A Wave (10 page)

Into the river and finds it calm, not all that exciting but above all

Nothing to be afraid of, celebrates us

And what we have made of it.

Not something so very strange, but then seeming ordinary

Is strange too. Only the way we feel about the everything

And not the feeling itself is strange, strange to us, who live

And want to go on living under the same myopic stars we have known

Since childhood, when, looking out a window, we saw them

And immediately liked them.

And we can get back to that raw state

Of feeling, so long deemed

Inconsequential and therefore appropriate to our later musings

About religion, about migrations. What is restored

Becomes stronger than the loss as it is remembered;

Is a new, separate life of its own. A new color. Seriously blue.

Unquestioning. Acidly sweet. Must we then pick up the pieces

(But what are the pieces, if not separate puzzles themselves,

And meanwhile rain abrades the window?) and move to a central clearinghouse

Somewhere in Iowa, far from the distant bells and thunderclaps that

Make this environment pliant and distinct? Nobody

Asked me to stay here, at least if they did I forgot, but I can

Hear the dust at the pores of the wood, and know then

The possibility of something more liberated and gracious

Though not of this time. Failing

That there are the books we haven’t read, and just beyond them

A landscape stippled by frequent glacial interventions

That holds so well to its lunette one wants to keep it but we must

Go on despising it until that day when environment

Finally reads as a necessary but still vindictive opposition

To all caring, all explaining. Your finger traces a

Bleeding violet line down the columns of an old directory and to this spongy

State of talking things out a glass exclamation point opposes

A discrete claim: forewarned. So the voluminous past

Accepts, recycles our claims to present consideration

And the urban landscape is once again untroubled, smooth

As wax. As soon as the oddity is flushed out

It becomes monumental and anxious once again, looking

Down on our lives as from a baroque pinnacle and not the

Mosquito that was here twenty minutes ago.

The past absconds

With our fortunes just as we were rounding a major

Bend in the swollen river; not to see ahead

Becomes the only predicament when what

Might be sunken there is mentioned only

In crabbed allusions but will be back tomorrow.

It takes only a minute revision, and see—the thing

Is there in all its interested variegatedness,

With prospects and walks curling away, never to be followed,

A civilized concern, a never being alone.

Later on you’ll have doubts about how it

Actually was, and certain greetings will remain totally forgotten,

As water forgets a dam once it’s over it. But at this moment

A spirit of independence reigns. Quietude

To get out and do things in, and a rush back to the house

When evening turns up, and not a moment too soon.

Headhunters and jackals mingle with the viburnum

And hollyhocks outside, and it all adds up, pointedly,

To something one didn’t quite admit feeling uneasy about, but now

That it’s all out in the open, like a successful fire

Burning in a fireplace, really there’s no cause for alarm.

For even when hours and days go by in silence and the phone

Never rings, and widely spaced drops of water

Fall from the eaves, nothing is any longer a secret

And one can live alone rejoicing in this:

That the years of war are far off in the past or the future,

That memory contains everything. And you see slipping down a hallway

The past self you decided not to have anything to do with any more

And it is a more comfortable you, dishonest perhaps,

But alive. Wanting you to know what you’re losing.

And still the machinery of the great exegesis is only beginning

To groan and hum. There are moments like this one

That are almost silent, so that bird-watchers like us

Can come, and stay awhile, reflecting on shades of difference

In past performances, and move on refreshed.

But always and sometimes questioning the old modes

And the new wondering, the poem, growing up through the floor,

Standing tall in tubers, invading and smashing the ritual

Parlor, demands to be met on its own terms now,

Now that the preliminary negotiations are at last over.

You could be lying on the floor,

Or not have time for too much of any one thing,

Yet you know the song quickens in the bones

Of your neck, in your heel, and there is no point

In looking out over the yard where tractors run,

The empty space in the endless continuum

Of time has come up: the space that can be filled only by you.

And I had thought about the roadblocks, wondered

Why they were less frequent, wondered what progress the blizzard

Might have been making a certain distance back there,

But it was not enough to save me from choosing

Myself now, from being the place I have to get to

Before nightfall and under the shelter of trees

It is true but also without knowing out there in the dark,

Being alone at the center of a moan that did not issue from me

And is pulling me back toward old forms of address

I know I have already lived through, but they are strong again,

And big to fill the exotic spaces that arguing left.

So all the slightly more than young

Get moved up whether they like it or not, and only

The very old or the very young have any say in the matter,

Whether they are a train or a boat or just a road leading

Across a plain, from nowhere to nowhere. Later on

A record of the many voices of the middle-young will be issued

And found to be surprisingly original. That can’t concern us,

However, because now there isn’t space enough,

Not enough dimension to guarantee any kind of encounter

The stage-set it requires at the very least in order to burrow

Profitably through history and come out having something to say,

Even just one word with a slightly different intonation

To cause it to stand out from the backing of neatly invented

Chronicles of things men have said and done, like an English horn,

And then to sigh, to faint back

Into all our imaginings, dark

And viewless as they are,

Windows painted over with black paint but

We can sufficiently imagine, so much is admitted, what

Might be going on out there and even play some part

In the ordering of it all into lengths of final night,

Of dim play, of love that at last oozes through the seams

In the cement, suppurates, subsumes

All the other business of living and dying, the orderly

Ceremonials and handling of estates,

Checking what does not appear normal and drawing together

All the rest into the report that will finally be made

On a day when it does not appear that there is anything to receive it

Properly and we wonder whether we too are gone,

Buried in our love,

The love that defined us only for a little while,

And when it strolls back a few paces, to get another view,

Fears that it may have encountered eternity in the meantime.

