Chinese Whispers: Poems (4 page)

Since that day the memory of recognition beats

at my template. I don’t know what to do with all my acquired knowledge.

I could give it to someone, I suppose. Wait, no then

they wouldn’t know what to do with it.

I suppose I could be relaxed.

Yes, that’s more the ticket we smiled.

And in a Little while we broke under the strain:

Suppurations ad nauseam, the wanting to be taller,

though it’s simply about being mysterious, i.e., not taller,

like any tree in any forest.

Mute, the pancake describes you.

It had tiny Roman numerals embedded in its rim.

It was a pancake clock. They had ’em in those days,

always getting smaller, which is why they finally became extinct.

It was a hundred years before anyone noticed.

The governor-general

called it “sinuous.” But we, we had other names for it,

knew it was going to be around for a long time,

even though extinct. And sure as shillelaghs fall from trees

onto frozen doorsteps, it came round again

when all memory of it had been expunged

from the common brain.

Everybody wants to try one of those new pancake clocks.

A boyfriend in the next town had one

but conveniently forgot to bring it over each time we invited him.

Finally the rumors grew more fabulous than the real thing:

I hear they are encrusted with tangles of briar rose,

so dense

not even a prince seeking the Sleeping Beauty could get inside.

What’s more, there are more of them than when they were extinct,

yet the prices keep on rising. They have them in the Hesperides

and in shantytowns on the edge of the known world,

blue with cold. All downtowns used to feature them.

Camera obscuras,

too, were big that year. But why is it that with so many people

who want to know what a shout is about, nobody can find the original recipe?

All too soon, no one cares. We go back to doing little things for each other,

pasting stamps together to form a tiny train track, and other,

less noticeable things. The past is forgotten till next time.

How to describe the years? Some were like blocks of the palest halvah,

careless of being touched. Some took each other’s trash out,

put each other’s eyes out. So many got thrown out

before anyone noticed, it was like a chiaroscuro

of collapsing clouds.

How I longed to visit you again in that old house! But you were deaf,

or dead. Our letters crossed. A motorboat was ferrying me out past

the reef, people on shore looked like dolls fingering stuffs.

More

keeps coming out about the dogs. Surely a simple embrace

from an itinerant fish would have been spurned at certain periods. Not now.

There’s a famine of years in the land, the women are beautiful,

but prematurely old and worn. It doesn’t get better. Rocks half-buried

in bands of sand, and spontaneous execrations.

I yell to the ship’s front door,

wanting to be taller, and somewhere in the middle all this gets lost.

I was a phantom for a day. My friends carried me around with them.

It always turns out that much is salvageable.

Chicken coops

haven’t floated away on the flood. Lacemakers are back in business

with a vengeance. All the locksmiths had left town during the night.

It happened to be a beautiful time of season, spring or fall,

the air was digestible, the fish tied in love knots

on their gurneys. Yes, and journeys

were palpable too: Someone had spoken of saving appearances

and the walls were just a little too blue in mid-morning.

Was there ever such a time? I’d like to handle you,

bruise you with kisses for it, yet something always stops me short:

the knowledge that this isn’t history,

 no matter how many

times we keep mistaking it for the present, that headlines

trumpet each day. But behind the unsightly school building, now a pickle

warehouse, the true nature of things is known, is not overridden:

Yours is a vote like any other. And there is fraud at the ballot boxes,

stuffed with lace valentines and fortunes from automatic scales,

dispensed with a lofty kind of charity, as though this could matter

to us, these tunes

carried by the wind

from a barrel organ several leagues away. No, this is not the time

to reveal your deception to us. Wait till rain and old age

have softened us up a little more.

  Then we’ll see how extinct

the various races have become, how the years stand up

to their descriptions, no matter how misleading,

and how long the disbanded armies stay around. I must congratulate you

on your detective work, for I am a connoisseur

of close embroidery, though I don’t have a diploma to show for it.

The trees, the barren trees, have been described more than once.

Always they are taller, it seems, and the river passes them

without noticing. We, too, are taller,

our ceilings higher, our walls more tinctured

with telling frescoes, our dooryards both airier and vaguer,

according as time passes and weaves its minute deceptions in and out,

a secret thread.

Peace is a full stop.

And though we had some chance of slipping past the blockade,

now only time will consent to have anything to do with us,

for what purposes we do not know.

This is going to take some time.

Nope, it’s almost over. For today anyway.

We’ll have a beautiful story, old story

to fish for as his gasps come undone.

I never dreamed the pond of chagrin

would affect me this much. Look, I’m shaking,

shrinking with the devil

in the stagy sunrise he devised.

