Flow Chart: A Poem (6 page)

unexamined. It was all because I told him he should change his shirt. He got mad

and went out and I didn’t see him again for thirty years, by which time both of us had aged

considerably but were still reasonably attractive, some might even say more so. I

reminded him of the shirt thing and he just laughed, said supermarkets sell them now

and besides you shouldn’t worry about a little dirt, it’s the spice of life, he said.

And we had set aside Siberia

for us and for a few beloved friends

but the bureaucracy and the logistics of it all defeated us, why we were tied

up in red tape for 2½ years and after that I just wanted out, no

place is worth that much worry. Besides it’s quite quiet and confusing at home, thank you

very much. Yet I was still hung up on his idea of me, I thought I was becoming that person

I didn’t even know or want to know very much about, and all of my

déjà-vus were ones that could have occurred to him. Still, life is reasonably absorbing

and there’s a lot of nice people around. Most days are well fed

and relaxing, and one can improve one’s mind a little

by going out to a film or having a chat with that special friend; and before

you know it it’s time to brush your teeth and go to bed. Why then, does that feeling

of emptiness keep turning up like a stranger you’ve seen dozens of times, out-of-focus

usually, standing toward the rear of the bus or fishing for coins at the newsstand? I’m

sure it’s all coincidence, but it

does have a way of rattling things, like a constant draft through the house, rustling

papers, riveting one’s eye on the clock. So what’s

to feel nervous about? We all know that we have to live for a certain time and then

unfortunately we must die, and after that no one is sure what happens. Accounts vary. But we

most of us feel we’ll be made comfortable for much of the time after that, and get credit

for the (admittedly) few nice things we did, and no one is going to make too much

of a fuss over those we’d rather draw the curtain over, and besides, we can’t see

much that was wrong in them, there are two sides to every question. Yet the facts

fascinate one, we become one of those persons who are only satisfied with thoroughly

reliable information—the truth, if there ever could be such a thing. Our journey

flows past us like ice chunks, maybe it is we that are stationary.

O so much God to police everything and still be left over to flatter one’s

harmless idiosyncrasies, the things that make us
us
, which is precisely

what is fading like paint on a sign, no matter how much one pretends it’s the same

as yesterday. And children talk to us—
that
, surely, must be a plus?

It’s the lunatic frequency this time. One man, taking his kids to the ball

game, reverted and was found playing cards at a friend’s house. In spring the tips of

the apple branches graze the trailer and it’s time for a new round

robin of progressive delicacies and returned thank-you letters. Out in the open

by the gym it was never a question of keep your pants on we’re all getting someplace, getting

to be someone. Those were perspectives too limned to shoot along and the people thanked

the baseball player who invented them. Inactivity is as a syrup to these people, some of them,

they bank on mistrust and in the end are amazed to find their land has been overgrazed

by herds of yak, each of the quadrupeds spaced almost equidistant from its

nearest neighbor, as far as the eye can see, to Labrador and beyond

into the topaz twilight of the Urals. Oh some will say

you can’t trust them let alone see them coming, let alone avoid a collision

with jarring implications for the future of humanity. Even its garish exterior

isn’t as uncompromising as one might

at first conclude, and then they have ashtrays and can see, no one makes extraordinary

demands on them as long as they go on living, and in April

that doesn’t seem an impossible feat. To those residing on the outskirts of some

city or suburb it gets to be even more of a tease—were
they
included in the survey, and,

if so, who are they? Shooting-gallery ducks waiting to be flattened, probably.

What if one crosses the sea

to descend at the pier where one’s sweetheart bade farewell to one several years ago and finds

her there to greet one, not all that changed? And if the parents of both parties pronounce it

a suitable match, why there you are, another union has been consecrated, another

two people been driven from loneliness into the reciprocal dawn of each other’s arms

as if it were long ago, and tidings spread throughout the land and ordinary people

came to appreciate and savor and go back into the narrow, closetlike conundrum of their own

slender existences and be thankful there was for once something to talk about and then

mutually agree on. A pact with the forces that be—nothing less, and that

is saying a good deal. So in all eras bargains have been struck,

horns blown, and in some strange, silly way each of us is the stronger for it. We made

our tea and then we drank it. This is an honorable instance of how shame can disappear

in the dust and the confusion, the aftermath. And if an executive

can teeter on his perch all day long from dawn to dusk, a wren

can say to him, why don’t you go on an organized outing, stop

fooling yourself, this world-situation isn’t nonsense though
real politik
may not be

the accurate term for it either, so why explode like a timebomb that was set long ago

and may no longer be operable? But you see so many

of us are like that bird, that man I mean, that for but a few can life resonate with

anything like serious implications. So many were hung out to dry, or, more accurately, to rot.

