A Wave (5 page)

“So you think I have it, after all, or that I’ve found it? And you may be right. But I still say that what counts isn’t the particular set of circumstances, but how we adapt ourselves to them, and you all must know that by now, watching all these changes of scene and scenery till you feel it’s coming out of your ears.
I
know how it is; I’ve been everywhere, bearing messages to this one and that one, often steaming them open to see what’s inside and getting a good dose of
that
too, in addition to the peaks of Tartarus which I might be flying over at the time. It’s like sleeping too close to the edge of the bed—sometimes you’re in danger of falling out on one side and sometimes on the other, but rarely do you fall out, and in general your dreams proceed pretty much in the normal way dreams have of proceeding. I still think the old plain way is better: the ideas, speeches, arguments—whatever you want to call ’em—on one hand, and strongly written scenes and fully fleshed-out characters in flannel suits and leg-o’-mutton sleeves on the other. For the new moon is most beautiful viewed through burnt twigs and the last few decrepit leaves still clinging to them.”

Suddenly he glanced upward toward the scree and noticed a girl in a Victorian shirtwaist and a straw boater hat moving timidly down the path through the now wildly swirling mists. She was giggling silently with embarrassment and wonder, meanwhile clasping an old-fashioned kodak, which she had pointed at Mercury.

“It is Sabrina,” he said. “The wheel has at last come full circle, and it is the simplicity of an encounter that was meant all along. It happened ever so many years ago, when we were children, and could have happened so many times since! But it isn’t our fault that it has chosen this moment and this moment only, to repeat itself! For even if it does menace us directly,
it’s exciting all the same?”

And the avalanche fell and fell, and continues to fall even today.

There were little farmhouses there they

Looked like farmhouses yes without very much land

And trees, too many trees and a mistake

Built into each thing rather charmingly

But once you have seen a thing you have to move on

You have to lie in the grass

And play with your hair, scratch yourself

And then the space of this behavior, the air,

Has suddenly doubled

And you have grown to fill the extra place

Looking back at the small, fallen shelter that was

If a stream winds through all this

Alongside an abandoned knitting mill it will not

Say where it has been

The time unfolds like music trapped on the page

Unable to tell the story again

Raging

Where the winters grew white we went outside

To look at things again, putting on more clothes

This too an attempt to define

How we were being in all the surroundings

Big ones sleepy ones

Underwear and hats speak to us

As though we were cats

Dependent and independent

There were shouted instructions

Grayed in the morning

Keep track of us

It gets to be so exciting but so big too

And we have ways to define but not the terms

Yet

We know what is coming, that we are moving

Dangerously and gracefully

Toward the resolution of time

Blurred but alive with many separate meanings

Inside this conversation

How brave you are!
Sometimes.
And the injunction

Still stands, a plain white wall. More unfinished business.

But isn’t that just the nature of business, someone else said, breezily.

You can’t just pick up in the middle of it, and then leave off.

What if you do listen to it over and over, until

It becomes part of your soul, foreign matter that belongs there?

I ask you so many times to think about this rupture you are

Proceeding with, this revolution. And still time

Is draped around your shoulders. The weather report

Didn’t mention rain, and you are ass-deep in it, so?

Find other predictions. These are good for throwing away,

Yesterday’s newspapers, and those of the weeks before that spreading

Backward, away, almost in perfect order. It’s all there

To interrupt your speaking. There is no other use to the past

Until those times when, driving abruptly off a road

Into a field you sit still and conjure the hours.

It was for this we made the small talk, the lies,

And whispered them over to give each the smell of truth,

But now, like biting devalued currency, they become possessions

As the stars come out. And the ridiculous machine

Still trickles mottoes: “Plastered again …” “from our house

To your house …” We wore these for a while, and they became us.

Each day seems full of itself, and yet it is only

A few colored beans and some straw lying on a dirt floor

In a mote-filled shaft of light. There
was
room. Yes,

And you have created it by going away. Somewhere, someone

Listens for your laugh, swallows it like a drink of cool water,

Neither happy nor aghast. And the stance, that post standing there, is you.

To be a writer and write things

You must have experiences you can write about.

Just living won’t do. I have a theory

About masterpieces, how to make them

At very little expense, and they’re every

Bit as good as the others. You can

Use the same materials of the dream, at last.

It’s a kind of game with no losers and only one

Winner—you. First, pain gets

Flashed back through the story and the story

Comes out backwards and woof-side up. This is

No one’s story! At least they think that

For a time and the story is architecture

Now, and then history of a diversified kind.

A vacant episode during which the bricks got

Repointed and browner. And it ends up

Nobody’s, there is nothing for any of us

Except that fretful vacillating around the central

Question that brings us closer,

For better and worse, for all this time.

There is some charm in that old music

He’d fall for when the night wind released it—

Pleasant to be away; the stones fall back;

The hill of gloom in place over the roar

Of the kitchens but with remembrance like a bright patch

Of red in a bunch of laundry. But will the car

Ever pull away and spunky at all times he’d

Got the mission between the ladder

And the slices of bread someone had squirted astrology over

Until it took the form of a man, obtuse, out of pocket

Perhaps, probably standing there.

