Flow Chart: A Poem (20 page)

but it seems as though a stormy prelude had gotten out of hand; suddenly

everyone was running. But you know what I mean. They were like super-gullible

and had to be made to understand, even through tears, thrashings, moans.

Then I like the idea of coming out at the top

for a brief time to survey what’s happened down below

and retreat, the better to tidy up loose ends, weave reports

around this affair that brought us so much ridicule, so much deserved

attention. Besides, the plaster arches had taken on an air of permanence

long ago and were in danger of being confused with the real thing; one had to

shuffle the cards, put a brave face on it; otherwise we ourselves might have ended up

imagining we stood at the apogee of empire and power and forgotten to go in at night

or take temporary precautions. Then when the collapse finally maneuvered itself

into being we’d have no one to blame but ourselves, and be forced back

into a primary mood of spells and rituals. You didn’t want that. That’s how we

ended up winning, which is another story. Had we

however mistaken the early chirpings for pre-emptive strikes there’s a good chance we

might have ended up contemplating the sky from the other side, its stickers and warnings

looking interchangeable thanks to the tame minority decisions we’d endorsed,

never having run up against any precedents for dealing with superannuated, frayed

systems until they’d been polished to look like the present and were therefore

of no use to us or to anyone else either. How far we’d

strayed from the bend in the stream, but the current

seemed to push us forward, whispering words of encouragement, and the poplars laughed

and danced and smiled seemingly at us, but that was a pathetic fallacy,

of course. They never saw us. Not even once. Not us.

Quick—the medication. But the house had no sense at all, and having

become a limited partner in my own disestablishment, I watched in terror

as it moved on us, dull plumage of another kind,

condensed around doors and windows, with a sense of authority

still, like a wishbone in the throat, the docket

whose very plainness might be

adjudged a virtue. What is this? A frigid sense

of isolation, tarnished beyond knowledge? Yes, and the others tell

it differently, and their version too is the truth, or it is truthful.

And many of these were going up

into the house where he watched the city, and then

these others were below, but they did not matter so much. I was basking

on my sunlit shelf, like a tomato plant.
That
mattered. And the fact that there were so many

more speaking rationally mattered. And they began to scream, shrieking things like

where were you born, who got you started anyway? And in truth

I fumbled the question now, and the answer came from all over, randomly inclusive.

A ruthless teen dissolves equations you can’t bear to look at

before it’s all over but the shouting, and others prod

the old trunk, wanting some credit, like graffiti artists, shouting too.

I thought I was immune to it, having been stung once,

but I’m not. And I ask you, in the name of all that’s reasonable…

Others were shot. As I see it the main difficulty is getting used

to the gradual increase in light increments, walking home in the early evening

after a day at the office, and being back

in the apartment again, if only for the night.

And the mounting green. Each year, spring is more powerful,

gaps in its front are fewer, sizable runs on the arsenal at the observatory more remarked.

And the truth sits rigid. What does it have to contribute after all?

No charm, certainly. And precious little of the bread one weeps eating

having taken the cross, and all else is “nice” or “interesting” in that lurch

before one sees. Truly sees, that is when it is too late

even for memories and rumors, the starched ballgown, the paymaster’s slips,

and when it’s too late, it’s too good too. Otherwise they’d follow us

into this dawn, ask us misleading questions, like liars. Well,

some of us have to be. We’d see about that. “Anon.” I asked about the witches’ society

but you’ll have to grovel, to find out where they put it, where they’re

off to next, unless a lucky blight disclose as a side-effect the thrust

of its situation we’re leading down to. Yes, the harvest home had no walls at all.

And I got off at the corner. I hear America snowing. I want it to

confront me, not my fate, with the possibilities of the next change, but we pretend there are

reasons not to blur the wall between them and us, not to step down,

and become one in a group of opportunists like ourselves, and so matter peculiarly

before tomorrow’s decision, the battle of compromise. Yes, and you took over.

Not that I think for a moment that…And grasping that quiddity like an ox’s neck, without

warning he came at me. Relentlessly the minutes, some of them golden, touched.

His task force inserted itself. It was almost lazy how the spars of flame floated

down, and continued to burn on the grass, but this was a kind

of joke, a celebration. The hundred-year-old ivy marked the ridges on the tegument

where nodules of revolutionary thought were beginning to form, and splinter, leaving

the dark, obdurate mass of negative energy, confined in a ball, to point to

having its day in the near future—quite soon, mind you—and bill collectors

in an outer room. Reading, apparently. Then a wolf-moan, in guise of roll-call,

blew up the ammunition dump. There were artificial legs everywhere

and kindly geezers standing under umbrellas, softly asking things

like where is the next scrunched-up ball of paper and can my daughter-in-law, who lives

alone, touch any benefits from the sick behemoth’s collapse, who was

never particularly outgoing in his day but now wants to be part of the birthday celebration

just as kings and princes do. And with that on my mind, I searched the grass

for signs of the coming progress. And they all went back into their houses

and that was all for that day.

