Flow Chart: A Poem (5 page)

young girls in my time take that path and wonder afterwards

what went wrong. I’ve seen children, taken from their homes

at too early an age, left to wander about like Little Nell,

not knowing that they were never obliged to do this thing. O

paradise, to lie in the hammock with one’s book and drink,

not hearing the murmur of consternation as it moves progressively

up the decibel scale. Yet I see you are uncertain where to locate me:

here I am. And I’ve done more thinking about you than you perhaps realize,

yes, a sight more than you’ve done about
me
. Which reminds me:

when are we going to get together? I mean really—not just for a

drink and a smoke, but
really

invade each other’s privacy in a significant way that will make sense

and later amends to both of us for having done so, for I am

short of the mark despite my bluster and my swaggering,

have no real home and no one to inhabit it except you

whom I am in danger of losing permanently as a bluefish slips off

the deck of a ship, as a tuna flounders, but say, you know all that.

What kind of a chump do you think I am, anyway? I would like your

attention, not just your eyes and face. I would like to tell you

how much I love you. I’m a sap for trying, but down deep

in the bowels of the ship we hear something, don’t you agree, that

tells us where we went off course and what we must do to

get back on it only now it’s too late, all the

spars have erupted like apple blossoms, hitting the reef: I would

like to go on for a while anyway, but wonder under the circumstances whether

it wouldn’t be like setting out on a long journey in rain so heavy

it takes your breath away. Even one step is out of the question,

I think, now. I no longer have the energy to breathe

on the windowpane so that the frost will transform it into garlands

of chiseled steel that draw one out

like a rapt interlocutrix. No it’s

heavy out here today; the wind serves only to remind one of other possible

beginnings and an end, if one were likely to pass this way again.

I see.

I’ll try another ticket. Meanwhile thanks for the harmonium: its

inoffensive chords swept me right off my feet near the railroad

and—nice—are returning to bloom tomorrow and each day after that.

I thought nobody needed a confessor any more, but I was wrong I guess,

so, old stump, I’m off until tomorrow or some day early next week, I mean

how much more can I say, giving myself away, without negating

the positive meaning of what I wanted to say and which has now subtly changed

back to an elementary precept or something else one doesn’t much want to hear:

how we flowered, and lost, and rose up thin again with our thoughts

to distract us but not too much and so approached the shambling

roadbed and placed one sole in front of another, slowly but not tentatively,

and then the lean-to, the buttercups and the ring of blue mountains hove

into view as though to say but that’s what I asked you last time

and now you will be forced to give a different answer

even though the wind has dropped. I thought I saw someone over there.

No, it’s just the wind egging the trees on

into battle with dusk, and I can

still see how it’s still you there, only with such a difference I almost

didn’t have time to trust my space. But we know now and have had it true

to be us, for the asking, for the begging, for the just one more time.

In winter it was generally a slow blizzard of piano rags, while in summer

or some such season gentian shadows on the tapioca fields looked themselves

good enough to eat, and always in a locker downstairs was this pocket

mirror with
the
thumbprint on it, a source of shame, but how

can I deny my true origin and nature even if it’s going to get me into a lot of

trouble later? At any rate, no notice was taken of anything and

maids pushed their prams and policemen stopped cars and it was getting to be spring

or it wasn’t, but the bare trees looked oddly barbed, and perhaps
that

was something, and it seemed to be starting to rain. I sit here

wringing my hands but what good does it do

if
I
am the ghost this time despite

the reassuring activity that surrounds me? And if I am to be cast off, then

where
? There has to be a space, even a negative one, a slot

for me, or does there? But if all space is contained within me, then

there is no place for me to go, I am not even here, and now, and can join

no choir or club, indeed I am the sawdust of what’s around but nobody can

even authorize that either. My Collected Letters will I somehow

feel vindicate me but even there the onion skin cannot be split and I’ll go on

being a postscript written in invisible ink until some day several centuries from now

when they open a time capsule and enthusiastic fresh air will rush out to inform

the world and one can rise from one’s nap in time for bed. The great apartment

fronts will put their heads together and sunset will seem an enormous conflagration,

but vindicate one at what price? Where are the children now who wanted

to hear that story? Why, the youngest of them passed away years ago

on the west coast surprised that anyone should remember and the slow

torrent of the glacier got piped in efficiently to fill the slightest hairline

fissure. Its job is done. We all live in the past now. And so the children

must still hang on somewhere, though no one is quite sure where or how many

or what paths there are to be taken in darkness. Only the fools, the severed heads, know.

So my old mother became a niche in time, and she, too, preferred not to get out of it:

as long as it was going to be, it wasn’t this bad, says the antique adage. And these

three or four others came of it. No one asked them in but they came in anyway,

prepared to play. And somehow a chapter was written about this. It all

boils down to keeping quiet and having a good time. As long as you don’t abuse

the orange trees standing in their pots so civil, well all will be yours next time too

and let’s hear it for those who never won anything, whose time came and went

like the tide leaving curious bones behind, and they were never cheated on and never

lied, without telling anyone the truth. And behind these, interlopers

and more interlopers, a vast frame of them, too facile to be derided.

And bananas stand around stiffly, at attention. Is this

the gray way I once knew? And if so, where are the standard bearers? Why

have our values been lost? Who is going to pay for any of this?