Can’t you see how we need these far-from-restful pauses?

And in the wind neighbors and such agree

It’s a hard thing, a milestone of sorts in some way?

So that the curtains contribute what charm they can

To the spectacle: an overflowing cesspool

Among the memoirs of court life, the candy, cigarettes,

And what else. What kind is it, is there more than one

Kind, are people forever going to be at the edge

Of things, even the nice ones, and when it happens

Will we all be alone together? The armor

Of these thoughts laughs at itself

Yet the distances are always growing

With everything between, in between.

Another blueprint: some foxing, woolly the foliage

On this dusky shrine

Under the glass dome on the spinet

To make it seem all these voices were once one.

Outside, the rout continues:

The clash erupting to the very door, but the

Door is secure. There is room here still

For thoughts like ferns being integrated

Into another system, something to scare the night away,

And when morning comes they have gone, only the dew

Remains. What more did we want anyway?

I’m sorry. We believe there is something more than attributes

And coefficients, that the giant erection

Is something more than the peg on which our lives hang,

Ours, yours … The core is not concern

But for afternoon busy with blinds open, restless with

Search-and-destroy missions, the approach to business is new

And ancient and mellow at the same time. For them to gain

Their end, the peace of fireworks on a vanishing sky,

We
have to bother. Please welcome the three insane interviewers

Each with his astrolabe and question.

And the days drain into the sea.

Old-fashioned shadows hanging down, that difficulty in love too soon

Some star or other went out, and you, thank you for your book and year

Something happened in the garage and I owe it for the blood traffic

Too low for nettles but it is exactly the way people think and feel

And I think there’s going to be even more but waist-high

Night occurs dimmer each time with the pieces of light smaller and squarer

You have original artworks hanging on the walls oh I said edit

You nearly undermined the brush I now place against the ball field arguing

That love was a round place and will still be there two years from now

And it is a dream sailing in a dark unprotected cove

Pirates imitate the ways of ordinary people myself for instance

Planted over and over that land has a bitter aftertaste

A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing

He is a monster like everyone else but what do you do if you’re a monster

Like him feeling him come from far away and then go down to his car

The wedding was enchanted everyone was glad to be in it

What trees, tools, why ponder socks on the premises

Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there

In a smaller tower shuttered and put away there

You lay aside your hair like a book that is too important to read now

Why did witches pursue the beast from the eight sides of the country

A pencil on glass—shattered! The water runs down the drain

In winter sometimes you see those things and also in summer

A child must go down it must stand and last

Too late the last express passes through the dust of gardens

A vest—there is so much to tell about even in the side rooms

Hesitantly, it built up and passed quickly without unlocking

There are some places kept from the others and are separate, they never exist

I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another

In Buffalo, Buffalo she was praying, the nights stick together like pages in an old book

The dreams descend like cranes on gilded, forgetful wings

What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?

Did you say, hearing the schooner overhead, we turned back to the weir?

In rags and crystals, sometimes with a shred of sense, an odd dignity

The boy must have known the particles fell through the house after him

All in all we were taking our time, the sea returned—no more pirates

I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare colors

Wanting to write something I could think only of my own ideas, though you surely have your separate, private being in some place I will never walk through. And then of the dismal space between us, filled though it may be with interesting objects, standing around like trees waiting to be discovered. It may be that this is the intellectual world. But if so, what poverty—even the discoveries yet to be made, and which shall surprise us, even us. It must be heightened somehow, but not to brutality. That is an invention and not a true instinct, and this must never be invented. Yet I am forced to invent, even if during the process I become a
songe-creux,
inaccurate dreamer, and these inventions are then to be claimed by the first person who happens on them. I’m hoping that homosexuals not yet born get to inquire about it, inspect the whole random collection as though it were a sphere. Isn’t the point of pain the possibility it brings of being able to get along without pain, for awhile, of manipulating our marionette-like limbs in the strait-jacket of air, and so to have written something? Unprofitable shifts of light and dark in the winter sky address this dilemma very directly. In time to come we shall perceive them as the rumpled linen or scenery through which we did walk once, for a short time, during some sort of vacation. It is a frostbitten, brittle world but once you are inside it you want to stay there always.

The year—not yet abandoned but a living husk, a lesson

… and can see the many hidden ways merit drains out of the established and internationally acclaimed containers, like a dry patch of sky. It is an affair of some enormity. The sky is swathed in a rich, gloomy and finally silly grandeur, like drapery in a portrait by Lebrun. This is to indicate that our actions in this tiny, tragic platform are going to be more than usually infinitesimal, given the superhuman scale on which we have to operate, and also that we should not take any comfort from the inanity of our situation; we are still valid creatures with a job to perform, and the arena facing us, though titanic, hasn’t rolled itself beyond the notion of dimension. It isn’t suitable, and it’s here. Shadows are thrown out at the base of things at right angles to the regular shadows that are already there, pointing in the correct direction. They are faint but not invisible, and it seems appropriate to start intoning the litany of dimensions there, at the base of a sapling spreading its lines in two directions. The temperature hardens, and things like the smell and the mood of water are suddenly more acute, and may help us. We will never know whether they did.