Flow Chart: A Poem (4 page)

is obliged to, everyone may
bon gré mal gré
ignore it, yet it peaks

and in so doing has its say. The manageress was adamant, but I had the horrible idea

of prolonging beyond night and dawn one’s predilection for quoting old

dispatches and getting into hot water, and then? The sullen bathroom

question lasted, I was too far out into it, out of pocket, plus the by no means negligible

question of my own comfort to be decoded, and all other arguments

suddenly collapsed, like a dream of homecoming. How stung my myth;

my dream wasn’t over, we were only such a dream. By this time all the caissons

of power had been turned inside out anyway; it was considered correct to despise it

and rightly so, but how often can one shamble

back to the vegetable gunk and still retain at least a superficial appearance of contrition?

As often as the clock seems to say I love you and boulders

turn in their sleep and sigh and the cat is forever running away. It took

two weeks to lead up to this. The stores are quiet now.

I say lie down in it. I already asked Santa about it.

And then, you see, it became part of our cultural history. We can’t ignore it

even though we’d like to, it’s so mild and hurtless. And you thought

you had it bad, or good. With as many associations as that

to keep thumbing through, one winks at the legal filigrane that penetrates every

page of the mouldering sheaf down to the last one, like a spike

through a door. Somebody dust these ashes off, open

the curtains, get a little light on the subject: the subject

going off on its own again. Yes but if home were only light

sliding down darkened windows in rivulets, inhabiting their

concavities and generally adapting itself to the contours of what is already there,

one could understand that,

lie back on the stiff daybed shading one’s eyes from

omnipresent bleary dawn that acts as an uncle’s remonstrance: do this

not for me or for yourself but for your mother the way an empty circle

of daisies seeks to promote plausibility and is simultaneously too distraught

and ashamed to articulate the siren call crisply and sinks, it too,

into the foam of reliably not taking itself seriously. I wish you well darling always

especially days when the gray pain lifts for a moment like fog trapped under

a layer of warmer air, then sags definitively not knowing what to do

with itself or about anything. Days when the pointed freshness of forests

above the snowline

can consider itself numb, when the friendly gurgling of rills talks

back and one listens but never heeds

that desire for perfectability. Hey, it was here only a moment ago

I think or somebody misled me, as sometimes happens, yet with as many

associations as that some of it is bound to come down, to crumble, to be reduced

to a vexing powder but natural like dust, and that

within all our lifetimes. Local businessmen bristled. New painless

methods were introduced but somehow made it all thick and rubbery, an unwanted anthem.

No one said it. Care was off and running, the divorce courts

overflowing for once, and no one was going to take issue, dispute the power vacuum

that was walking around shaking hands, acting for all the world like a candidate.

But you feel it don’t you? How come nobody

has anything nice

to say, I mean you striped ball, even for a testimonial dinner on a commercial, then they all

run back, must have been a mistake. Yes, we have it here.

Anyway, where are they? I am violently opposed to the little pieces

of the puzzle getting in on the act; slobbering, as it were,

any more than I can see Little Red Riding Hood climbing Mt. McKinley.

But as for the horror of it—we are, look, all of us, undisciplined so

when it’s time to take the kids somewhere or subvert the boss’s ego the light

goes out of us for an instant. Oh I know we can patch it up, always successfully,

later. But out of the fine deposit of the encounter there is surely something

that is required reading, though seldom in focus. Good gravy, it

gives me the creeps just telling you about it. And after we had sunbathed

the mist was on time, dull and fathomable. That’s no reason to return home, to

our roots, of course, yet neither can it be construed as an invitation. You see

everything you see on television is a fraud, is planted there to confuse distraught

patriots like yourself, and though we enter into it no wiser and leave

resolved to mend our ways, something like an actual misprint occurs. We are no

longer in charge of our propriety; jackdaws have launched nearby and the elms have seen

better days. Why is it that just because I’m a child I can

warn no one of this, except by speaking in tongues? Oh I know formulating

bright, snazzy, fabulous demands isn’t the same thing as being a teacher

and picking up on the slowness of your student. I can rhapsodize about that

too, but there comes a point when having aimed

accurately and reaped the reasonable rewards is more than something to

sing about, is the entity, no I mean the accretion—is indeed the

fantastic fact. It was like being run over when I

first thought of this. And now sad to say our limbs

aren’t as important; we have witnessed an entire tennis match and candles

are coming on, there’s a hint

of fall in the air, soggy and bored.
O I have to keep fighting

back to find you, and then when you’re still there, what is it I know?

Nothing about the future and no more about you, either, honey,

I was going to say. Have you noted how things

have a way of working out but have you also noted how rarely this constitutes a satisfying

set of circumstances, especially when we dream, not plan, them? In my house

no one is rude but that’s no excuse;

I think footfalls

are approaching, circling round, then moving away

to some other sun, some direction? I care more

yet it’s there.

Despite handicaps trading continues,

natural horns bleat. The fog may be messing up traffic today

but in offices chic outfits signal that for sure violence too has its calm

aspects, when things get done in dozens, or even scores. The museum

guards must have known something was up, yet here too, only silence stammers.

