself, you’ll see. Meanwhile, if a new hat
might seem appropriate, then why not? Oh father I was looking out the window
but this time doesn’t seem such a long one, mightn’t we return
to the old cabin, just for a glimpse of the driveway? But that,
as the parrot said, is another story. Sooner or later you go blind staring at platinum
and the reverberations that warned against it can themselves no longer be distinguished
in the thudding and fog, and if all comes to be eclipsed at some
date in the not-too-near future, then why does it say I’m a salesman with a tie trying to
interest you in this new product, that can go out of control? It’s the Cotswolds
for me, but no, he has the name tag in his pants and this string flying behind him
into what you were told would be a void, which is his study. Heaven help jerks, they need
it worse than we, yet always something funny acts as a short prelude to disaster, and then afterwards
everybody is relieved; it’s still a high school; there’s nothing no longer wrong with it
and the shade acts as a puddle
from which froglike eyes protrude, if it is indeed this occasion, and this is 901½ McKinstry
Place, and you are Judson L. Whittaker, oh take this wheelbarrow far from my sight and bury it
on yonder height, so impatient have my clones become, and I, in the light,
of this new development am all but induced to come along with you. The stones
forbid it though. Fire that does not burn? Tell it to the no longer prematurely
gray slab of expanse, file it in “explanations which leave much unexplained,” but leave me my
dance, the one underpraised porcelain object on the stand.
In the western districts greetings proliferate
and I’m already starting to look better. When was I not
a paramilitary brother in some sense? Who coined this nickname? For I see
far, in looking, out over a life, the strange, wrenching mess of it, yet which has
some undistressed surfaces and unsealed peaks, or bumps, along with much that was fey and
witless as it went by. Where are those files now? Is it possible they can have been deleted
in the very mouth of time? Grenades pop, rockets vomit their lucklessness into the sky,
and which of us wants to bear the responsibility of having looked
something up? which is why
the unplanted cabbages stand tearful out of the mist, there is no
reason to go on ploughing the garden once winter has begun, yet
what else is there to do, except sweep the floor
with automatic hand, pondering certain dun sins of omission, if twilight really is a jewel
as you turned out to be (never fear, the rain
won’t rob you of your distinctive personality though I saw it streaming
the other day, down your clothes, you paused and seemed not to know what to think, but I,
I in my compartment knew: damaged hair, tattered kneecaps, a pimple
or two, and as automatically as one uncloses a window
you filed your report, and the court was amazed, emptied in a moment before
the order of dismissal came. Out of respect I should say I didn’t see you very closely;
you were too far down for that, not coinciding with anyone’s notion of a “person” yet livelier
still for it; oh you showed ’em how to fit into the barrel of an ignored idiosyncrasy and
still have room left over for passages of devastating wit that nightly
bring the house down. And if sleep is narrower after that, it’s also more pointed,
slanted like the harrow’s tooth, to bring up what may be coming along
any second now) and it is, in feathers all over the floor, only now it’s the maid’s turn
and we may never see what stays groping in her eyes. The floor is lovely, though, passionate
and filled with bright ideas like a bride only what it says about us isn’t forthcoming.
Outside the river is magenta and some sunbeams got caught upside down in it, just their
(our) luck I guess. Meanwhile I have received your postcard. I wanted to tell you
how much I thought it shouldn’t change, but dairies (diaries?) got in the way and exchanged notes
at which time the judgment was all but unreadable, jointures charged with embalming fluid,
for it is written that whatever is not glue may be pressed into service as such, and
the trip gets merrier just before a sudden decision is reached concerning the child-pests
we thought we’d seen the last of.
And for one moment, when apple-dust hangs
in your hair you move that glider over an inch, to be
in shade. Dawn, an egg, comforts one only with the idea of its shape. Later we
are in the round and full of fears: did we confuse that shape
with something else, and if so was it congruent, or like a pair of trousers, wavering
in the breeze? And then when you come down to it nobody matters any more.
There is nothing like the old beach. The old tables.
Once, an avalanche of cuties threatened our meeting. Fred bypassed it.
Now the season, “a boundless and festive rejoicement,” is on track. I, too, voted for it.
But a subtle form of harassment overtakes, by undermining, each new claim as fast
as it is put in the docket. Case dismissed. Is it then true that it does not matter,
or that women give birth to children as easily as a fruit disgorges its seeds?
Salt in the cure-all dilutes both qualms and unheeded label
cautions, and when called upon, comes outside in a suit, prepared to play the reasonable
inquisitor, listen to shouts. Toward evening a stitch is dropped and the blindly desiring
run together like syrup and milk: the only ethos, cranes
severing horizon from water with the great sawing motion that always instills awe
around wreaths for buddies, and in time your tome will tell them too
about the never leaving off.
Surely that last tragedy will be enough
and the wind must drop, and it does; a single leaf falls circling,
alights on the water’s swiftly moving mirror as the chorus picks up on hope
in the black promise facing us. Blood oozing under every door, now tell us
if we can get this way again by remembering and so turn to glass citizens.
Let the cycle of greed begin again, the sheer poetry of it will win over all but a few
viewers and those servants who choose not to look into the path being proposed for all of us
to follow—we’ll tell them how—and it has just started to sprinkle
a few seconds ago, just before I arrived here in some confusion but now am
dressing the bare stone, as was long ago ordered,
and can complain, really, of nothing—of my head, square as a box,
receptacle for fools’ tools? But it was I who brought them here,
taught them to scratch out a rough living from the soil. Of birdsong or caterwauling
in the night? No, I was just living it. Now that it’s time for repairs I’m not sure I
had to be brought to the very edge of the indignant abyss, but no matter, if it doesn’t fly
off on its own, sloth will overtake it, sleep bend the branch to earth.
Yet always in fear of some complaint we adjust dials
to those who lie on their side stricken with the power of the floor, uninhibited;
uninhibited cross farms for gain or planted shapes.
But, “no habitation unless one linger.” You were afraid of setting out shoots.
But now that sugared April crosses blink, the shining squalls and yellow
plumes imaginably stuck in hair, and one returns to heaven, under what conditions
does one sort out the waterfall? For always, dark spirits and connivance
underlay the people-mover as it spiraled ever higher beyond
the counterpane of colored wooden cows, to the continental divide.
And here one would take some comfort in the waved gesture that told how far the sun had shriveled
since we began our climb, the hazards put away under our feet.
“The sun was still high in the heavens,” yet a narrow ruffle of flux edged the huge
saucer-like plain, and one began to think of other sets of conditions:
the old people in the house, a long day away; the carbons of pets and other mooted toys,
or motion at a stranger in a hat who thinks he knows you from somewhere, but it scarcely
matters since you are separating amiably now again, forever, it seems, and the clues we
all leave behind are fated not to be found this time,
or if they are it will resemble something a squirrel laid there, a good while ago; but since charm can never
be quite rinsed from these bones it befits us to go along with it, congratulate it
at last for having had something to say and not said it, as torrents frazzle a canyon
without contributing to its demise unless one chooses to consider inexorably
slow processes that score even the cosmic mind at rarest intervals, and superficially;
secure in the adding up of all things
into a block of hay from which no strand is permitted to extrude.
And while the fire-mind tries out its images on us one last time an unsettling tableau
of doom constructs itself from greenish chalk on the green blackboard, but not yet
for these eyes, while the brandy decanter is bent and yards of cretonne
smother the schoolyard and take their place among the popping trees, yet unendorsably, O nargileh.
