Chinese Whispers: Poems (3 page)

Who to watch? What new celeb’s dithering

is this, commemorated in blazing script?

The torches are extinguished in marl.

I will live in a house in the middle of the road,

it says here. No shit!

What did I do to deserve this? Who controls

this anger management seminar? They’ve had their way with me;

I am as I was before. Thank heaven! If I could but remember

how that was.
Always, it’s nightfall

in a wood, some paths are descended,

and looking out over the ropy landscape, one sees

a necessity that was at the beginning
.

Further up there is fog. But it’s nice being standing:

We should be home soon,

dearest, a dry hearth awaits us, and the indulgence of sleep.

What if I really was a drifter,

would you still like me? Would you vote

for me in the straw polls of November, wait for me

in the anteroom of December, embrace the turbulent, glittering skies

the New Year brings? Lie down with me once and for all?

The radio is silent, fretful; it bides its time

and the world forgets to consider. There is room to tabulate

the wonders of its sesquicentennials,

but the aftermath’s unremarkable, picked

clean by a snarky wind.

Then I became as one who followed
.

The afternoon is slow, slower and slower

until a full stop is reached

long before anyone realized it.

Only the faintest nip in the air

causes these burghers to become aware

that their time is passing too, and then but fitfully.

Go stack those bricks over there.

See what the horse is doing.

Everything around you is waiting.

It is now apologized for.

The sky puts a finger to its lips.

The most optimistic projections confirm

the leakage theory. Another drop in temperature

is anticipated. It’s all about standing still,

isn’t it? That and remaining in touch with

a loose-fitting impression of oneself:

oneself at fifteen, out at night

or at a party in the daytime.

Oh sure, I knew it was me all along.

Then the sneezes got up to go.

A shower or two, and the old landscape

is good as new. A bit yellow in spots,

but that’s what’s called progress.

She hovers, lonesomely, like a zeppelin, over downcast

vales and trees, a free spirit, or something

like that.

We’d reached the end of the grove,

it was time to turn back, to find what we’d left behind

waiting for us. And it was good to see the scraps

of pleasure assembling into a face. By and large conduits

of reduced gauge carry the fiber optics better,

the chatting, the suspense, lorries of debris

haunted by the sometime catchall of these cisterns. It was quite

cozy in the Midwest, he’d wanted to say, but never

understood how a question can just go out

like a pilot light, leaving the need rubbed and raw

in hankered-after faces.

is what’s the matter. Can’t see without it.

Or was it, over the years of arrears,

swathed in a hoydenish privacy? No.

It’s ours to deal.

The true crisis is only now coming to rest.

Birdie, on your tree,

I like you. Can’t we be friends? Why is this awful

oxygen all that concerns us?

Seriously, I’d like you to come down.

On wings of windows, parties, songs,

comedy and mystery, the world drenches us.

It’s the same world as before. Only time has exploded.

We mustn’t draw many conclusions from that, only

keep our distance, as though the years mattered

to our education. We like us as we were before.

That’s all right, no argument there,

no benediction either
.

The month looks just as unsightly as before.

So who trained me to bring it inside,

pat it, make a fuss over it,

prepare its little dinner? It’s not even ominous.

An ombudsman explained the nexus wasn’t ours

to roost in, that we’d all be moving back in someday.

He laid it on the line and went home.

Said he needed a breather. The next day he was back

with a sheet of instructions. The neighbor dissented,

said it was all poppycock. There’d be no collective bargaining

without his input. As I’d noticed

on similar occasions, he left his cap in the hall.

Asked why he did so, the tout turned surly,

then stringently polite. It’s your agreement,

he explained, you don’t even have to sign it;

then took up the discussion at a farther juncture,

spoke in general terms

only vaguely related to the present situation.

Claimed it smacked of pettifoggery

and worse. But there would be peace along the way,

eventually—

If we shadows have offended

we’ll replace the argument with the veil, again.

There can’t be too many soft corners to lurch into.

The rooms have been spared the mindless tracking in

of guests. The carpets are fresh as moonlight,

I think, as in those ancient jalousie warehouses.

The scribes are in agreement:

It would be a decade before the child is born

and two more before unhappiness

erects shyly into happiness

for a while till the suburban roadbed

is made over and grief laughs from oriels,

a billowing decline.

Roof down, it lay less urgent.

Panhandlers, virgins, tax collectors, the

self-medicating slime we were

overcame all that was

then. We said good night.

(Various pizzicati weighed in.)

I looked past the manger to the stuttering fields beyond:

Is it you who’ve come to take me to that place,

polish me,

in a world pressed into forgiving?

Then on four feet it turned,

as though having forgotten something,

came and presented it:

I said it was you all along.

I should have gotten up under the eaves, when thunders

yawned in the new day.

Perhaps I was too old, or not yet

old enough to undertake a new stage

of “life’s journey,” another episode.

But the sea gave repose.

He turned his face full to the leaves;

autumn caught him in the mouth,

slapped some worried sense into all of us.

