Flow Chart: A Poem (9 page)

can lie but no more, reprisals splash into the night. It must surely have come

from over there, those dried grasses. More power to them, for what must never

seem to have taken place on an afternoon once. As we kindle interest in that old past, what

astonishing trills one hears, what blistering swamp flowers thrust open; furry

sea-creatures invade the royal compound and next week the clock will strike

exactly at twelve o’clock, you’ll be free of a long-tendered obligation.

Since then I’ve been sleeping better too, but your shoes aren’t getting fed properly, there are

spots on whatever one is called to drink, and curse it, no

water in the watering-trough. Yes but the horse said he didn’t want any, besides

his harness is torn and angry,

a proverb for the industrious. Oh we’ve known a long time how much her

trail was costing her and others and now it’s time for definitive common knowledge, only

nothing is so sure anymore it wants to be reminded. Maybe it never knew at all. Maybe

we deduced it out of guilt, and now it’s we on the run, my goodness how the unrolling

scenery veers past. Was it even we

who were meant to start on this race? Might it have been for the others, all for them,

and so one is let off lightly, or so it seems, with a reprimand

and a startling dream? I told someone at the start of this

I wouldn’t play faster than my nearest neighbor. Now look

what’s become of him. I wouldn’t want to end up at a finish line unwashed

and looking like that. I go. I come later. You all land at the bottom of a crowded funnel

and so whatever joke is cracked coincides with your defense. Not everyone was made to wear

what we choose to wear. The colors, rinsed, insistent, return; the pink is for you,

not just to wash and wish desperately into something else that in any case

was probably never meant to be understood, and it smiles, and salvages

what little it can from the eternal barren beginning of March. Just two;

the alibi would only cover two; it’s over; we are lost

in the habit, smiling in a foxglove tent; but the doves requested permission to weave over us

like psalms and sometimes the sun is good, but it just seems like it won’t go away

the way a song does, leaving a slightly hollowed path behind. We could follow,

but the brimming lake on the horizon is more likely to join us if we

don’t absolve ourselves, recklessly dreaming. In time all excuses merge in an arch

whose keystone overlooks heaven, and

we must be patient if we are to live that far, at our own expense, this time, without that.

Bet there was some falling off there; still, amid the hoo-ha concerning new appointments and

such there was no time to discern; new people there, android sleep rains down

on pinched neighbors like ingots of silver, and there’s no mess, only a poking among reeds.

The last recognizable mentor left; it was up to the remains of his flock to reconstitute,

but left to their own devices many fled the comparative safety of the coop for used-

car lots, car washes, drive-in banks, in order so to speak to get their heads together.

I was the only one of my squadron to count them as they left in single file,

but not being able to do much about it, or keep records, soon I too was lost—well, not exactly,

but tethered expectations always result when you go a little too far in one direction, not

enough in another, and betimes one spots the calendar on the office wall: think, it says.

Like a plangent river my life has unrolled this far, to a fraction of this place,

and I have commandeered motor launches, but it has all been in vain, this celebration: listen,

what do children think of you now? Suddenly everyone is younger, and many of them not all

that young, either, and who, do you suppose, loves you? It’s a variant of the shell game

again; not all its premises are suicidal, but where is the one who takes out the ashes,

leaves the key behind? Up through the frantic town he rages (“It works, it’s bent

but it works!”) like the wing of a plane but we always knew it was here, sure we did, Ma I’ll tell you later

in the meantime and lilac bushes are a kind of promise. Aren’t they? And wine,

and noisemakers, and all the little things we thought good at a hinge in space: they’re

not like that now, are they? And all the kids, and people who came over: now salted

in their time, and we try to break out of ours, I guess, and still the animals stampede toward

headquarters. I was depressed when I wrote that. Don’t read it. Still, if you must, take

note of certain exemptions in the

fourth paragraph where I was high: they said it shouldn’t enter, but I succeeded in decoding the big top

so that someday all children should live like this, have what was at last ours,

only I succeeded and a train roared by:
that man
, it seems to say. And then it is past,

after it is flagged down. A sore spot in my memory undoes what I have just written

as fast as I can write; weave, and it shall be unraveled; talk, and the listener response

will take your breath away, so it is decreed. And I shall be traveling on

a little farther to a favorite spot of mine, O you’d like it, but no one can go there. The mummy

said so. I have to keep in the shadows yet a little longer, until you will wisely see how I

fit under here and so must leave any day now.

The boskets were blue, I remember; only

a few ships in the distance now, and a tall flag beckons

me in another direction. Dammit, I’ll stick to this one, this is the one they meant

for me to take all along, and I don’t see why I should take that other one. My child,

you must do as you wish; to do otherwise would insult God’s rule, and you do

care for Him, don’t you? Only give no thought to the morrow—

it will presently arrive and take care of itself, you’ll see. Meanwhile, if a new hat

might seem appropriate, then why not? Oh father I was looking out the window

but this time doesn’t seem such a long one, mightn’t we return

to the old cabin, just for a glimpse of the driveway? But that,

as the parrot said, is another story. Sooner or later you go blind staring at platinum

and the reverberations that warned against it can themselves no longer be distinguished

in the thudding and fog, and if all comes to be eclipsed at some

date in the not-too-near future, then why does it say I’m a salesman with a tie trying to

interest you in this new product, that can go out of control? It’s the Cotswolds

for me, but no, he has the name tag in his pants and this string flying behind him

into what you were told would be a void, which is his study. Heaven help jerks, they need

it worse than we, yet always something funny acts as a short prelude to disaster, and then afterwards

everybody is relieved; it’s still a high school; there’s nothing no longer wrong with it

and the shade acts as a puddle

from which froglike eyes protrude, if it is indeed this occasion, and this is 901½ McKinstry

Place, and you are Judson L. Whittaker, oh take this wheelbarrow far from my sight and bury it

on yonder height, so impatient have my clones become, and I, in the light,

of this new development am all but induced to come along with you. The stones

forbid it though. Fire that does not burn? Tell it to the no longer prematurely

gray slab of expanse, file it in “explanations which leave much unexplained,” but leave me my

dance, the one underpraised porcelain object on the stand.

