Flow Chart: A Poem (2 page)

how filled with complaints about time and the weather the air)

pointed out a way that diverged from the true way without negating it,

to arrive at the same result by different spells,

so that no one was wiser for knowing the way we had grown,

almost unconsciously, into a cube of grace that was to be

a permanent shelter. Let the book end there, some few

said, but that was of course impossible; the growth must persist

into areas darkened and dangerous, undermined

by the curse of that death breeze, until one is handed a skull

as a birthday present, and each closing paragraph of the novella is

underlined:
To be continued
, that there should be no peace

in the present, no sleep save in glimpses of the future

on the crystal ball’s thick, bubble-like surface. No you and me

unless we are together. Only then does he mumble confused words

of affection at us as the barberry bleeds close against the frost,

a scarlet innocence, confused miracle, to us, for what we have done

to others, and to ourselves. There is no parting. There is

only the fading, guaranteed by the label, which lasts forever.

This much the gods divulged before they became too restless,

too preoccupied with other cares to see into the sole fact the

present allows, along with much ribbon, much icing

and pretended music. But we can’t live with them in their day:

the air, though pure, is too dense. And afterwards when others

come up and ask, what was it like, one is too amazed to behave strangely;

the future is extinguished; the world’s colored paths all lead

to my mouth, and I drop, humbled, eating from the red-clay floor.

And only then does inspiration come: late, yet never too late.

It’s possible, it’s just possible, that the god’s claims

fly out windows as soon as they are opened, are erased from the accounting. If one is alone,

it matters less than to others embarked on a casual voyage

into the promiscuity of dreams. Yet I am always the first to know

how he feels. The inventory of the silent auction

doesn’t promise much: one chewed cactus, an air mattress,

a verbatim report. Sandals. The massive transcriptions with which

he took unforgivable liberties—hell, I’d sooner join the project

farther ahead, retaining all benefits, but one is doomed,

repeating oneself, never to repeat oneself, you know what I mean?

If in the interval false accounts have circulated, why,

one is at least unaware of it, and can live one’s allotted arc

of time in feasible unconsciousness, watching the linen dresses of girls,

with a wreath of smoke to come home to. There is nothing beside the familiar

doormat to get excited about, yet when one goes out in loose weather

the change is akin to choirs singing in a distance nebulous with fear

and love. Sometimes one’s own hopes are realized

and life becomes a description of every second of the time it took;

conversely, some are put off by the sound of legions milling about.

One cultivates certain smells, is afraid to leave the charmed circle

of the anxious room lest uncommitted atmosphere befall

and the oaks

are seen to be girdled with ivy.

Alack he said what stressful sounds

More of him another time but now you

in the ivory frame have stripped yourself one by one of your earliest

opinions, polluted in any case by bees, and stand

radiant in the circle of our lost, unhappy youth, oh my

friend that knew me before I knew you, and when you came to me

knew it was forever,
here
there would be no break, only I was

so ignorant I forgot what it was all about. You chided me

for forgetting and in an instant I remembered everything: the

schoolhouse, the tent meeting. And I came closer until the day

I wrote my name firmly on the ruled page: that was a

time to come, and all happy crying in memory placed the stone

in the magic box and covered it with wallpaper. It seemed our separate

lives could continue separately for themselves and shine like a single star.

I never knew such happiness. I never knew such happiness could exist.

Not that the dark world was removed or brightened, but

each thing in it was slightly enlarged, and in so seeming became its

true cameo self, a liquid thing, to be held in the hollow

of the hand like a bird. More formal times would come

of course but the abstract good sense would never drown in the elixir

of this private sorrow, that would always sing to itself

in good times and bad, an example to one’s consciousness,

an emblem of correct behavior, in darkness or under water.

How unshifting those secret times, and how stealthily

they grew! It was going to take forever just to get through

the first act, yet the scenery, a square of medieval houses, gardens

with huge blue and red flowers and solemn birds that dwarfed

the trees they sat on, need never have given way to the fumes and crevasses

of the high glen: the point is one was going to do to it

what mattered to us, and all would be correct as in a painting

that would never ache for a frame but dream on as nonchalantly as we did.

Who could have expected a dream like this to go away for there are some

that are the web on which our waking life is painstakingly elaborated:

there are real, bustling things there and the burgomaster of success

stalks back and forth, directing everything

with a small motion of a finger. But when it did come,

the denouement, we were off drinking in some restaurant,

too absorbed, too eternally, expectantly happy to be there or care.

