Flow Chart: A Poem (28 page)

ever unsatisfied, forever finding fault? Some of this crowd

were about right. But it can never stop raining. There are places you drive through

and people who come out to see what’s going on, but in the end these are effects

merely. The truly vitiated look haggard and mean, whether they be socially

acceptable or no, and still the perquisite authority hasn’t been distilled;

it is everyone’s, for everyone to see. I will show you fear in a handful of specialists. Furthermore

the burliest male is but as a handmaiden to the suspicion of his own history:

he’s got it right, OK? And so have a few others, while the waiting’s been going on. But enough of

this self-congratulation in Aegean sunrises. Who are we, after all? And who needs profundity?

The moment I came down here I knew it was going to get better. There were autographs to sign,

and contracts, many of them in sextuplicate, and so I knew I was in for a good rest

after a long drive, and they’d leave me in peace, though not forget about me. Alas,

how sparsely furnished it all looks now. Chatterton’s garret? And how much harder it is to pinpoint

the single, modestly important thing, now that we know its freight would be

long in coming, and much harder to decipher than any

entity before now. But of course! That’s the solution! We know ourselves and everything

of the past. The one thing we don’t know is how silly it’s going to look in about five

minutes, like an eighteenth-century cherub atop a globe. You fuck me, I’ll

fix you. You give me that, and I’ll give you this. It’s all so important yet so excruciatingly

banal, isn’t it, darling? Then we’ll have come home and there will be an end to it,

and they that have found it already shall have it taken away from them, and we who

never knew what a good thing we were on to shall be reproached and rewarded

with the viceroy’s attention, though we must stand outside, I think. Fortify my ignorance

then, I shan’t be doing anything to anybody but must not for this

reason stand alone, uninspired by hope. Three seasons shall pass before anybody gets up the nerve to jump,

by which time a perverse

order shall reign and those who have inspired us shall take their places in it

like latecomers ushered to their seats at the opera once the overture is finished. You can’t

can it and sell it, that’s for sure, but it
is
a commodity, and someday all

will be wiser for it. And the paradoxically strong sense of personal loss that overwhelms you

when you hear about the death of someone you barely knew will answer for it too: you’ll

be exonerated and no one will ever make fun of you again, or turn aside

when your name is mentioned. Meanwhile you’ll be slightly happy when they

see how much your standing in this rigid matriarchal society has been enhanced

by the little you do, trying to scrape out a living and keeping your sense of humor,

which is, assuredly, not always easy. Anyway, someone will care.

They’d better. And the funk take over. The generations collapse like floors

in a burning building, and it will all somehow be…
appropriate
. Er, yes. We is rich

and handsome, as it were. HOWEVER,

I’ll face the world alone. Bad cats will want to eat me. Autos

will run over me. Dogs will chase me. Chickens, hawks, tigers, lions…Perhaps

I’d better ride up with you. You understand, of course.

I certainly don’t want to live next to a taxidermist. Miss Gale, I may need you later.

Then in the car he proposed to me. In the back seat. We drank sacrificial wine.

It was so
good
. And underneath I was saying,

all men are rogues, but I guess I like them,

if that’s what they are. Then we went out and a cloud like a magician’s cape

covered the sun. I’ll never forget that. And we walked on

awhile and I was trying to explain my embarrassing

tendency not to be able to distinguish things that happened to me years ago

from recent dreams. He was cool for a while after that. Men

never seem to know how much to erase, and afterward it’s bedlam, greed and self-interest take over

to a point where they actually cancel each other out, and one is left

hungry for one’s greed, at least it was something, and now, why no

one has anything left to be impatient about. It’s like damp weather.

And everybody said no wonder. It’s an hour to find you.

You, so belated in the past, your comments could never be

interpreted as part of history, or so you said, and that’s what we thought.

I’m just a copier. You are the history, the book. In time I think

it’ll get you straight and all peoples will see what we’re up to. In the past they chided you:

no more. I’m sending for your things, your books and things, we’ll go over

it again in the morning. First get a good night’s sleep. There are people who think nothing of

writing out a check for the full amount and handing it to you. I mean we’re talking

debts canceled, a link to the future, daybreak…Well I thought so too and

still I’ve had it with those who want to own you, as it were,

and give you nothing in return. Still, if it were possible to come to some agreement

or other, I think I’d be content, and they too. Here, it says in the bar

how much we’re going to spend, and then we’ll be equidistant from base camp and the

summit and have some voice in our lives and how much the future matters

to us, and to others as well. Boy, I’ll say so. Meanwhile, do you

think they’re going to kill us in cold blood? Naw, I don’t think so, besides

it’s too risky, and we’re on this side of the great river, they

on the other. I’d like to thank you for what you just said, but I could never

find the words.

Oh, that’s all right.

A soft rain,

a sudden shower. Why shouldn’t it?

