A Wave (2 page)

And now you’re lookin’ good all up and down the line

Except for one thing you still have in mind

It’s always there though often with a different face

It’s the worm inside the jumping bean that makes it race

Too often when you thought you’d be showered with confetti

What they flung at you was a plate of hot spaghetti

You’ve put your fancy clothes and flashy gems in hock

Yet you pause before your father’s door afraid to knock

Once you knew the truth it tried to set you free

And still you stood transfixed just like an apple tree

The truth it came and went and left you in the lurch

And now you think you see it from your lofty perch

The others come and go they’re just a dime a dozen

You react to them no more than to a distant cousin

Only a few people can touch your heart

And they too it seems have all gotten a false start

In twilight the city with its hills shines serene

And lets you make of it more than anything could mean

It’s the same city by day that seems so crude and calm

You’ll have to get to know it not just pump its arm

Even when that bugle sounded loud and clear

You knew it put an end to all your fear

To all that lying and the senseless mistakes

And now you’ve got it right and you know what it takes

Someday I’ll look you up when we’re both old and gray

And talk about those times we had so far away

How much it mattered then and how it matters still

Only things look so different when you’ve got a will

It’s true that out of this misunderstanding could end

And men would greet each other like they’d found a friend

With lots of friends around there’s no one to entice

And don’t you think seduction isn’t very nice?

It carries in this room against the painted wall

And hangs in folds of curtains when it’s not there at all

It’s woven in the flowers of the patterned spread

And lies and knows not what it thinks upon the bed

I wish to come to know you get to know you all

Let your belief in me and me in you stand tall

Just like a project of which no one tells—

Or do ya still think that I’m somebody else?

To have been loved once by someone—surely

There is a permanent good in that,

Even if we don’t know all the circumstances

Or it happened too long ago to make any difference.

Like almost too much sunlight or an abundance of sweet-sticky,

Caramelized things—who can tell you it’s wrong?

Which of the others on your team could darken the passive

Melody that runs on, that has been running since the world began?

Yet, to be strapped to one’s mindset, which seems

As enormous as a plain, to have to be told

That its horizons are comically confining,

And all the sorrow wells from there, like the slanting

Plume of a waterspout: doesn’t it supplant knowledge

Of the different forms of love, reducing them

To a white indifferent prism, a roofless love standing open

To the elements? And some see in this a paradigm of how it rises

Slowly to the indifferent heavens, all that pale glamour?

The refrain is desultory as birdsong; it seeps unrecognizably

Into the familiar structures that lead out from here

To the still familiar peripheries and less sure notions:

It already had its way. In time for evening relaxation.

There are times when music steals a march on us,

Is suddenly perplexingly nearer, flowing in my wrist;

Is the true and dirty words you whisper nightly

As the book closes like a collapsing sheet, a blur

Of all kinds of connotations ripped from the hour and tossed

Like jewels down a well; the answer, also,

To the question that was on my mind but that I’ve forgotten,

Except in the way certain things, certain nights, come together.

I want a bedroom near the sky, an astrologer’s cave

Where I can fashion eclogues that are chaste and grave.

Dreaming, I’ll hear the wind in the steeples close by

Sweep the solemn hymns away. I’ll spy

On factories from my attic window, resting my chin

In both hands, drinking in the songs, the din.

I’ll see chimneys and steeples, those masts of the city,

And the huge sky that makes us dream of eternity.

How sweet to watch the birth of the star in the still-blue

Sky, through mist; the lamp burning anew

At the window; rivers of coal climbing the firmament

And the moon pouring out its pale enchantment.

I’ll see the spring, the summer and the fall

And when winter casts its monotonous pall

Of snow, I’ll draw the blinds and curtains tight

And build my magic palaces in the night;

Then dream of gardens, of bluish horizons,

Of jets of water weeping in alabaster basins,

Of kisses, of birds singing at dawn and at nightfall,

Of all that’s most childish in our pastoral.

When the storm rattles my windowpane

I’ll stay hunched at my desk, it will roar in vain

For I’ll have plunged deep inside the thrill

Of conjuring spring with the force of my will,

Coaxing the sun from my heart, and building here

Out of my fiery thoughts, a tepid atmosphere.

What name do I have for you?

Certainly there is no name for you

In the sense that the stars have names

That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,

But you are too preoccupied

By the secret smudge in the back of your soul

To say much, and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.

It gets to be kind of lonely

But at the same time off-putting,

Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,

The one that looped among islands, and

You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.

And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.

There is light in there, and mystery and food.

Come see it. Come not for me but it.

But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

And still I automatically look to that place on the wall—

The timing is right, but off—

The approval soured—

That’s what comes of age but not aging,

The marbles all snapped into the side pockets,

The stance for today we know full well is

Yesterday’s delivery and ripe prediction—

The way not to hold in when circling,

As a delighted draughtsman sits down to his board.

