Flow Chart: A Poem (27 page)

knows the secret and cares. As a door on its hinges, so he in his bed

turns and turns, and in his turning unlocks the rusted padlock of death,

that flies apart and at once I am shriven. Take me in, teach me her

ways, but above all don’t leave me for dead:

I live, though I draw only a little breath.

The story that she told me simmers in me still, though she is dead

these several months, lying as on a bed. The things we used to do, I to thee,

thou to me, matter still, but the sun points the way inexorably to death,

though it be but his, not our way. Funny the way the sun

can bring you around to her. And as you pause for breath,

remember it, now that it is done, and seeds flare in the sunflower.

And left it that way, and then it kind of got shelved. It was a missing increment,

but as long as no one realized it was missing, calm prevailed. When they did, it was well

on the way to being a back number of itself. So while people cared, and some even wept,

it was realized that this was a classic, even a generic, case, and soon

they called attention to other aspects of the affair. No one ever explained how a trained

competitor of long standing would just bar itself from the case that way, there being no

evidence of self-interest, except insofar as loving a sun constitutes one. They shied away

from this one, and it was with no love

or self-pity in its heart that it betook itself then down the few stone steps leading

to the crypt. Here, at least, peace of a sort reigned, better than the indifferent bog

of schnorrers and nay-sayers it had kept company with for so long, a whole season, and the unlovely

atmosphere that had soured that season at its close was not recognized here: it was a currency

no one had any use for. If this left one like sailcloth, with the grained and toned

texture of one who has seen much, and still wishes to help, why all the better: one could go

farther and fare worse than entertain the possibility of such a journey, a
voyage d’affaires

that will consistently be fun at any given moment. And so, though stalks heavy with the

mothy, mopheaded bloom may tremble next August, that is a thing of the past; the sun

purges its mind of all negative thoughts, granting

equanimity with the largesse of one who has too much, and

causes people to re-examine their attitudes. Maybe get some rain?

Are sherbets more glorious now than formerly? So this small, piecemeal uncurling exposes

vast sheets of preoccupations that the sun’s firmness can in many cases

cause to evaporate before their expiration date. A hound-shaped fragment of cloud rises

abruptly to the impressive center of the heavens only to fold itself

behind itself and fade into the distance even as it advances

bearing news of the channel coast. That is the archetypal kind of development

we’re interested in here at the window girls move past continually. Something

must be happening beyond the point where they turn

and become mere fragments. But to find out what that is,

we should be forced to relinquish this vantage point, so

deeply fought for, hardly won.

Yes, others chorused, and

we’ll see to it that good use is made of it once they find you. Sea

so dark, O harvester, is it possible they could have brought you and me together

after so long, only to be separated in an instant? There must have been some purpose to this,

some idea hiding in the vacuity, the regular oblongs that comprise

your adverse assessment of my capabilities, like building blocks? But no,

it says, please sit down, you’re upsetting the others. With my cant,

my stammer, I suppose? Oh all right, I’ll go peaceably, but when you next see me,

rigged out in nickel armor to do battle with the henchpersons—it doesn’t matter

whose—you’ll descry in me a note of alarming mildness that I was saving

for just such an occasion. After all,
I

can go on living here, and I don’t mind emptiness, but you

must fill your days with satisfying chatter. Then, just as the moon’s cloak

grazes the tits of some remote foothills, we’ll engage

each other constructively, your energy will flow into me and vice versa, and behold,

all will have been in vain, the warring, the contusions, the peacemongering:

we’ll have only ourselves, and only ourselves to blame.

Excellent is the peach, and stirring the tales

of battle, the calls to emulation. But excellent also is the spat-out pit, the ideal

of zero growth, when it comes to that. I think all men should argue, and then give in, for it

takes time to really make up one’s mind about certain matters. Days of mourning

in particular.

Then when somebody comes to ask you if you have freshened up, or would like to,

the whole freight train of associations is set in motion, lumbers gracelessly

along the clacking tracks, and it isn’t so much as if you
had
made up your mind, indeed

had done so quite some time ago, thank you, but as if it’s all off

and running: the race to the pageant, stiff competition among the ushers,

the stagehands. And now I want it to be the way

it was. I’m very particular about the trivia I associate with,

but for which I’d long ago have passed out from boredom. Which brings me to you: how do
you

like it, and could you care if you saw a sample of it escaping from the mass

to go inform other, unenlightened souls of whom we spoke and thought were past

redemption and caring but who shine like the night breezes

in this direction, the dew on them is genuine, and are those

tears? Who said it that way? I’ll go another way. And she’ll have me

then, there’ll be no recourse, and we shall be happy after all, that’s all there is to it, you’ll

see.

It will never make any difference now, but

it remains to note how the change will affect your work. Empty slots in the zodiac

presage no good, nor the giant pebble at its center, but who knows, with patience

and a little hunger one makes one’s way. From here you can see the town,

bustling with various kinds of sleepy activity. Old trucks in the squares.

Above it a few celestial blips, comparing different depths in space, how it feels

against a sky of tinfoil, and seemingly just emptied, but it has always been thus.

Gradually, heads appear around the rim of the crater, blotted in the sunlight.

Just gentle, happy suds, and the time to be missing:

all the time in the world, he liked to say,

and I’d recriminate too if I had escaped but it’s not clear that I have. I stumbled

into an abandoned pigpen just now, and they are watching, which is all

anybody ever does. If I had books here I’d read.