And of all the ones I like

this is the most promising. Here in the dry

it is, anyway. It likes us, saying, “We’ll get you over

this one, then hand you back the tiller. The others

are all love and lovers, sometimes.” We won’t bite,

though, having been deceived so often in the past. The fact that the

happy ending’s only waiting your approval dooms it; you shall go off the deep end

once more and ultimately, and, not to put too fine a deconstruction on it, be redeemed only

in a distant future no one cares to look into. There’s so much of it going round

now that no one wants to look farther than his or her pocket mirror. It’s funny how certain natural

calamities bring people together at times, separate them at others. Rampant “me tooism”’s certainly

the order of the day, and such a tall order; one can view oneself framed, silhouetted, dead, and

still only think in terms of surfaces, boundaries; the very heavens

have lifted off for destinations unknown, and as we can sit

here, we do. It isn’t uncold. Whence comes Iceland’s beam? But suppose you know someone who’s

got a vested interest, an urge to show you how your hostility is what’s aborting

the final, suave wrap-up, with the guts to stand up and say so—
then

aren’t we uniting, and isn’t something due

to come of it when the last tears stain the oak flooring, and the roasted swans, the pineapples,

are sent away untasted. How many of us does
that
make?

Two, surely, but there is something like flowers in the room, and that makes it

a magic number, confounding calculations, canceling reports,

bringing in other unknown elements that are a form of art, at least

as long as they stay that way. True, that puts us in one another’s way; we can no longer

aim at that destination on the wall, that hill outside the window, that seemed to promise

indefinite relief, but at least, being boxed in, can thwart the unknown at home, swear

fidelity and probably mean it this time. And meanwhile the tottering parade of ancient red

double-decker London buses winds past the window like a shriek

of victory but in reality contradicting itself: no carnival could be this atrocious
and

unfrequented, at least it seems so to me. And one fits exactly the space of the mind

opposite one; there is no

sequel and no blank pages. As far as I’m concerned it’s a draw, and a decent one at that

if you keep your mind off it.

Voices of autumn in full, heavy summer;

algae spangling a pool. A lot remains to be done, doesn’t it?

I haven’t even begun to turn myself inside-out yet, and that

has to precede even an informal beginning. Try making up those childish itineraries we were once

so apt at, and you’ll see. Even my diary has become an omen to me,

and I know how I’ll have to go on writing it; it would be disappointed

otherwise. And those days we have to get through! Afternoons at the store,

and when bluish evening, the color of television

in a window high above the street, comes on, who has the strength to

judge it all according to a pre-existing set of criteria and then live with it,

let alone enjoy it and aim it at being a force for good, in one’s life and that of those

we share, for a time, this earth with, and later on to judge the after-effect of those fruits of it

which may no longer exist except as examples and increasingly dim ones at that? Why

it’s enough to make you want to leave home, strike out on your own

at midnight: “Why Girls Leave Home,” “The Trial of Mary Dugan”: maybe these were the things

they were saying then in the theater or writing about in novels so that

people would
understand
and thereby save themselves a lot of trouble

and floundering. In the unprincipled mire we walk about in today, nobody bothers even

to warn you about the perils of white slavery (to cite an extreme example), but then again

nobody is forcing you to save yourself either. That would be uncouth. Yet it would be nice

to think that years afterward one might have a good laugh about it,

and that assurance is precisely what we lack today. The fact is that no one even cares

what’s it all about. They see only shoe-leather

thinning into the future, and the inexorable dawn

shading into dusk, and know that’s what they’re made of, like it

or not. That’s what everybody’s made of,

and it comes as no shock to find out that the present is, after all, brittle

as glass in a burning conservatory. Listening to the dance music from outside

is all that matters. Really. Stockings are of secondary importance.

There was a strange, scorched taste to the soup,

I thought. Had you?

Otherwise who would believe us when we came

home to taste the soup, and cry a little, not wanting much?

Like little girls pretending to understand each other

when they talk like adults, we’d see that living

on this alternate rail was possible but not

eminently desirable, though definitely possible.

O in that winter what tore my thought was the shiny poem

I was about to read and recite, and write: a lacquered thing

with an even more exciting nimbus that spelt out possibilities

in all the tales we were going to be told, all the wrongs

inflicted on us and in turn by us on all those

around us, neither more nor less fortunate than we.

Trying to drum up business one begins explaining recklessly

one’s family and the dates in one’s house, the little

plum tree visible in the enclosure. The path one made

forcing oneself. And now these are out of date and exactly what is

required here. Let’s pass on them without analyzing them,

and others who sang here, knowing justice mysterious, and out of the way,

the way a moth sings in the house. A letting go,

as finger by finger unclasps. But we told it the way we wanted it to go.

So what about your story? And the fires that made you, better

than you wanted, still not worth dying for? I placed an ad,

it was wrong of me, and how should I go?

There—it’s over. And what a blessed relief. I have always loved the

sight of women sewing, and holly at the eaves, sometimes a look that

spears you through the darkness: you are the unaccountable one

but there are acres of us just now. And I thought I came off looking lewd.

No, but with the dock ahead, and that man in pinstripes

and bowler. We knew there’d be repercussions, but they were soft

as cotton candy when they came, and respectful, like dreams

put away, like money in the bank.

Time was when weather seemed a release. Today it’s screwed down

all the way, like a cap on a jar, yet it mirrors something

in each one of us, something we had been trying to find out

without much success as dogs came and went across

dull afternoons—the “dear, dead days” as someone called them.

It’s there, but with a new intensity. Everything is landscaped

for one’s greater peace of mind, the furnaces within banked

for greater authoritativeness. I would like to

come out on the plus side,
I
wants us to, and amid the

explosions of careless lovemaking I suppose that’s possible.

What’s the catch? No doubt it lies somewhere along the way

of overreacting to these minute meteorological changes,

a slight twist to the horizon’s lip or the ghost

of a frown that could have seen anything, such as the V of a bird

disappearing desultorily into a cloud. And meanwhile

there are rooms to be put back in order.