The beginning of the middle is like that.

Looking back it was all valleys, shrines floating on the powdered hill,

ambivalence that came in a flood sometimes,

though warm, always, for the next tenant

to abide there.

Now I have neither back nor front.

I am the way certain persons are

who never tell you how they are

yet you know they are like you and they are.

I was preternaturally wise

but it was spring, there was no one to care or do.

It was spring and the sprinklers were on.

Bay, indentation, viscous rocks

that are somebody’s pleasure. Pleasures that don’t go away

but don’t exactly stay,

stay the way they were meant to be.

I caught a winged one,

looked it firmly in the eyes:

What is your surmise? Oh, I only like living on,

the rest isn’t so important to me,

not at all, if you wish.

But I do, I said. Then, well, it’s like a clearing

in the darkness that you can’t see. Darkness is meant for all of us.

We grow used to it. Then daylight comes again.

That’s what I mean when I say about living

it could be going on, going somewhere else,

but it’s not, it’s here, more or less.

You have to champion it, then it fights for you,

but that isn’t necessary. It will go on living anyway.

I say do you mind I’m getting tired.

But there is one last thing I must know about you.

Do you remember a midnight forge

around which crept the ghosts of lepers, who were blacksmiths

in a time persistently unidentifiable, and then you went like this?

You remember how the hammer fell slowly

taking all that song with you.

You remember the music of the draft horses

they could only make against a wall.

All right, how little does it all cost you then?

You were a schoolchild, now you are past middle age,

and the great drawing hasn’t occurred.

I see I must be going.

I just like living,

only like living.

Sometime you must tell me of your intentions,

but now I have to stay here on this fast track

in case the provisions come along

which I won’t need, being a living, breathing creature.

But I asked you about your hat.

Oh yes well it is important to have a hat.

The general was always particular about his withers,

lived in a newspaper tent

someone had let fall beside an easy chair.

Telling the man with no fingers what it was like to smoke a cigarette

in the Twenties, we proceeded naturally to your cousin Junius.

His plan was to overtake the now speeding tortoise

by digging some kind of a fire trench in its path,

which would cause it to wonder,

fatally, for a second,

after which we could all go back to channeling the news.

There’s a story here about a kind of grass that grows in the Amazon

valley that is too tall for birds to fly over—

they fly past it instead—

yet leeches have no trouble navigating its circuitous heaps

and are wont to throw celebratory banquets afterward,

at which awards are given out—best costume in a period piece

too distracted by the rapids to notice what period it is, and so on.

Before retiring the general liked to play a game of all-white dominoes,

after which he would place his nightcap distractedly on the other man’s crocheted chamber-pot lid.

Subsiding into fitful slumber, warily he dreams

of the giant hand descended from heaven

like the slope of a moraine, whose fingers were bedizened with rings

in which every event that had ever happened in the universe could sometimes be discerned.

Sometimes you end up in a slough no matter what happens,

no matter how many precautions have been taken, threads picked from the tapestry

that was to have provided us with underwear, and now is bare as any

grassless season, on whatever coast you choose to engage.

It’s sad that many were left behind,

but a good thing for the bluebirds in their beige houses.

They never saw any reason to join the vast, confused migration,

fucking like minks as far as the spotty horizon.

It doesn’t get desperately cold any more, and that’s certainly a lucky anomaly too.

Time, you old miscreant! Slain any brontosauruses lately? You—

Sixty wondering days I watched him navigate the alkali lick,

always a little power ebbing, streaming from high windowsills.

Down here the tetched are lonely. There’s nothing they can do

except spit.

We felt better about answering the business letter

once the resulting hubris had been grandfathered in,

slowly, by a withered sage in clogs

and a poncho vast as a delta, made of some rubbery satinlike

material. It was New Year’s Eve

again. Time to get out the punch bowl,

make some resolutions,

I don’t think.

Quietly the first hours left, amused.

We were in a quandary at first then wet our whistles

in some neighborhood bar. The throng came on strong.

It’s too far off to hear the people over there,

someone said. Perhaps we should move,

another one said. Perhaps. But we were way off

and the rut in the sand only led to one place.

When the sand closes over our ease

we’ll know it done.

The morose driver wept, represented his case

as somehow more urgent. Than other passengers’.

Some of them we got out.

Vanilla ice cream, I quaffed,

for it
seemed
good, for a little time at that.

The poet wanted to introduce us to his suite.

But what he really wanted to do

was play for a little time. Well, that’s natural—

I mean, who among us hasn’t tried?

Few, it’s true, have succeeded.

Another morn he would lie in shock

over the state of poetry. “None could penetrate

the recesses of the human mind like Major Pendennis,”

he opined. We saw it coming,

or should have:

a big empty cape

on the shoulders of the oldest,

who seemed to be advancing.

He wasn’t ancient, but he struck us that way.

If we’d never been to town, and heard the lights

sometime, we’d be all over a neighbor, licking,

passing out free samples of dude. But it was like

too cagey for them, none of us wanted to retire.