Houseboat Days: Poems (4 page)

The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected

In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through

Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of

Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your

Ghostly transparent face. You in falbalas

Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics,

The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you

Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter)

Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be approached,

Never pierced through into the timeless energy of a present

Which would have its own opinions on these matters,

Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes

That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail

Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed)

Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet

For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in

And out of it. I want that information very much today,

Can’t have it, and this makes me angry.

I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that

Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling

Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at last see my complete face

Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge.

I shall keep to myself.

I shall not repeat others’ comments about me.

Some departure from the norm

Will occur as time grows more open about it.

The consensus gradually changed; nobody

Lies about it any more. Rust dark pouring

Over the body, changing it without decay—

People with too many things on their minds, but we live

In the interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling,

Our lives remind us. Finally this is consciousness

And the other livers of it get off at the same stop.

How careless. Yet in the end each of us

Is seen to have traveled the same distance—it’s time

That counts, and how deeply you have invested in it,

Crossing the street of an event, as though coming out of it were

The same as making it happen. You’re not sorry,

Of course, especially if this was the way it had to happen,

Yet would like an exacter share, something about time

That only a clock can tell you: how it feels, not what it means.

It is a long field, and we know only the far end of it,

Not the part we presumably had to go through to get there.

If it isn’t enough, take the idea

Inherent in the day, armloads of wheat and flowers

Lying around flat on handtrucks, if maybe it means more

In pertaining to you, yet what is is what happens in the end

As though you cared. The event combined with

Beams leading up to it for the look of force adapted to the wiser

Usages of age, but it’s both there

And not there, like washing or sawdust in the sunlight,

At the back of the mind, where we live now.

Something strange is creeping across me.

La Celestina has only to warble the first few bars

Of “I Thought about You” or something mellow from

Amadigi di Gaula
for everything—a mint-condition can

Of Rumford’s Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy

Gonzales, the latest from Helen Topping Miller’s fertile

Escritoire, a sheaf of suggestive pix on greige, deckle-edged

Stock—to come clattering through the rainbow trellis

Where Pistachio Avenue rams the 2300 block of Highland

Fling Terrace. He promised he’d get me out of this one,

That mean old cartoonist, but just look what he’s

Done to me now! I scarce dare approach me mug’s attenuated

Reflection in yon hubcap, so jaundiced, so
déconfit

Are its lineaments—fun, no doubt, for some quack phrenologist’s

Fern-clogged waiting room, but hardly what you’d call

Companionable. But everything is getting choked to the point of

Silence. Just now a magnetic storm hung in the swatch of sky

Over the Fudds’ garage, reducing it—drastically—

To the aura of a plumbago-blue log cabin on

A Gadsden Purchase commemorative cover. Suddenly all is

Loathing. I don’t want to go back inside any more. You meet

Enough vague people on this emerald traffic-island—no,

Not people, comings and goings, more: mutterings, splatterings,

The bizarrely but effectively equipped infantries of happy-go-nutty

Vegetal jacqueries, plumed, pointed at the little

White cardboard castle over the mill run. “Up

The lazy river, how happy we could be?”

How will it end? That geranium glow

Over Anaheim’s had the riot act read to it by the

Etna-size firecracker that exploded last minute into

A
carte du Tendre
in whose lower right-hand corner

(Hard by the jock-itch sand-trap that skirts

The asparagus patch of algolagnic
nuits blanches
) Amadis

Is cozening the Princesse de Clèves into a midnight micturition spree

On the Tamigi with the Wallets (Walt, Blossom, and little

Skeezix) on a lamé barge “borrowed” from Ollie

Of the Movies’ dread mistress of the robes. Wait!

I have an announcement! This wide, tepidly meandering,

Civilized Lethe (one can barely make out the maypoles

And
châlets de nécessité
on its sedgy shore) leads to Tophet, that

Landfill-haunted, not-so-residential resort from which

Some travellers return! This whole moment is the groin

Of a borborygmic giant who even now

Is rolling over on us in his sleep. Farewell bocages,

Tanneries, water-meadows. The allegory comes unsnarled

Too soon; a shower of pecky acajou harpoons is

About all there is to be noted between tornadoes. I have

Only my intermittent life in your thoughts to live

Which is like thinking in another language. Everything

Depends on whether somebody reminds you of me.

That this is a tabulation, and that those “other times”

Are in fact the silences of the soul, picked out in

Diamonds on stygian velvet, matters less than it should.

