Flow Chart: A Poem (21 page)

pus comes out? Were we needed then?

Almost casually, gigantic cardboard cutouts

of mammoths and hydras appear in the wings, and one knows, not having done one’s homework,

that the spells will materialize as dots joined together, and the casual

whirlwind that vaporizes moods and intensity of expression was an astrologer’s error;

here, it sits on a doorstep, waiting for the “back in five minutes” tenant to materialize

with all the lawsuits and indecent percentages in its wake, but that’s no matter,

it’s a river and one must keep up with it.

Another time I was just sitting, on a rung.

Some kids were playing ball. I asked what it meant that we

never did anything, were content to let others do things and play,

as though it were for us. He said, sure thing. I said I’d had a nap,

what I wanted now more than anything was that someone would come and play with me;

I’d then decide whether to or not. She said, but this is all some kind of love ambush.

The boys don’t play with you, they have to play with themselves. You’re supposed to find some

kind of message in it, when the weather takes you away for a day

and delivers you back home, as though from a fishing trip, and no one can say

you are any different, or notice a different twinkle in the eye. But it is all changed

even though you and they would prefer not to admit it.

You’re a grown man now, but must sit in a tub. I agreed that it was so,

but said I’d always imagined that this was how things would be

and therefore wasn’t it a surprise? Things aren’t supposed to happen according

to plan and thus when they do it’s a small dislocation in the universe; clocks

are delayed a millisecond and this causes phenomena to run counter to their usual course,

so I should be washed free of all blame. And even if it were otherwise,

arriving someplace and forgetting one’s speech isn’t such a grand or unique occasion;

it’s like chess. The same things happen over and over again under such different guises,

but you think you’re keeping up with them. That serves to salve

the individual conscience and suppress the crowd’s roar as effectively

as a bell-jar would. I washed the jug in some water, then

wiped it clean with a cloth. I was thinking again about all the suffering and dying

that goes on all around us, in hospitals especially. Somehow the face of the mentally

retarded woman came back to haunt me. “Oh, no, not you again!” But she was all the time

talking quietly to herself and couldn’t have heard me anyway

with that thick partition of glass between us. But even

if she could have it wouldn’t have mattered; it’d have sounded like consolation

or agreement (so there was no point in attempting these either, they’d have

been transformed into static. Best not to hear). But you can never ignore

for long the pain that comes over you from such a person, how all the wishing

in the world would only make things worse. Yes, and you are a voyeur, too,

unfortunately, and the purity of your desire could hardly be extricated

from all that. You are a voyeur with a conscience, the last thing anyone should be,

I swear. No use trying to cover your tracks using archaic words like “leman”; the sense

kills and you have the refrain to remind you. Sure but I was just drifting

anyway, faintly out of tune, nothing scared could have happened to me.

On a treadmill

it would have been different, I’d have had the reward of seeing shining eyes,

knowing them directed at me. How I’d have fulfilled my promise if I’d been let go

or not, but that’s a small cataclysm in a landscape now

that’s no matter. I just want to be left at home—maybe something perky or melodic

will come along, who knows, and in the meantime I can irritate myself without causing

discomfort to others.

As on a darkling strand when the weather improves a bit,

there was a little more to be seen than was apparent at first. The groan of pebbles

lugged back and forth by the undertow, which at first seemed temporary and quickly

turned out to be eternal wasn’t made to displease me, no more than were

the hanks of pubic seaweed deposited at intervals that might well have been

predetermined, though of course they were not, no more than were the houses

irregularly staggered up the street that led away from all this, but not

too far away. I had just been having my first nightmare at the age of 59, and awoke refreshed

to the ordinariness of the way things didn’t want to shake hands with me; it

was pleasant in my sight.

“Wait here a moment, I’ll be right back,” she called

over her shoulder. Things had been regularly falling into place

for some time, but this wasn’t one of them: “Look how

little shore there’s actually left.” But it wasn’t true, there was a broad shelf

spattered with puddles of water extending quite a ways, glittering

in the softly veiled sunlight. Does she think you too

are going to come around to her notion of things, when we touch, and glance

at each other? Or will there positively not be any sequel

to it this time? But songs, yes. They cascade

into one another. It’s getting dark, I fear. We should go back

though not until you—her—have answered the riddle of the miracle, why it crests

just at this point every year, and then ceases to speak, and the silence extends it

even as far as the forever with telling tears and twilights. Tell me, did

I ever come to you, talking like this, and you received me into you, and I dwell

with you? O we were never a couple, but at last

the lantern-light pierces the horn of distress, of mayhem: you may want to

rearrange the facts now that they’re getting scarce. All this points to only one

perpetrator, and that person is—and a shot rang out. The intruder sprawled

in his new pants, a helpless look on his visage, as when one from outdoors rushes in,

sees the truth, and confesses; but surely more is to come, the stain

sang in the wall, and the wall buckled. And it was all up to us co-conspirators: more

even an uncle and an aunt couldn’t ask. And veiled day paled, even

as it drained into the catch basin of our collective unconscious: just who were

we to feel this way anyway, and why had anyone asked? A mystery. The clerk

sharpened his pen and put it away. But as for coming back tomorrow, that was wonderful,

and also in the succeeding days ahead when the losses should be more acutely visible

and the burns too. The stone house man had built upon the shore, with the station-master

in it.

Speaking of which the weary sap next comes to your door.