Pottsville is too small for a man of your caliber. Full many a flower

is born to blush unseen, and waste its fragrance on the arctic air

outside the Shady Octopus saloon, and then some.

If all is going to be reorganized, the charming irregularities of the days

ahead may as well go too, the song of plaintive songs choke off the ingress

while alleviating the drip, as the old man, hypotenuse-like, touches

an extremity that soon burns out of control, surrounds

the town on the down and all rush together, those who

hated each other suddenly finding good reason for the slobbering embrace.

Whether it’s more fun to feel in one’s own underpants

or strike out on the highroad to professional success, all pavilions a-flutter,

all portholes glinting, before the thing sinks in the mouth of the river, memory

has been transformed into corpses and while we stand discussing the news the unmanageable

outline of something much bigger and more profuse is struggling to understand

itself (it will be years before it gets around to us and by then

what faces will we be? Who’s going to take care of the association headquarters

and, likelier still, revert with us to the narrow-gauge railroad track that steals

through yellow viburnum and buried cinders as though to point the finger of guilt

at the very beginning, the origin that is still a baby, learning to cry

as the lights are blown out and darkness like a swift film of oil closes down

to the brilliant crack at the horizon’s outcome?). No two employees know it.

I thought, and this much remained hidden from me:

the beloved canker that was always there, willing to give you all of “Queen Mab”

for a quarter, or turn on the rusty heel of one boot and be off, whistling

into such nether parts of the sky as are deemed scarcely fit for consumption

here on our poor earth; the Christmas lights, each blinking in the triumph of its

individual color toward the benefit of the whole; the stars and so on brought forth

each night as a sop to the unweeded intellect, though much

more remains to be read into them; polar bears, relaxing each on his floe in the arctic section

of the zoo or rolling off it into the green, greasy water; people with pencils

in their hands; a selection of erotic attractions for this week including stiletto heels

and rubber miniskirts; carloads of whatever thundered past in the night; juleps

on porches; and the most extravagant collection of whodunit compliments one

was ever gifted with, out of the nightfall of a dream, freeflowing as the meanders

of a great stream, and every bit as meaningless and ominous; and finally a choice

of purgations, each not necessarily appropriate to the instance; i.e., electrocution for the theft

of a needle; simple tears for aggravated manslaughter; a necklace of boar’s teeth

for blaspheming; added lines in the forehead for poaching, or preaching; a fountain

of mud on the front lawn of one who fondled his daughter’s best friend’s breasts;

and, for the discreetly ambitious, a monotonous horizon. As it all bore in

on me I started to awake, then thought better of it, then rushed to the phone to call

my broker, but it was too late: an osselet of meaning in the lizard’s tail

of eternity had clicked into place, become pure and unattainable, while I, goof

that I am, simultaneously realized just how sensational it was and how a fortune could

be made by being first with the revelation as the bank closed its doors and the market suspended operations.

True, they managed to save Hitler’s brain before it destroyed the world

with
zuppa inglese
. (Just look in the milk can and you’ll find out why.) But sometimes

walking away from a cure may not be the best way to get rid of it. Sure, you feel

fine. Today, and tomorrow as well. By next week you’re feeling better

than you have in a long time. And as the medication gradually dissipates, the feeling of

well-being takes over, an arbiter for generations to come. Only long after your death

will the life you so busily led be imputed to the cornerstone of rot that was

the secret, driving force in it: something everyone at the time found to be OK.

And as gravel sinks slowly with the aquifer’s depletion, those

not in the know will begin to stir in their sleep; it will gradually dawn on them

(in dreams of “cheese, toasted mostly”) how the ingenious theory was flawed; indeed

it was flaws that produced the dazzling quicksilver sheen that attracted

so many to it for so long. If that’s the case, why tarry on rutted goat-paths

from whence even the nearest foothills are shrouded, by mists, from view? The animals

are incredible; there’s even a dog named Bruce. One can retool the context, but slowly,

slowly, and of course there is no positive guarantee of a successful outcome; one

should think of it as a virtuoso spinning-song whose relentless
roulades
promise minor

disturbances among the cobwebbed rafters but perhaps nothing much to weave

one-armed nightshirts with for the wild swans, your brothers: only

try to forget the slow upward

path to perfectness and let its mirror-image

come to install its truly sensitive surface within you, during the night

of deft dreams and bad brushes with dolor. Fear of the dark causes it,

but by then to have been around and been of it will have carried over into lunch.

Do you think there’s some connection between this and that which happened before?

Perhaps not. Perhaps there is none, but the Patagonians will like it, all 499,500 of ’em.

Without further ado bring on the subject of these

negotiations. They all would like to collect it always, but since

that’s impossible, the Logos alone will have to suffice.

A pity, since no one has seen it recently. Others crowded the opening, hoping

to catch a glimpse, but the majority saw the occluded expatriate ragtag

representation and

decided to not even try. To this day no one knows the shape or heft of the thing,

and that’s the honest truth thrown out of court, exhibiting abrasions,

muffled. And the story of how we ran out of it.

So, “marrying little with less,”
meliora probant, deteriora

sequuntur
, they footdrag in oblivion, lingering over steaks to analyze

the latest inquiry.

My biological father thought enough of it to see that I was posited, demanding

names omitted from the roster, either from carelessness or intent to harm:
we’ll

see that the thing gets done! And moreover, as I was asking her about her car

a quiet moment of fatigue slipped in leaving faces drained, moments of pleasure