Reasons, reasons for this:

The enthusiast mopping through his hair again

As he squats on the toilet and catches one eye in the mirror

(Guys it has come through all right

For once as delivered it’s all here and me with time on my hands

For once, with writing to spare, and how many

Times have there been words to waste,

That you had to spend or else take big losses

In the car after an early dinner the endless

Light streaking out of the windshield

A breakthrough

I guess but don’t just now take into account,

Don’t look at the time) and time

Comes looking for you, out of Pennsylvania and New Jersey

It doesn’t travel well

Colors his hair beige

Paints the straw walls gilds the mirror

The thing is that this is places in the world,

Freedom from rent,

Sundries, food, a dictionary to keep you company

Enviously

But is also the day we all got together

That the treaty was signed

And it all eased off into the big afternoon off the coast

Slid shoulders into the groundswell removed its boots

That we may live now with some

Curiosity and hope

Like pools that soon become part of the tide

I could say it’s the happiest period of my life.

It hasn’t got much competition! Yesterday

It seemed a flatness, hotness. As though it barely stood out

From the rocks of all the years before. Today it sheds

That old name, without assuming any new one. I think it’s still there.

It was as though I’d been left with the empty street

A few seconds after the bus pulled out. A dollop of afternoon wind.

Others tell you to take your attention off it

For awhile, refocus the picture. Plan to entertain,

To get out. (Do people really talk that way?)

We could pretend that all that isn’t there never existed anyway.

The great ideas? What good are they if they’re misplaced,

In the wrong order, if you can’t remember one

At the moment you’re so to speak mounting the guillotine

Like Sydney Carton, and can’t think of anything to say?

Or is this precisely material covered in a course

Called Background of the Great Ideas, and therefore it isn’t necessary

To say anything or even know anything? The breath of the moment

Is breathed, we fall and still feel better. The phone rings,

It’s a wrong number, and your heart is lighter,

Not having to be faced with the same boring choices again

Which doesn’t undermine a feeling for people in general and

Especially in particular: you,

In your deliberate distinctness, whom I love and gladly

Agree to walk blindly into the night with,

Your realness is real to me though I would never take any of it

Just to see how it grows. A knowledge that people live close by is,

I think, enough. And even if only first names are ever exchanged

The people who own them seem rock-true and marvelously self-sufficient.

Down in the street there are ice-cream parlors to go to

And the pavement is a nice, bluish slate-gray. People laugh a lot.

Here you can see the stars. Two lovers are singing

Separately, from the same rooftop:
“Leave your change behind,

Leave your clothes, and go. It is time now.

It was time before too, but now it is really time.

You will never have enjoyed storms so much

As on these hot sticky evenings that are more like August

Than September. Stay. A fake wind wills you to go

And out there on the stormy river witness buses bound for Connecticut,

And tree-business, and all that we think about when we stop thinking.

The weather is perfect, the season unclear. Weep for your going

But also expect to meet me in the near future, when I shall disclose

New further adventures, and that you shall continue to think of me.”

The wind dropped, and the lovers

Sang no more, communicating each to each in the tedium

Of self-expression, and the shore curled up and became liquid

And so the celebrated lament began. And how shall we, people

All unused to each other and to our own business, explain

It to the shore if it is given to us

To circulate there “in the near future” the why of our coming

And why we were never here before? The counterproposals

Of the guest-stranger impede our construing of ourselves as

Person-objects, the ones we knew would get here

Somehow, but we can remember as easily as the day we were born

The maggots we passed on the way and how the day bled

And the night too on hearing us, though we spoke only our childish

Ideas and never tried to impress anybody even when somewhat older.

A lake of pain, an absence

Leading to a flowering sea? Give it a quarter-turn

And watch the centuries begin to collapse

Through each other, like floors in a burning building,

Until we get to this afternoon:

Those delicious few words spread around like jam

Don’t matter, nor does the shadow.

We have lived blasphemously in history

And nothing has hurt us or can.

But beware of the monstrous tenderness, for out of it

The same blunt archives loom. Facts seize hold of the web

And leave it ash. Still, it is the personal,

Interior life that gives us something to think about.

The rest is only drama.

Meanwhile the combinations of every extendable circumstance

In our lives continue to blow against it like new leaves

At the edge of a forest a battle rages in and out of

For a whole day. It’s not the background, we’re the background,

On the outside looking out. The surprises history has

For us are nothing compared to the shock we get

From each other, though time still wears

The colors of meanness and melancholy, and the general life

Is still many sizes too big, yet

Has style, woven of things that never happened

With those that did, so that a mood survives

Where life and death never could. Make it sweet again!

It all wears out. I keep telling myself this, but

I can never believe me, though others do. Even things do.

And the things they do. Like the rasp of silk, or a certain

Glottal stop in your voice as you are telling me how you

Didn’t have time to brush your teeth but gargled with Listerine

Instead. Each is a base one might wish to touch once more

Before dying. There’s the moment years ago in the station in Venice,

The dark rainy afternoon in fourth grade, and the shoes then,