In the western districts greetings proliferate

and I’m already starting to look better. When was I not

a paramilitary brother in some sense? Who coined this nickname? For I see

far, in looking, out over a life, the strange, wrenching mess of it, yet which has

some undistressed surfaces and unsealed peaks, or bumps, along with much that was fey and

witless as it went by. Where
are
those files now? Is it possible they can have been deleted

in the very mouth of time? Grenades pop, rockets vomit their lucklessness into the sky,

and which of us wants to bear the responsibility of having looked

something up? which is why

the unplanted cabbages stand tearful out of the mist, there is no

reason to go on ploughing the garden once winter has begun, yet

what else is there to do, except sweep the floor

with automatic hand, pondering certain dun sins of omission, if twilight really is a jewel

as you turned out to be (never fear, the rain

won’t rob you of your distinctive personality though I saw it streaming

the other day, down your clothes, you paused and seemed not to know what to think, but I,

I in my compartment knew: damaged hair, tattered kneecaps, a pimple

or two, and as automatically as one uncloses a window

you filed your report, and the court was amazed, emptied in a moment before

the order of dismissal came. Out of respect I should say I didn’t see you very closely;

you were too far down for that, not coinciding with anyone’s notion of a “person” yet livelier

still for it; oh you showed ’em how to fit into the barrel of an ignored idiosyncrasy and

still have room left over for passages of devastating wit that nightly

bring the house down. And if sleep is narrower after that, it’s also more pointed,

slanted like the harrow’s tooth, to bring up what may be coming along

any second now) and it is, in feathers all over the floor, only now it’s the maid’s turn

and we may never see what stays groping in her eyes. The floor is lovely, though, passionate

and filled with bright ideas like a bride only what it says about us isn’t forthcoming.

Outside the river is magenta and some sunbeams got caught upside down in it, just their

(our) luck I guess. Meanwhile I have received your postcard. I wanted to tell you

how much I thought it shouldn’t change, but dairies (diaries?) got in the way and exchanged notes

at which time the judgment was all but unreadable, jointures charged with embalming fluid,

for it is written that whatever is not glue may be pressed into service as such, and

the trip gets merrier just before a sudden decision is reached concerning the child-pests

we thought we’d seen the last of.

And for one moment, when apple-dust hangs

in your hair you move that glider over an inch, to be

in shade. Dawn, an egg, comforts one only with the idea of its shape. Later we

are in the round and full of fears: did we confuse that shape

with something else, and if so was it congruent, or like a pair of trousers, wavering

in the breeze? And then when you come down to it nobody matters any more.

There is nothing like the old beach. The old tables.

Once, an avalanche of cuties threatened our meeting. Fred bypassed it.

Now the season, “a boundless and festive rejoicement,” is on track. I, too, voted for it.

But a subtle form of harassment overtakes, by undermining, each new claim as fast

as it is put in the docket. Case dismissed. Is it then true that it does not matter,

or that women give birth to children as easily as a fruit disgorges its seeds?

Salt in the cure-all dilutes both qualms and unheeded label

cautions, and when called upon, comes outside in a suit, prepared to play the reasonable

inquisitor, listen to shouts. Toward evening a stitch is dropped and the blindly desiring

run together like syrup and milk: the only ethos, cranes

severing horizon from water with the great sawing motion that always instills awe

around wreaths for buddies, and in time your tome will tell them too

about the never leaving off.

Surely that last tragedy will be enough

and the wind must drop, and it does; a single leaf falls circling,

alights on the water’s swiftly moving mirror as the chorus picks up on hope

in the black promise facing us. Blood oozing under every door, now tell us

if we can get this way again by remembering and so turn to glass citizens.

Let the cycle of greed begin again, the sheer poetry of it will win over all but a few

viewers and those servants who choose not to look into the path being proposed for all of us

to follow—we’ll tell them how—and it has just started to sprinkle

a few seconds ago, just before I arrived here in some confusion but now am

dressing the bare stone, as was long ago ordered,

and can complain, really, of nothing—of my head, square as a box,

receptacle for fools’ tools? But it was I who brought them here,

taught them to scratch out a rough living from the soil. Of birdsong or caterwauling

in the night? No, I was just living it. Now that it’s time for repairs I’m not sure I

had to be brought to the very edge of the indignant abyss, but no matter, if it doesn’t fly

off on its own, sloth will overtake it, sleep bend the branch to earth.

Yet always in fear of some complaint we adjust dials

to those who lie on their side stricken with the power of the floor, uninhibited;

uninhibited cross farms for gain or planted shapes.

But, “no habitation unless one linger.” You were afraid of setting out shoots.

But now that sugared April crosses blink, the shining squalls and yellow

plumes imaginably stuck in hair, and one returns to heaven, under what conditions

does one sort out the waterfall? For always, dark spirits and connivance

underlay the people-mover as it spiraled ever higher beyond

the counterpane of colored wooden cows, to the continental divide.