Flow Chart: A Poem (12 page)

not much listens. I have the feeling my voice is just for me,

that no one else has ever heard it, yet I keep mumbling the litany

of all that has ever happened to me, childish pranks included, and when the voluminous

sun sets, its bag full, one can question these and other endeavors silently:

how far wrong did I go? Indeed, one can almost see the answers spelled out

in quires of the sky: Why? it enthuses, and immediately some of the metal trim

falls off, the finish has gotten gooey, but we persevere, and just as the forms

begin to float away like mesmerized smoke, the resolution, or some resolution, occurs.

We are no longer on that island. Here, the inmates

treat us harshly, but like adults, and though as usual no rest is authorized,

one can without too much difficulty keep pace with the majority of them

and see one’s old clothes reflected in that mirror. And shoots keep popping up;

birds are pecking excitedly in the dirt for something, and your shoes

have grown too small; it will be time to change them soon. Of course, one is too old

to be a waif, yet that issue never surfaces; one is judged fairly

though without this set of complex circumstances being taken into account,

and that’s something, more than you think, for by evening

the pronounced moan will have been deadened, and we are free to take our ease,

reveling in the glow, the surface of things, like water nourished on fading light.

You see, we have escaped. But one always goes back voluntarily

before the next roll-call, and that bittersweet dream of complete and utter

laziness is postponed once again, confirmed and postponed. And I write my diary

by street-light, because it’s better that way; I may not have to look too closely

at my handwriting, yet I can feel it, all around and on me

like a garment or a sheet, and this too seems like a good idea. Well, doesn’t it?

It does. But remember, one isn’t obliged to love everything

and everybody, though one ought to try. One way is to accept the face they

present to you, but on consignment. Then you may find yourself falling in love

with the lie, sinister but endearing, they fabricated to win acceptance

for themselves as beings that are crisp and airy, with an un-self-conscious note of rightness

or purpose that just fits, and only later take up the guilt behind the façade

in the close, humid rooms of whatever goes down in their struggle (or hundreds

of struggles) against fate, and perhaps buy that too someday

when their manners are out of the way. I have obtained gratifying results in both instances

but I know enough not to insist, to keep sifting a mountain of detritus

indefinitely in search of tiny yellow blades of grass. Enough

is surely enough, in spite of what religion teaches us. I’m happy to be back with others

at the fairgrounds, without disparaging them too much, and when someone asks me

what I think of him or her, reply without false naïveté that I really love them

very much, but it might be time to take other factors into account, my own

well-being, for example, and how far along the path to survival my unselfish

instincts have moved me. Usually it’s both farther and not as far as we imagine,

i.e., taking a wrong turning and then after a fretful period emerging in some nice

place we didn’t know existed, and would never have found without being misled

by the distracted look in someone’s eyes. It’s mostly green then; the waves are peaceful;

rabbits hop here and there. And the landscape you saw from afar, from the tower,

really is miniature, it wasn’t the laws of perspective that made it seem so,

but for now one must forgo it in the interests of finding an open, habitable space,

which isn’t going to be easy. In fact it’s the big problem one was being led

up to all along under the guise of being obliged to look out for oneself

and others: the place isn’t hospitable, though it can support itself and one or two

others, but really it would be best to start all over again from the beginning

and find some really decent area that reflects a commitment to oneself.

But where? In a bubble under the surface of the ocean? Isn’t it all going to be a fiction

anyway, and if so, what does it matter where we decide to settle down?

That was the first time you washed your hands,

and how monumental it seems now. Those days the wind blew only from one quarter;

one was forced to make snap judgments, though the norms unfolded naturally enough,

constructing themselves, and it wasn’t until you found yourself inside a huge pen

or panopticon that you realized the story had disappeared like water into desert sand,

although it still continued. I guess that was the time I understood enough

to seize one of the roles and make it mine, and knew what I heard myself saying,

but not whose yellow hair it was. Mélisande? Oh, I’d

come before to let you in, and saw only a chipmunk, and so…But now it’s nice

to sing along, and read the newspapers together, and try on funny hats: only

be aware that at daybreak there must be no trace of you, or the cock might not crow

and there’d be hell to pay. Besides, you wouldn’t wish it

even if we were together, as someday we may be. I say “someday”

for the sound of it, like a drop of water landing, but I also meant it, but now I’m

standing just outside unafraid, listening. So much is wrapped in soot,

that now I’m no longer blind

and can denounce any aggressor, but I won’t, because I’m afraid to, and besides,

what if the attic door slammed shut? Much remains unknown

in these calm countries. A bridge erects itself into the sky, all trumpets and twisted steel,

but like the torso of a god, too proud to see itself, or lap up

the saving grace of small talk. And when these immense structures go down, no one hears:

a puff of smoke is emitted, a flash, and then it’s gone,

leaving behind a feeling that something happened there once,

like wind tearing at the current, but no memory and no crying either: it’s just

another unit of space reduced to its components. An empty salute.

It’s like the wind has taken over,

except that one can be aware of, keep an eye on oneself in that medium:

this one is more like a pock-marked wall, in which spalling occurs due to stress

and anxiety at regular, key points in one’s career

(if it can be called that—“progress” is a better word, implying a development

but not necessarily a resolution at the end), and which enfolds you even as you

marvel at its irregular surface before you feel yourself beginning to sink into it,

toes first. Then, usually, one wakes up and everything seems ordinary.