That inspiration came later, in sleep while it rained,

urgently, so that lines of darkness interfered with the careful

arrangement of the dream’s disguise: no takers? Anyway,

sleep itself became this chasm of repeated words,

of shifting banks of words rising like steam

out of someplace into something. Forget the promises the stars made you: they were half-stoned, and besides

are twinned to no notion that can have an impact

on our way of thinking, as crabbed now

as at any time in the past. A forlorn park stood before us

but there was no way to want to enter it, since the guards

had abandoned their posts to slate-gray daylight

flowing into your heart as though it were a blotter, confounding

or negating the rare survival of wit into our century:

these, at any rate, are my children, she intoned,

of whom I divest myself so as to fit into the notch

of infinity as defined by a long arc of crows returning to the distant

coppice. All’s aglow. But we see by it that some mortal

material was included in the glorious compound, that next to

nothing can prevent its mudslide from sweeping over us

while it renders the pitted earth smooth and pristine and something

like one’s original idea of it, only so primitive

it can’t understand us. Meanwhile the coat I wear,

woven of consumer products, asks you to pause and inspect

the still-fertile ground of our once-valid compact

with the ordinary and the true. It wants out and

we shall get it even with decreased services and an increased

number of spot-checks, since all of it, ourselves included,

is in our own interests to speak up for and deny when the proper

moment arrives. Now, nothing further remains to be done except

to sleep and pray, saving the pieces for a slightly

later time when they shall be recognized as holy remnants of the burnished

mirror in which the Almighty once saw Himself, and wept,

realizing how all His prophecies had come true for His people

at last and no one was any wiser for it as they walked the wide

shadowless streets with no eyelids or memory when it came to

intersecting the itineraries of other, similarly blessed creatures

(blessed for having no name, no preconceived strategies

unless they lay underground, too unprofitable to dig up

until the requisite technologies had been developed some

decades down the road and nodding as though in acknowledgment of

an acquaintance one doesn’t remember yet is not sure of

having ever formally renounced either: was it on land or at sea

that that bird first came to one, many miles from the nearest anything?).

What we are to each other is both less urgent and more

perturbing, having no discernible root, no raison d’être, or else flowing

backward into an origin like the primordial soup it’s so easy to pin

anything on, like a carnation to one’s lapel. So it seems we must

stay in an uneasy relationship, not quite fitting

together, not precisely friends or lovers though certainly not enemies, if

the buoyancy of the spongy terrain on which we exist is to be experienced

as an ichor, not a commentary on all that is missing from the reflection

in the mirror.
Did I say that? Can this be me?
Otherwise the treaty will

seem premature, the peace unearned, and one might as well slink back

into the solitude of the kennel, for the blunder to be read as anything

but willful, self-indulgent. And meanwhile everything around us is already

prepared for this resolution; the temperature, the season are exactly right

for it all not to be awash with sentiments expelled from some impossibly

distant situation; some episode from your childhood nobody knows about and

even you can’t remember accurately. It is time for the long beds

then, and the extra hours to be spent in them, but surely somebody can

find something spontaneous to say before it all fizzles, before the incandescent

tongs are slaked in mud and the tender yellow shoots of the willow

dry up instead of maturing having concluded that the moment

is inappropriate, the heroes gone to their rest, and all the plain

folk of history foundered in the subjective reading of their lives

as expendable, the stuff of ordinary heresy, shards of common crockery

interesting only because unearthed long after the time had come for a

decision on what to do at the very moment they disappeared into timelessness,

one of innumerable such tramping exits that no one hears,

so long as they may be promptly and justly forgotten,

subtracted like the soul we never knew we had and replaced with something

young, and easier, climate of any day and of all the days, postmillenarian.

Just so, some argue, some still are

nurtured by their innocence, a wanton

formula a nursemaid gives them. They grow up to be slim,

and tall, but often it seems something is lacking,

some point of concentration around which a person can collect itself,

and be neither conscious nor uncaring, be neutral.

And when the pitcher

is emptied of milk, it is not refilled, but washed and put away on a shelf.

Conversations are still initiated,

haltingly, under the leaves, around an outdoor table,

but they insist on nothing and are remembered

only as disquieting examples of how life might be

in that other halting yet prosperous time

when games of strength were put away.

And each guest rises

abruptly from the table, a star at his or her shoulder.

For then, in smeared night, no blotch or defect can erase it,

the wonderful greeting you heard in the morning

and heard yourself reply to.

But at times such as

these late ones, a moaning in copper beeches is heard, of regret,

not for what happened, or even for what could conceivably have happened, but

for what never happened and which therefore exists, as dark

and transparent as a dream. A dream from nowhere. A dream

with no place to go, all dressed up with no place to go, that an axe

menaces, off and on, throughout eternity. Or ships, lands

which no one sees, islands scattered like pebbles

across the immense surface of the ocean; this is what it is

to believe and not see, to implore dreaming, then to arrive home

by cunning, stricken and exhausted, a framed picture of oneself. The ads

didn’t tell you this, they were too busy with their own professional sleight-of-hand

to notice those farther out in deep water (“
when such a destin’d wretch

as I, wash’d headlong from on board
”), decorating the maelstrom with

someone’s (I wish I knew whose) notion of what is right, or cute.

Soon the dark chairs and tables stand out sharply in front of strange

green-striped walls, gulls circle in the sky, smoke

from piles of old tires set alight at strategic points throughout the city

sifts through the crack where the pane doesn’t quite join the sill—

is this, I ask you, a mute entreaty on the part of some well-intentioned

but shy deity meant to take the temperature of the lives being squandered

by the few left here below? Ask, rather, why the clock slows down

a little more each day, necessitating double, triple and even quadruple tintinnabulations

in order for its fundamentally banal intentions to be elucidated

so that one may settle down to enjoying the usufruct of the sparse,

shattering seconds, the while looking forward to retiring at ninety

on a comfortable income without rueing the day one first took up the odd

gambit that has projected us into a lifetime of self-loathing and shallow interests.