What right have you to consider yourself anything but an enormously eccentric though

not too egocentric character, whose sins of omission haven’t omitted much,

whose personal-pronoun lapses may indeed have contributed to augmenting the hardship

silently resented among the working classes? If I thought that for a minute I’d…yet,

remembering how you didn’t want to get up today, how warm the bed was and cozy, you

couldn’t really begin with a proletarian, accustomed as they are to backbreaking

toil and so (you’d like to think) don’t feel it that much. Besides they never read Henry James’ novels.

Just for the sake of argument let’s say I’ve never done an honest day’s work

in my life. It’s hardly heartbreaking news, not

a major concern. Calling shots

is
something I’ve done a lot of, and I’m here to tell you as referee that too much

isn’t enough, and that coldness must get boxed out by somebody

or the universe would get derailed. Besides, maybe they do feel it less, as infants

and the feeble-minded are said to. My first concern (in any case) was to build up

a graduated series of studies, leading to the alchemical perfection of one who says,

I can do that. The fabrication of it lasted nearly a lifetime,

leaving me, at the end, unable to perform the most banal act such as tying my shoelaces

in a double knot, and vulnerable to the japes of skeptics

who would have preferred to die a thousand deaths rather than undertake the course

of study I had so painstakingly elaborated. And as for me, sad to say,

I could never bring myself to offer my experiments the gift of objective, scientific

evaluation. Anything rather than that! So I feel I have

wandered too long in the halls of the nineteenth century: its exhibits,

talismans, prejudices, erroneous procedures and doomed expeditions are but too familiar

to me; I must shade my eyes from the light with my hands, the light of the explosion

of the upcoming twentieth century. Nobody asked me whether I wanted to be born here,

whether I liked it here, but that’s hardly an excuse for cobbling a palace of mendacious
rêves

into something like existence. The entry is inconspicuous, more like a sentry’s box,

but the grand regularity of the insides, spoilt by a profusion of ornament, is

(however) my main contribution to the history of sitting and licking.

Over the door

a weathered board scratched with impossible-to-make-out letters, and for this

he was a child and we grew up knowing him, at least some did, and he

was fair as any, and stood in open cornfields sometimes

to give the scale

to his dreaming, and the dreams of one vast civilization.

We can see the effects now in devices we use in everyday life without thinking of them,

in traces of the slightly altered climate and the disproportionately enormous effect it has had

on geography, roads and productivity. Someone in his class

should have made him a marshal. Still, he never had the courage to follow his bent

to the exclusion of petty distractions, nor they to follow him when the wind stood

in his sails, and he on the poop deck, calling,
Arise,

ye unchained millions, and realize your consequences

only before it’s too late!
I’m afraid it’s all busywork

for the historian of manners, now. Trash and understanding. When they collected

on the balcony, some curious, it was only to listen to the upward whoosh! of air, to learn

how the week of seminars had gotten canceled due to circumstances beyond our control,

but out of spite, actually. Whose? His or the provost’s? When they said,
Does it buzz?

he replied, yes it does. And there was an end to making arrangements. Many had

already mounted the homeward trail, headed for a warm bath and a good fuck. Others

noted a change in the atmosphere: surely it was lighter, but thinner?

So you tell yourself you’re going to show yourself and say no to yourself

before witnesses are dragged in to recant. It works so well—how
do
you manage it,

dear? Being able to go in and out at any point, I mean. In this case

it’s back to the hurricane. When we last looked in though

there were party streamers suspended from ceiling fixtures, and everything

seemed to be in full swing. Now, Marsha’s baby occupies center stage.

Whodunit? Dunno. But let’s listen in: “For the fourth time I want you

to go over there where the washing is and stand the nasty question on its head.

I mean, what are mussels?” And so it goes, down to the loading and unloading,

the pretty bleak exteriors. For some, it causes eye cramps. But the boldest line

on today is Cedric’s “Hey how’d we get this way, eyeful? And the fault of whose buns

ran it aground in Norwalk, if only you’d had an antenna out for the main, the central

occasion and dash after it like a slaphappy Weimaraner and diddle it, ’cos

it’s ours, dig? Of course, after I was ‘slimed’ for the first time, and by

you, no less, I became increasingly withdrawn for years and the case dragged

through the courts before finally being settled. And by what right

do I imagine you this spring day?”

Mostly the others are more secretive, or were,

until this new bombshell hit the stands. Now, full of remorse, we ask ourselves

what we could have done to prevent the calamity. But there was nothing,

of course, beyond waiting it out, under a dripping awning, on the beach.

The “elegancy” which Malone imposed upon it was in the direction of that generalization

dear to the eighteenth-century heart, which the modern temperament finds

so uncongenial. Clearly we were to blame in some way we cannot know

other than by divination or recourse to charlatans, which, I’d better say

right off, is totally out of the question. But when fear pelts down

one forgets such resolves. I was ever

determined not to reveal myself a stoolie. I had sat in a metal chair before,

yet had always assumed that with age a mingled straggling peace and dignity

came along. Even in my late forties I patiently awaited

this. After dinner she played Kjerulf. We sipped tea, looking at each other.

I find appealing the quality of danger

inherent in thunder, though of course it’s actually in the lightning,

which I don’t much like at all. I’ll take my jacket off now, and be off.

Another day we read the thunder its own prepared statement.

The effect was stupefying. I always do get that feeling

of being prepared for anything but this, usually followed by a postscript

about deciding to mend my ways, abjure evil delight, from this day forward.

This, however, was something else. I may never speak the truth again,

knowing it to be compounded of false mottoes and
aperçus
, and that trying