Then there will be no letters for what is truth,

to make up the words of it. It will be standing still

for all it’s worth. A hireling shepherd came along,

whistling, his eyes on the trees. He was a servant of two masters,

which is some excuse, although not really all that much of a one.

Anyway, he overstayed his welcome. The last train had already left.

How does one conduct one’s life amid such circumstances,

dear snake, who want the best for us

as long as you’re not hurt by it?

My goodness, I thought I’d seen a whole lot of generations,

but they are endless, one keeps following another,

treading on its train, hissing.

What a beautiful old story it could be after all

if those in the back rows would stop giggling for a minute.

By day, we paddled and arbitraged

to get to this spot. By night it hardly matters.

Strange we didn’t anticipate this,

but the dumbest clues get overlooked by the smartest gumshoe

and we’re back in some fetishist’s vinyl paradise

with no clue as to how we got here

except the tiny diamond on your pillow—it must have been a tear

hatched from a dream, when you actually knew what you were doing.

Now, it’s all fear. Fear and wrongdoing.

Our outboard motor sputters and quits, and silence

beats down from every point in the sky. To have digested this

when we were younger, and felt a set of balls coming on ...

It may be that thunder and lightning are two-dimensional,

that there was never really any place for fear,

that others get trapped, same as us, and make up

amusing stories to cover their tracks. Wait,

there’s one in the donjon wants to speak his piece. Rats,

now he’s gone too.

Yes, he slipped and died in front of you,

and you intend to twist this into an ethos?

Go make up other stories.

Window reflected in the bubble,

how often I’ve tried to pray to you,

but your sphere would have nothing of it.

I felt almost jinxed. Then a spider led the way

back into the room

and I knew why we’d never left. Outside was brushfires.

Here was the peace of Philemon and Baucis,

offering chunks of bread and salami to the tattered stranger,

and a beaker of wine darker than the deepest twilight,

a table spread with singularities

for the desperate and tragic among us.

Angel, come back please. Let us smell your heavenly smell again.

It’s dull, no realism. A no-color. To what

formlessness have we committed? How fond I am

of it blew off the pensive boarder

hunkered amid lilacs, a hoverer, as meat loves salt.

Such scenes are not uncommon in this

world of decent gin, this midden whose ungodly

stench plunders all inserts of a keepable diary.

Why call them stones?

Swapping and cheating are as a labor of love

for all concerned. I try to read some sense

into the minutes but am usually rebuffed,

as scorched linen yells at the ironing board’s

grace note of intrigue. Sooner or later

we send them packing, and they leave us—it’s

so
simple? Don’t you love it? Ask later whether

we and they were loved. Someone should know. In 150, 160 years

they’ll be beholden, you can bet. And not knowing what

those others want has all along been a jiffy.

The shelf’s canceled

from the Adriatic to the Antarctic, my footsteps cast

incredibly long shadows, though that’s not for you to macerate.

Or masticate. I who matriculated was perhaps

meant to be a lover unto you

through the unabated storm’s portholes—dear, we’re

here because he asked us to wait some more.

For a long time things seemed to go astutely.

Every evening at four the unspooling showed us

its friendly face. “I will treat you well,

on my honor.” In those days, no one kept records

or took notice of things much. It was

possible to live as an entity.

Still, surprising things were overheard

from time to time. Voices that seemed to come from a garage

with a third option no one had been told about.

Something about a shipwreck. It was probably OK.

We began to grow impatient

about peace and war, after a busy day of relaxation

few around us could contain or apprehend.

The money fish had been strapped to my thigh.

Otherwise I might have turned informant, living out my days

in a Tudor bungalow under the witness protection program.

I needed the cash. The rest was just net profit and loss.

How old? The fish and the lake

swam around together, easily bored.

The belly of a courtier leans forth.

It is mild weather. Just so much we know.

So much we know and cannot have it

in our little hands. The mouse goes to bed.

A neighbor is placing his false teeth

in a glass of water. You say, not like this,

like this, but too much wells up—

the patient outline of the maples’ faces,

the brook that ran too far,

into some intelligence or other.

Amber and vanilla are all what we know,

how can it be so? Whose little tootsie

are you, once? Did the elephant

walk silently past your house, one

night when you were out?

None of the children escapes—

dam, waterfall, how could we hear

it in the crashing noise? Whose complaint

goes unregistered? How many of us are there,

anyway? Or were, some, some of the time.

Mayhap in dreams

a lady kisses a far shuttle,

warning away visions of Kansas

and outer suburbia, where cows work.

You came back from that dung

as from another world,

one that made you and broke you

four times in the course of your life.

Yet, you were “splendid.”

You have answered every question.