Don’t ask your partner what to think. He may have noticed

that the weathervane has jammed even as crowds of daytrippers

move on out of the city in gaily painted carts, and by noon something just

too awful had come between us. I called John but he couldn’t come to the phone

nor did his assistant have any clue as to what the barking, the clatter

of falling jewelry were all about. It occurs to me in my home on the beach

sometimes that others must have experiences identical to mine

and are also unable to speak of them, that if we cared

enough to go into each other’s psyche and explore

around, some of the canned white entrepreneurial brain food

could be reproduced in time to save the legions

of the dispossessed, and elephants. But—

what is a waiting room for, after all? If not to

live out one’s life scarily to the borders of altered lawns

with red leaves nestled on them. Home becomes more than a place, more even than

a concept for this elite minority, and then singles them out

by pointing so that some symbol of their shame never

goes away, until the paper it is written on has rotted

over thousands of years, by which time new insects will have been introduced,

new forms of dandruff, holes that are really shoes. A thin puddle of air

rules over us; all obeisances are made that way, all

curtsies and notions seem to point into that vortex

of fear just as the alarm goes off. But is it

fear, or only an unpleasant hum? And jaywalkers gravitate there,

are seen to believe. The old man had no enemies. Why, then? Because a handful

of ages knew of his connection to poetry via the wet, fissured rocks far below

in the cave and took revenge for their own knowingness to create an unpleasant

situation that would probably have gone away if nobody had said anything about it,

but now—well you just can’t ask people to keep silent

about something they’ve seen, and the forces that prodded

us on to victory are staging an uncharacteristic fast.

Only the intrusion of tomorrow’s light will have been recognized as a new note

in the negotiations, which will in any case by that time be in the public

domain, and no further recruiting be deemed necessary, or undertaken.

I can’t shake the hunch that this is what the stuff is all about

and no one cares to

know, let alone be a witness to further legal horse-trading.

That’s what caused all the trouble.

Words, however, are not the culprit. They are at worst a placebo,

leading nowhere (though nowhere, it must be added, can sometimes be a cozy

place, preferable in many cases to somewhere), to banal if agreeable note-spinning.

Covering reams of foolscap with them won’t guarantee success,

yet neither will it automatically induce ruination; wheel on the guillotine;

leave, in the middle distance, something like an endless morgue, a lake of regret.

It’s better though to listen to the strange chirps of the furniture.

Listening is a patented device whose manifold uses have scarcely begun to be explored,

that one should practice on as many occasions as are deemed profitable. Bore your friends,

wine them, show them a grand time: other, more auspicious

occasions are sure to be evoked; nights when, from the grandstand, tremendous plumes

of steam plummeted straight into the basalt sky. Days of conversation, and, at the end,

a feeling of progress in sorting out mutual feelings and actually partly

resolving certain discords came to seem as though it were happening

and the treehouse was split apart by rays plunging out of the incandescent

core of tangled concerns and resolves and the handcar of an important relationship

was steered onto the right track out of the city into a shadowed, mostly empty

peripheral zone of tears for anointed and angry memories, defused now,

ready for twilight. It’s something Eagle Scouts used to discuss

by the campfire, a page that somehow got ripped out of the record, to be

as though it had never been. Just because cows and horses stand around much as they always have,

it is as though we were contemplating a set of sealed instructions:

now the bridge will never be built,

if that is all time had in the wallet at his back. Scaled-down surprises

here and there, a puttering about in dust, and once again it seems as though it

were all up to us. Well, why not? The gravel underfoot is a little finer

this time round. And nobody yells at you. The words have, as they

always do, come full circle, dragging the meaning that was on the reverse side

all along, and one even

expects this, something to chew on. I’m rubber

and you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you; in which gluey

embrace I surrender. We are both part of a living thing now.

A decade later he stumbled or became confused.

There was no one else along on this outing, so why was he

always flailing his arms majestically? Talking to the walls? Whenever someone’d

cross over to be kind to him it was as though he’d never seen a human face before;

the eyes were runny, the nose ditto, the words were like chopped cotton wool

after he’d forced them out. To drag meaning like this behind one is bad

enough, but to have it beside one is worse, worse than knowing what to do.

Finally, the memory became an object

to be passed around for displays of connoisseurship to ignite; thus,

one can live in the same house with one’s ambitions and

drives and still have the luxury of feeling alone: oh come off it, no

one wants to be alone. And even, you know, accept the occasional invitation

but also slog on unshod, solitary, except for casual greetings from

even more casual acquaintances.

Harder to explain is the disparity between what is loved

and the energy with which one goes about doing it, and harder still

to understand or appreciate the astonishingly thin gruel

which serves its hunger
de tous les jours
and with which

it gives every appearance of being satisfied. I suppose if one

were born and grew up on a desert island, knowing

of nothing better or even different, one might coincide

with the four walls that contain one and see no anomaly, no

grotesquerie, in the result. This mound of cold ashes that we call

for want of a better word the past wouldn’t inflect the horizon

as it does here, calling attention to shapes

that resemble it and so liberating them into the bloodstream

of our collective memory: here a chicken coop, there a smokestack,

farther on an underground laboratory. These things then wouldn’t

depress (or, as sometimes happens, exalt) one, and living would be just that:

a heavenly apothegm leading to a trance on earth. Yet one scolds

the horizon for having nothing better to offer.
Did I order that?

And when the bill comes, tries to complain to the management

but at that point the jig, or whatever, is up. Yes I’ve seen many fine