But I am prepared now for the drone that submerges grace-notes in the conviction

of its being. To listen only for a moment is to bathe

in it as in a possibility—the first one—and you can shut your ears anyway

from the tirade in its later stages, assuming one wants to

not get off until the sudden unnatural brightness that indicates the last stage of the

voyage has been inaugurated, that we’re in for some fun and enlightenment

now which takes the form of bad dreams—you know that one you’re terrified of having

again, and it always turns out to be rather nice

at the end? Besides, a delegation of schoolchildren has come to thank you for it,

for having it, and thus allowing yet another generation to grow up unmenaced

by the plans of bureaucrats for civilization a few years down the pike, every year

or so. You see it is part of your plan, gestates with you,

because of you, and in you—never mind that it’s too shrill for some ears to pick up

on, that’s what protects us during the periods of ritual slump and restores

some of one’s original dignity like a lost lace christening-robe—besides,

they weren’t very fat in those days, or somebody had to wear those things.

There were governesses and servants then, which seems almost magical now, almost

beyond belief. Simple lives were also led. In short the world was a great

circus ring in which one could witness proud doings and glimpse one’s fellow

spectators on the opposite side, and everything turned to song like fire, hustled

into the furnace of energetic living, and the sad birds

walked away, were seen no more. Thus evening

when it arrived took on an orgiastic purity that was understood as of a piece

with the fabric, dim and buried in spray as it might have appeared

sometimes, until the truth will out, and vociferousness have its day, as is

only right, and we should think about it, and come back to it sometimes, at other times.

I now find it deeper, though quieter, to prepare this

and have come belatedly to realize that sex has very little to do with any of it,

that is directly, except insofar as it makes you do something you hadn’t thought about

because it brought you to a place you hadn’t thought of visiting,

some quiet corner of a garden, unnoticed before, whose perfection of design

no longer now seems a threat, but rather a greeting instead.

I was hurrying on my way as usual, too bored to notice the look of calm self-esteem

of those who circulated near me, nor give back what I had accepted as readily

as a drop of rain, token of the neutral benevolence that waits and pours

at certain corners where the road is taken up again

like a shuttle. There will always be someone to share the burden; even

oxen are true, as under burnished leaves they sidle

forth at morning, or return at evening without much commotion, without

making too much of it. And our dreams are scanned and dissolved in these seemingly

pointless rituals (unless the point is to release us as they smash the perfect design,

for mere symmetry is death, and their rounds would be that if shattered wreaths

didn’t loom in the wake of their indifferent passage). But there I go,

attributing impartial goodness to the coils of superstitious industriousness that shored

me for a moment and let me down easy: bunches of grapes

the fox didn’t even bother to shrug at, passing into the golden dust-clouds,

the clank of arms and clumsy restitutions, of that middle distance

where old man and girl alike play, and the shadow can never creep near enough

to explode the myth of the day we have, the scale to be played.

No matter that it didn’t make me look ridiculous—the point is I could easily have managed

that without assists from bunnies and wood-sprites if something not of my own construing,

something I rejected, hadn’t interposed a feline quickness and fur just before the fatal

gradient, and I stepped back and stared, and in that moment saw myself on a visit to myself,

with quite a few me’s on a road receding sharply into a distance spiked with blue

fantastic crags that had castles perched on them and were honeycombed with grottoes. I could as easily

have missed it and arrived blind at my destination, this room

where I entertain a stranger as dusk deepens and silence settles in,

and never known my own two shoes, what to make of them,

as they scoured hills as well as dales in search of the person they

belonged to instead of staying parked under this plain wooden table.

Something else will break fruitfully

the allotted chain of associations, and it will serve as well—only don’t try to pass it off as

an impulse, sincerity. Too much of the city remains standing for that

and the canker must burn in the memory, red as loganberries, for the lever

to cancel the fulcrum, for a new age of nothing to come into being,

attracting as little attention as possible,

that all may live

to do justice to the gods that set us in motion! Hesperides!

Any day now you must start to dwell in it,

the poetry, and for this, grave preparations must be made, the walks of sand

raked, the rubble wall picked clean of dead vine stems, but what

if poetry were something else entirely, not this purple weather

with the eye of a god attached, that sees

inward and outward? What if it were only a small, other way of living,

like being in the wind? or letting the various settling sounds we hear now

rest and record the effort any creature has to put forth to summon its spirits for a moment and then

fall silent, hoping that enough has happened? Sometimes we do perceive it

this way, like animals that will get up and move somewhere and then drop down

in place again, we hear it and especially we see it—some whitecap curdles

in a leaden expanse of water and we are aware this moment

has done its share, that we shall not be needing this batch of insight again.

Yet other times it all comes stampeding into the foreground, crushing one’s toes, a question

like the question of what to wear, and then we fall back, confused, we know we are not

smart enough, that we can never anticipate all the trials that will have been administered

just now, forget those to come when we and our kind have been forgotten

in some memorial dump of time, with stone lotuses and iron epaulets, and they called you

a wheeler and dealer, and yes that is what fate reserves for the most capable,

even; they called you a leader and here you are, with us in the kingdom of ghosts; only don’t

tarry too long with your inaugural address: others are waiting to mount the lectern.

Yet there are other times as in a quarry where no breeze stirs; nothing

indicates it; poetry scarcely drips from vines, the weather is hugely oppressive, yet

you do know something is at work in you, something else: take death away and still

a vast alteration remains to be made. We know this decade doesn’t fit,

that we can do nothing about it except swear, yet it
will
do, it will have to. A fly

dies, and then? Who are we to speculate on the delicious paradoxes that will outlive us,

embroiled in street things, squeezing a pimple until some richly satisfying