The Double Dream of Spring (5 page)

As maps lean south and shrivel toward the north.

It is fine to be in on it, stone markings, always

And eventually at some limit with a high view

But cross-country skirtings were part of the next lesson

That sleep evades, and in him was no parking space

For looks dragged under windows next time, from boarded-up places

Speaking no mind into the center of the rout.

And as day followed day the plainer meaning of it

Became a constant projected on the emigration.

The tundra seemed elaborated.

Then a permanent falling back shapes, signs the residue

As a tiny wood fence’s the signature of disgust and decay

On an otherwise concerned but unmoved, specially obtruded hill:

Flatness of what remains

And modelling of what fled,

Decisions for a proper ramble into known but unimaginable, dense

Fringe expecting night,

A light wilderness of spoken words not

Unkind for all their aimlessness,

A blank chart of each day moving into the premise of difficult visibility

And which is nowhere, the urge to nowhere,

To retract that statement, sharply, within the next few minutes.

For it is as though it turns you back,

Your eyes through the recent happenings as they advance through you,

Never satisfied on the way, but

There is reasonable assurance in the way it is not seen again,

Banging of the shuttle, repeated swipes of the wind,

For the afterthought coincides: much of it was intentional.

It is aloes to be remembered toward the place

Out of which it grew like forest out of mountain, when later someone says there was no mountain

Only roads, and stars hanging over them,

Only a flat stone over the place where it says there is more.

It is a low game, too tired to sleep,

Feeling through equipment to the less developed:

“You’ve gone and mixed me up

I was happy just bumming along,

Any old way, in and out, up and down.”

The passion has left his head, and the head reports.

And then some morning there is a nuance:

Suddenly in the city dirt and varied

Ideas of rubbish, the blue day stands and

A sudden interest is there:

Lying on the cot, near the tree-shadow,

Out of the thirties having news of the true source:

Face to kiss and the wonderful hair curling down

Into margins that care and are swept up again like branches

Into actual closeness

And the little things that lighten the day

The kindness of acts long forgotten

Which give us history and faith

And parting at night, next to oceans, like the collapse of dying.

It is all noticed before it is too late

But its immobility gives no comfort, only chapter headings and folio numbers

And it can go on being divine in itself

Neither treasured nor cast down in anger

For we cannot imagine the truth of it.

This deaf rasping of branch against branch

Like a noncommittal sneer among many superimposed chimes

As we go separate ways

That have translated the foreground of paths into quoted spaces:

They are empty beyond consternation because

These are the droppings of all our lives

And they recall no past de luxe quarters

Only a last cube.

The thieves were not breaking in, the castle was not being stormed.

It was the holiness of the day that fed our notions

And released them, sly breath of Eros,

Anniversary on the woven city lament, that assures our arriving

In hours, seconds, breath, watching our salary

In the morning holocaust become one vast furnace, engaging all tears.

The rise of capitalism parallels the advance of romanticism

And the individual is dominant until the close of the nineteenth century.

In our own time, mass practices have sought to submerge the personality

By ignoring it, which has caused it instead to branch out in all directions

Far from the permanent tug that used to be its notion of “home.”

These different impetuses are received from everywhere

And are as instantly snapped back, hitting through the cold atmosphere

In one steady, intense line.

There is no remedy for this “packaging” which has supplanted the old sensations.

Formerly there would have been architectural screens at the point where the action became most difficult

As a path trails off into shrubbery—confusing, forgotten, yet continuing to exist.

But today there is no point in looking to imaginative new methods

Since all of them are in constant use. The most that can be said for them further

Is that erosion produces a kind of dust or exaggerated pumice

Which fills space and transforms it, becoming a medium

In which it is possible to recognize oneself.

Each new diversion adds its accurate touch to the ensemble, and so

A portrait, smooth as glass, is built up out of multiple corrections

And it has no relation to the space or time in which it was lived.

Only its existence is a part of all being, and is therefore, I suppose, to be prized

Beyond chasms of night that fight us

By being hidden and present.

And yet it results in a downward motion, or rather a floating one

In which the blue surroundings drift slowly up and past you

To realize themselves some day, while you, in this nether world that could not be better

Waken each morning to the exact value of what you did and said, which remains.

We are happy in our way of life.

It doesn’t make much sense to others. We sit about,

Read, and are restless. Occasionally it becomes time

To lower the dark shade over it all.

Our entity pivots on a self-induced trance

Like sleep. Noiseless our living stops

And one strays as in a dream

Into those respectable purlieus where life is motionless and alive

To utter the few words one knows:

“O woebegone people! Why so much crying,

Such desolation in the streets?

Is it the present of flesh, that each of you

At your jagged casement window should handle,

Nervous unto thirst and ultimate death?

Meanwhile the true way is sleeping;

Your lawful acts drink an unhealthy repose

From the upturned lip of this vessel, secretly,

But it is always time for a change.

That certain sins of omission go unpunished

Does not weaken your position

But this underbrush in which you are secure

Is its doing. Farewell then,

Until, under a better sky

We may meet expended, for just doing it

Is only an excuse. We need the tether

Of entering each other’s lives, eyes wide apart, crying.”