Which is no miracle either, only one’s daily ration

of satisfaction after a plenitude of endurance, even as it puts springiness in the gait

and a deceptive, fleeting zest for life until one encounters it again, muddied

and forgotten on the side of a hill above a large city. Which way did they go, it wonders,

and horsemen ride up as though on cue, and the rustlers disappear over the ridge,

and the spring trash is freighted with penance yet there is a satisfaction in knowing it

all comes true again and I wave into the flag. How many knives in the corridor

of them one traverses at the rate of one inch per minute, and do those in charge know

what to do with them? Do they even know where they are? Not at the last point where speech coincided

with the much-embraced hem of someone’s robe as it swept by too fast for compliments

to occur in near-zero-degree temperature with a wind-chill factor of minus 51 degrees Fahrenheit

but too slow for cognitions relative to our positive but neutral, spreadeagled stance

re the conniption chambers of this world and our frequent encounters with them,

give or take a year or two, and then it’s gone, again. There was no one to tell us what it meant

when it meant what it did; we had to rely on quasi-secret details of costume encoded

into the larger blank that would do us harm but remains stalled off the coast, O

sister of my worst enemy, to know how it talked back to us when we were no longer there

to receive the ice cream and the short shrift, but when we did get back there was nothing

but a well-dressed old gentleman waiting in the lobby who told us we ought to apply

for an emigration visa but did nothing to help us solve the vexed question of directions,

oil the bureaucratic wheels; thus in one kind of mess one dreams of others, perhaps

more serious, but which have the attraction of occupying the middle distance; meanwhile

all the porters have shuffled away, under the erroneous impression we haven’t the coin

to pay them no doubt, yet it’s not true, we would pay them if we could, but just look

how they have left the funhouse mirror clearly visible for perhaps the first time

and we can at last admire our billowing hips and hourglass waists through which

the background music of the street pours at an exponential rate, quite enough

to deafen less serious characters than we, who benefit from being put in our place

without imagining the successes with which we were daubed in earliest childhood

and which continue to stick to us long after they have worn off

in the eyes of some, preachers and paupers alike, but did it ever occur to them we aren’t

as they imagine us, or even as we imagine ourselves, but more like bales

of hay, already harvested but still sitting around, waiting for someone to put them

in the barn before rain and rodents have their way with them? Surely, no one

creeps, no one speaks, yet one can’t call this silence,

there are too many ships on the horizon, and besides, a pea

blinded me the last time I tried to look for significance in it, and then lots

of people are ready to tell you you’ve gone astray, but what about the rest of them:

they may not think so, although they say nothing. Our words are interpreted left

and right as they become speech, and so it is possible at the end that a judgment may be

formed, and yet the intrepid

listener does no such thing, hypnotized by his reflection, and it is up

to us to file the final report on the decision in many cases. As flax is blue,

I desire your toes, and in the final

harbor our destinies though parallel are too closely linked to be seen as such, my

boulder that rushes to me yet hangs suspended

like mistletoe and we all go often to a place we are familiar with,

though it seems strange and uncompromising. So much was I taken aback by

the rules of the prostitute, it seemed for a while we should never reach the oval lake’s

opposite shore, but then we did, suddenly; it was like looking for a lost object

and finding it in the palm of your hand. Out of the sad spring, no heart-clenching chime

then or ever; the development was muted, then fudged; but one had been warned to play

within the enclosure on the off chance that something slightly singular would occur; this

took the form of accidental meetings with old acquaintances. Never mind, it said, about how to

give dignitaries the slip; your job is to play with responses, until, elsewhere, they are changed

to raw greetings and obtuse expressions about how this or that influenced one’s gradual ascent

to greatness with not so much as a look back in any direction, and when these “come true,”

when the future has arrived, not be the last to put in your consent to what, in actual fact,

transpired long ago when noses were buried in manuscripts and lampshades

ornamented our own landscape quite sufficiently, or so it is claimed in reference

works by forgotten but reliable authorities. The sheen, like that of silk, on the night air,

and the days, plain old miserable days scanned by a gas engine’s rattle, or, worse,

afternoons in a canoe, with the quality of rebounding off yourself as you write

in water the name of the beloved, and later get a chance to see it on vellum, in blood-red.

No task actually kept us here; besides it was much too airy, but I want

to single out certain elements in the role indifference played in all our lives, winding down

toward a town that continues to hold our attention

after seven centuries of interaction of the divine with the sparse sentinels, posted

here and there, of our attention to portents high and low issued from a cave

on the edge of Main Street and therefore able to transport us instantaneously to the region

of whatever happens to be interesting to six or more people just then: a steeply shelving

lawn purplish with black gargoyle-like shadows and lesser animadversions, weak though sincere

ones, and we have to get off here, it’s our stop. But we
will
come back, no question

of it, some other time when all the right numbers have come up, conflated with calls for

truth and decency at whatever street corners they may abound: so is it likened by clerics

to what had never gone before, except to say, I still love you. The barn has begun

to tarnish and it would not do to stay any longer, even though you were posted here:

it is essential that you leave this very evening, that you not look back

or ever give a thought to the circumstances that transported you to this place

of easy definitions and only so-so resolutions, because all

that was going to name you has been shunted aside, and it beseems us to act modest in turn, lest