And as the luckless describe love in glowing terms to strangers

In taverns, and the seemingly blessed may be unaware of having lost it,

So always there is a small remnant

Whose lives are congruent with their souls

And who ever afterward know no mystery in it,

The cimmerian moment in which all lives, all destinies

And incompleted destinies were swamped

As though by a giant wave that picks itself up

Out of a calm sea and retreats again into nowhere

Once its damage is done.

And what to say about those series

Of infrequent pellucid moments in which

One reads inscribed as though upon an empty page

The strangeness of all those contacts from the time they erupt

Soundlessly on the horizon and in a moment are upon you

Like a stranger on a snowmobile

But of which nothing can be known or written, only

That they passed this way? That to be bound over

To love in the dark, like Psyche, will somehow

Fill the sheaves of pages with a spidery, Spencerian hand

When all that will be necessary will be to go away

For a few minutes in order to return and find the work completed?

And so it is the only way

That love determines us, and we look the same

To others when they happen in afterwards, and cannot even know

We have changed, so massive in our difference

We are, like a new day that looks and cannot be the same

As those we used to reckon with, and so start

On our inane rounds again too dumb to profit from past

Mistakes—that’s how different we are!

But once we have finished being interrupted

There is no longer any population to tell us how the gods

Had wanted it—only—so the story runs—a vast forest

With almost nobody in it. Your wants

Are still halfheartedly administered to; sometimes there is milk

And sometimes not, but a ladder of hilarious applause

No longer leads up to it. Instead, there’s that cement barrier.

The forest ranger was nice, but warning us away,

Reminded you how other worlds can as easily take root

Like dandelions, in no time. There’s no one here now

But émigrés, with abandoned skills, so near

To the surface of the water you can touch them through it.

It’s they can tell you how love came and went

And how it keeps coming and going, ever disconcerting,

Even through the topiary trash of the present,

Its undoing, and smiles and seems to recognize no one.

It’s all attitudinizing, maybe, images reflected off

Some mirrored surface we cannot see, and they seem both solid

As a suburban home and graceful phantasms, at ease

In any testing climate you may contrive. But surely

The slightly sunken memory that remains, accretes, is proof

That there were doings, yet no one admits to having heard

Even of these. You pass through lawns on the way to it; it’s late

Even though the light is strongly yellow; and are heard

Commenting on how hard it is to get anybody to do anything

Any more; suddenly your name is remembered at the end—

It’s there, on the list, was there all along

But now is too defunct to cope

Which may be better in the long run: we’ll hear of

Other names, and know we don’t want them, but that love

Was somehow given out to one of them by mistake,

Not utterly lost. Boyish, slipping past high school

Into the early forties, disingenuous though, yet all

The buds of this early spring won’t open, which is surprising,

He says. It isn’t likely to get any warmer than it is now.

In today’s mainstream one mistakes him, sincerely, for someone else;

He passed on slowly and turns a corner. One can’t say

He was gone before you knew it, yet something of that, some tepid

Challenge that was never taken up and disappeared forever,

Surrounds him. Love is after all for the privileged.

But there is something else—call it a consistent eventfulness,

A common appreciation of the way things have of enfolding

When your attention is distracted for a moment, and then

It’s all bumps and history, as though this crusted surface

Had always been around, didn’t just happen to come into being

A short time ago. The scarred afternoon is unfortunate

Perhaps, but as they come to see each other dimly

And for the first time, an internal romance

Of the situation rises in these human beings like sap

And they can at last know the fun of not having it all but

Having instead a keen appreciation of the ways in which it

Underachieves as well as rages: an appetite,

For want of a better word. In darkness and silence.

In the wind, it is living. What were the interruptions that

Led us here and then shanghaied us if not sincere attempts to

Understand and so desire another person, it doesn’t

Matter which one, and then, self-abandoned, to build ourselves

So as to desire him fully, and at the last moment be

Taken aback at such luck: the feeling, invisible but alert.

On that clear February evening thirty-three years ago it seemed

A tapestry of living sounds shading to colors, and today

On this brick stump of an office building the colors are shaggy

Again, are at last what they once were, proving

They haven’t changed: you have done that,

Not they. All that remains is to get to know them,

Like a twin brother from whom you were separated at birth

For whom the factory sounds now resonate in an uplifting

Sunset of your own choosing and fabrication, a rousing

Anthem to perpendicularity and the perennial exponential

Narration to cause everything to happen by evoking it

Within the framework of shared boredom and shared responsibilities.

Cheerful ads told us it was all going to be OK,

That the superstitions would do it all for you. But today

It’s bigger and looser. People are not out to get you

And yet the walkways look dangerous. The smile slowly soured.