As one who moves forward from a dream

The stranger left that house on hastening feet

Leaving behind the woman with the face shaped like an arrowhead,

And all who gazed upon him wondered at

The strange activity around him.

How fast the faces kindled as he passed!

It was a marvel that no one spoke

To stem the river of his passing

Now grown to flood proportions, as on the sunlit mall

Or in the enclosure of some court

He took his pleasure, savage

And mild with the contemplating.

Yet each knew he saw only aspects,

That the continuity was fierce beyond all dream of enduring,

And turned his head away, and so

The lesson eddied far into the night:

Joyful its beams, and in the blackness blacker still,

Though undying joyousness, caught in that trap.

You have been declining the land’s

Breakable extensions, median whose face is half my face.

Your curved visor’s the supposition that unites us.

I’ve been thinking about you

After a dry summer, fucking in the autumn,

Reflecting among arabesques of speech that arise

The certain anomaly, the wise smile

Of winter fitted over the land

And your activity disappears in mist, or translates too easily

Into a general puree, someone’s aura or idea of games—

The stone you cannot perfect, the sharp iron blade you cannot prevent.

But this new way we are, the melon head

Half-mirrored, the way sentences suddenly spurt up like gas

Or sting and jab, is it that we accepted each complication

As it came along, and are therefore happy with the result?

Or was it as a condition of seeing

That we vouchsafed aid and comfort to the seasons

As each came begging           

And the present, so flat in its belief, so outside it”

As it maintains, becomes the blind side of

The fulfillment of that condition; and work, ripeness

And tired but resolute standing up for one’s rights

Mean leaning toward the stars

The way a tree leans toward the sun

Not meaning to get close

And the bird walked right up that tree.

You have reached the point closest to your destination

O tired beacon

Dominating the plain

Yet all but invisible

To the mind surrounding your purpose

You are totally subsumed

The good abstracted, squandered, thrown away

As it was in the lean time.

Are these floorboards, to be stared at

In moments of guilt, as wallpaper can stream away and yet

You cannot declare it?

Then each breath is a redeeming feature

Resolving in alteration

The inanity of flowers into perfect conditions

That their mildness can only postpone, not change.

And surveying the hundredfold record of the summer

The shapely witness declares herself at last

Content with the result:

Whitecaps wincing at every point of the compass

The justified demands of commerce, difficult departures and all

Into a hemisphere where no credit is expected

And the shipping is rendered into its own terms.

It is what keeps itself

From going blind

All aging is perpetual chatter

On these buff planes, protuberances

And you are in the wind at night

And so it is an even darker night

And death is the prevention of which the cure’s

Metal polish and sawdust

Light grinding into your heels.

“These things … that you are going to have—

Are you paid specially for them?”

“Yes.”

“And when it is over, do you insist,

Do you insist that the visitor leave the room?”

“My activity is as random as the wind.

Why should I insist? The visitor is free to go,

Or to stay, as he chooses.”

Are you folks just going out for a walk

And if you are would you check the time

On your way back? It’s too late to do anything today.

I would just take a pratfall if I stepped outside that door.

“I don’t know whether I should apply or nothing.”

“I think you shd make yr decision.”

So it was by chance we found ourselves

Gumshod on the pebbled path, Denmark O Denmark

Flat, rounded eyes, Denmark Denmark

Gray parchment landscape Denmark O Denmark

Unmanageable sky, Denmark that cannot shift

The faucet drips, the minutes apply, Denmark.

Life is not at all what you might think it to be

A simple tale where each thing has its history

It’s much more than its scuffle and anything goes

Both evil and good, subject to the same laws.

Each hour has its color and forever gives place

Leaving less than yon bird of itself a trace.

In vain does memory attempt to store away

The scent of its colors in a single bouquet

Memory can but shift cold ashes around

When the depths of time it endeavors to sound.

Never think that you may be allowed, at the end,

To say to yourself, “I am of myself the friend,”

Or make with yourself a last reconciliation.

You will remain the victim of your hesitation

You will forget today before tomorrow is here

And disavow yourself while much is still far from clear.

The defunct days will offer you their images

Only so that you may read of former outrages

And the days to come will mar with their complaints

The splendor that in your honor dejected evening paints.

Wishing to collect in your heart the feelings

Scattered in the meadows of misfortune’s hard dealings

You will be the shepherd whose dog has run away

You will know even less whence comes your dismay

Than you know the hour your boredom first saw the light.

Weary of seeking day you will relish the night

In night’s dim orchards you will find some rest

The counsels of the trees of night are best

Better than those of the tree of knowledge, which corrupts us at birth

And which you allowed to flourish in the accursèd earth.

When your most arduous labors grow pale as death

And you begin to inhale autumn’s chilly breath

Winter will come soon to batter with his mace

Your precious moments, scattering them all over the place.

You will always be having to get up from your chairs

To move on to other heartbreaks, be caught in other snares.

The seasons will revolve on their scented course

Solar or devastated you will perforce

Be perfumed at their tepid passing, and not know

Whether their fragrance brings you joy or woe.