And these marginalia—what other word is there for them?—are the substance of the text,

by not being allowed to fit in. One can proceed like a ghost

along corridors and find that doors are closed to one, and then

what good is being invisible? It all goes to show how our parents taught us many things,

including the right one, that we should untie

gently, like a knotted shoelace, and then little expressions of relief occur in the whorls,

and many things, incipient ones, besides. Yet on the shoals of this time

everyone believes himself righteous and lost, that the view is only a way

in all directions, and one must have a timepiece to unravel ramifications that

in fact do not exist, but like a gold toothpick are merely on hand to see that they

get talked about and maybe some club will invite one of them to speak. It is an air

strangely purged of magnolias, and quicklime, and anyone

can be called to take a seat. Best to enjoy it,

not turn up in the unwritten part as a miser or scavenger few would have taken seriously

as a person, but just as many might have feared. We live in an age when terror

opens like breadfruit and one
must
pick and choose—the seeds and proverbs just

aren’t that numerous. Everybody must vote. Everybody’s vote must be accepted into the

tilting radio tower that is collapsing in one’s own best interest in one

dark swoop of mingled horror and relaxed apprehension: to accomplish

anything more would be a joke, yet

the boy

still stands there, hasn’t gone away; by any

other standards a misadventure yet one is going to be firm and tame and positive

in searching out the old prescription, scratching one’s

first initial idly in the wood of the door and only then

going away, to be something else in some other town when newspapers bearing

that day’s date finally arrive and the citizenry, perplexed, still goes about its business

carrying news of new situations into inaccessible corners of this bland

and stultified universe, only to be someone

isn’t then their top priority: getting to be tall in late afternoon is.

The arrogance of these people! Anyone who’s been around understands, and that

includes most of us: barristers…Out of one’s loneliness it’s hard not to forgive

the girl who longs to be seen, and the guy who wishes only to be left alone. Forest

dithers protect us a lot of the time, but for those moments when one is thrust willy-

nilly into the spotlight, then oh dear! I wish I had something more sizable to say—

couldn’t my part be rewritten? But that’s over too before long. And the forest comes to

seem more like a commodity, somewhere one can live and tie rope around oneself.

The annals, if there are any, transform this into glamour and chrysoprase, two

adjacent keys of a piano pressed down one after the other. And one’s modesty—

well it’s all here, in this manila folder. I was going to talk about that, tree

of the deep, tree of being beautiful of, of lost promise and hopes

that still flutter in the distance, and you know somehow…But in the end it got mistreated,

the happy moments streaked with sadness, but perhaps they always were.

Perhaps it says a great deal that there were any, and so

out of tune with the rest that was going on, like a canary in a zoo, and I said

why give any guarantees if it can be rescinded without notice, if entreaties are to

become comments, and you know what he said, he said, well, it’s reasonable for you to expect that

but it’s not unreasonable for anyone else to pay it no mind, so there! I was

crushed. The one person I thought understood. But it’s all right, he can go on paying,

meanwhile I am scarcely alone, though it
is
lonesome. However, when I start

feeling blue I can just stand up like everyone else and lay my cards on the table: look,

it says so, it’s all here, written in this book. So I’m never completely at a loss,

only a little disconcerted, thrashing about, sometimes. In the rival cesspool

of other nations they may think they have it better, but I know that here the

uncertainty is pure. And so I often take the afternoon off, read, write or gaze

intently out of the window for long periods of time. And then you take tea

in the afternoon, that is you make it and then drink it. Oh I’m so sorry, golly, how

nothing ever really comes to fruition. But by the same token I am relieved of manifold responsibilities,

am allowed to delegate authority, and before I know it, my mood

has changed, like a torn circus poster that becomes pristine again in reverse cinematography,

and these moments of course matter, and fall by the wayside in a positive sense.

Perplexed by myopia one still enjoys it, and in the autumn of life cackles somewhat unrestrainedly

before writing off one’s accurate perception

of all that has gone before in the heroic period when books are friends. Nature

wants you to do it. No seism infinitesimal enough not to register in the growing

tornado of disapproval when mountains crash in the rubble, electricity bisects the sky, and

shrill ululations burst forth from caverns deep in the earth’s surface. But I’m

getting ahead of my story, we’re talking about how you, a wanderer, like it,

and how to escape. Oh my dear, I’ve tried that. But if it interests you

you can browse through this catalog and, who knows, perhaps come up with a solution that will apply

to your complicated case, just conceivably, or perhaps you know someone better informed

in the higher echelons where the view is distant and severe,

the ground blue as steel.

But how trivial the music. All this. Yet it is where part of the gender first starts to

emerge and become a blur. The various members

of both sexes never seem to get hurt: theirs is a life that drifts peaceably along

as on a stream and they can wave

to each other like boats and join in the fun and never be forgotten. Possibly

a door opens far down in the wall to admit a lover

who as silently departs later. Possibly there is more to it all than this,

but if we can decipher even what the fair-minded man wants us to, what about the rest,

poverty and disclaimers? And who sees the mountain-mad man through goatshine

and never confesses to an early blunder concealed, to having left a child in the cold once?

And as they marginally edge each other, new and good truths and others, older

and not so good, begin to appear along the bicycle-trail of their itinerary

through space, here on earth. One was a Spanish longshoreman’s daughter,

a laughing girl, who, when told the truth, deliberately spat on it. Another,

young too, and in the full flower of “the devil’s beauty,” had good cause to come up and grab

an arm, an elbow resting on a newspaper as it happened, and tickle the thing

half to death. And in the interval of slide, or portamento, a lot of laughing does

get to be heard, only it’s like you’re not doing it, it’s the boys

on the other side of the ridge obeying their zeal again. The moon abruptly decides to set

and kids pester their parents for more firecrackers, in the crevices, where eyes

lately peeked out—O bored hero,

why not return to earth for a while? We have forgiven thee

what was construed as negligence rather than rancor, so in return we

should be taught by thy knee. Later when she comes to throw out the table scraps there it will be,

a little sliver of haven made and purposely rigged for you

to come and go many times without noticing, slinging your coat over your shoulder