Characterizing this rebuttal as “hogwash,” the senator strode swiftly through the marble rotunda,

commenting the day’s happenings without missing a beat. We have seen that the police

charge you more for delivering a baby when it’s clement outdoors. We have seen

signs of life in the land of waiting, but it’s too soon to rejoice; we’ll

let you know. Others may have been after him to unzip the course, which wouldn’t explain

dance orchestras in the rainy plaza or the unquestioning look of one child whose doll

came in second. In the hayloft the air was pure and fresh

and I could remember how once all of existence was as painfully expectant, careless of duration

as the mayflies trying to just get by, and how this curdled at evening with the smell of socks

and underarm deodorant so that that desperate patch seemed a nice place to be. Anyway it

had tested our mettle, whatever that is. Warnings boiled up seemingly out of the ground

but it was difficult to know what to make of them, or even to know who they were meant for.

Was it the last train? No pass to the way home from school? It was hard too to decode the missing,

who had apparently been seen as recently as this morning, turning away after being turned away.

Their locks are always a little more opalescent, their gussets straighter. Hygiene

is always a problem in the jungle, but you can stay here for decades and never appear

flushed, or flustered. Something about the thinness of the topsoil. They stand you

up and march you away and nobody looks afraid, just bored, and the majesty of the larkspur

performs annually. Refreshments are on a first-come, first-served basis. We have seen the cage

and the humdrum animals it contains. We have seen the house of the leader,

a little farther off. And the numbered apples on his trees.

It can never be anything but symbolic.

By that I mean it can never cause utterance in outsiders,

only second thoughts and self-doubt. For the discourse (and by discourse I mean
lively
discourse)

to take place on a meaningful level, that is, outside someone’s brain, a state of artificial

sleep would have to be induced, first of all. Then the skills for measuring reflexive

response would have to be sharply honed. Finally, the patient’s automatic, and therefore healthy,

impulse toward duplicity would have to be sorted out, strand by strand, in order that the

viable negative attempts to ward off phenomena like the empurpled dais of the approaching

twilit gloom might be measured, both as to sincerity and effectiveness. This technically

not unrealizable state of affairs would then bring us closer, but only a little, to a vantage

point from which the abiding, negative (but in the sense of “passive”) sheathing of the soul might

offer an overview of what might be mounted inside that, but the view our telescope afforded

would be that of an episode which happened several trillion light-years ago, a fleeting

one at that, a grace-note in some cosmic oratorio from which one would then try to extrapolate

a sense of all that comes after, and how it jibes with the average mind of today,

its feeding habits, outbursts, and so on. The attempt is certainly worth making, even

if it only corroborates the central dark thesis about the purely symbolic, anti-functional

nature of the universe as a setting for the countless doomed initiatives that flourish

in it to supply compost for the core-concept, a somewhat antiquated but still functioning

regulatory system that organizes us in some semblance of order, binding some of us loosely,

baling others of us together like straw, but always there is a connection, albeit sometimes an

extremely loose one like a tendril that brushes against one, a lock of hair that falls over

the eye or a buzzing insect that is never too far away. And though the armature

that supports all these varied and indeed desperate initiatives has begun

to exhibit signs of metal fatigue it is nonetheless sound and beautiful in its capacity to perform

functions and imagine new ones when appropriate, the best model anyone has thought up

so far, like a poplar that bends and bends and is always capable of straightening itself

after the wind has gone; in short it is my home, and you are welcome in it

for as long as you wish to stay and abide by the rules. Still,

the doubling impulse that draws me toward it like some insane sexual attraction can

not be realized here. For that to take shape one would have to be able to conceive a linear

space independent of laws in which blunted gestures toward communication could advance or recede

without actually moving from the spot to which they are rooted; in other words, destiny could

happen all the time, vanish or repeat itself ad infinitum, and no one would be affected, one’s

real interests being points that define us, the line, which is dimensionless and without desire.

Thus, all things would happen simultaneously and on the same plane, and existence, freed

from the chain of causality, could work on important projects unconnected to itself and so

conceive a new architecture that would be nowhere, a hunger for nothing, desire desiring itself,

play organized according to theology with a cut-off date, before large façades. And these

urges, if that’s what they are, would exist already without propriety, without the need

or possibility of fulfillment, what the bass clarinet is to the orchestra, though of course we

would all get along very much as we do now, since human perfectibility would not

be sacrificed but on the contrary get promoted to the first desk, where it belongs,

and everybody would be free to draw his or her own conclusions and take them home like homework

provided the constellations remained inalterable, which is another question, and the

concept of beauty were abolished, which is another and possibly more important one. Anyway,

it looks like a nice day for all this, and I invite you to start revving up your VCR’s;

who knows what may happen? In the meantime, look sharp, and sharply at what is around you; there is

always the possibility something may come of something, and that is our

fondest wish though it says here I’m not supposed to say so, not now, not

in this place of wood and sunlight, this stable or retiring room or whatever you want to call it.

Excuse me while I fart. There, that’s better. I actually feel relieved.

Who knew at the time how froward they would be

later on, and in what circumstances we would be meeting again,

and how others with the names of heroes of boys’ adventure novels would be replacing us

on the perilously steep escalator of destiny that only lurches upward,