Prodigies of timing may be arranged to convince them

We live in one dimension, they in ours. While I

Abroad through all the coasts of dark destruction seek

Deliverance for us all, think in that language: its

Grammar, though tortured, offers pavilions

At each new parting of the ways. Pastel

Ambulances scoop up the quick and hie them to hospitals.

“It’s all bits and pieces, spangles, patches, really; nothing

Stands alone. What happened to creative evolution?”

Sighed Aglavaine. Then to her Sélysette: “If his

Achievement is only to end up less boring than the others,

What’s keeping us here? Why not leave at once?

I have to stay here while they sit in there,

Laugh, drink, have fine time. In my day

One lay under the tough green leaves,

Pretending not to notice how they bled into

The sky’s aqua, the wafted-away no-color of regions supposed

Not to concern us. And so we too

Came where the others came: nights of physical endurance,

Or if, by day, our behavior was anarchically

Correct, at least by New Brutalism standards, all then

Grew taciturn by previous agreement. We were spirited

Away
en bateau,
under cover of fudge dark.

It’s not the incomplete importunes, but the spookiness

Of the finished product. True, to ask less were folly, yet

If he is the result of himself, how much the better

For him we ought to be! And how little, finally,

We take this into account! Is the puckered garance satin

Of a case that once held a brace of dueling pistols our

Only acknowledging of that color? I like not this,

Methinks, yet this disappointing sequel to ourselves

Has been applauded in London and St. Petersburg. Somewhere

Ravens pray for us.”

The storm finished brewing. And thus

She questioned all who came in at the great gate, but none

She found who ever heard of Amadis,

Nor of stern Aureng-Zebe, his first love. Some

There were to whom this mattered not a jot: since all

By definition is completeness (so

In utter darkness they reasoned), why not

Accept it as it pleases to reveal itself? As when

Low skyscrapers from lower-hanging clouds reveal

A turret there, an art-deco escarpment here, and last perhaps

The pattern that may carry the sense, but

Stays hidden in the mysteries of pagination.

Not what we see but how we see it matters; all’s

Alike, the same, and we greet him who announces

The change as we would greet the change itself.

All life is but a figment; conversely, the tiny

Tome that slips from your hand is not perhaps the

Missing link in this invisible picnic whose leverage

Shrouds our sense of it. Therefore bivouac we

On this great, blond highway, unimpeded by

Veiled scruples, worn conundrums. Morning is

Impermanent. Grab sex things, swing up

Over the horizon like a boy

On a fishing expedition. No one really knows

Or cares whether this is the whole of which parts

Were vouchsafed—once—but to be ambling on’s

The tradition more than the safekeeping of it. This mulch for

Play keeps them interested and busy while the big,

Vaguer stuff can decide what it wants—what maps, what

Model cities, how much waste space. Life, our

Life anyway, is between. We don’t mind

Or notice any more that the sky
is
green, a parrot

One, but have our earnest where it chances on us,

Disingenuous, intrigued, inviting more,

Always invoking the echo, a summer’s day.

The code-name losses and compensations

Float in and around us through the window.

It helps to know what direction the body comes from.

It isn’t absolutely clear. In words

Bitter as a field of mustard we

Copy certain parts, then decline them.

These are not only gestures: they imply

Complex relations with one another. Sometimes one

Stays on for a while, a trace of lamp black

In a room full of gray furniture.

I now know all there is to know

About my body. I know too the direction

My feet are pointed in. For the time being

It is enough to suspend judgment, by which I don’t mean

Forever, since judgment is also a storm, i.e., from

Somewhere else, sinking pleasure craft at moorings,

Looking, kicking in the sky.

Try to move with these hard blues,

These harsh yellows, these hands and feet.

Our gestures have taken us farther into the day

Than tomorrow will understand.

They live us. And we understand them when they sing,

Long after the perfume has worn off.

In the night the eye chisels a new phantom.

Like an object whose loss has begun to be felt

Though not yet noticed, your pulsar signals

To the present death. “
It must be cold out on the river

Today.
” “You could make sweet ones on earth.”

They tell him nothing. And the neon Bodoni

Presses its invitation to inspect the figures

Of this evening seeping from a far and fatal corridor

Of relaxed vigilance: these colors and this speech only.

The lace

Of spoken breathing fades quite quickly, becomes

Something it has no part in, the chairs and

The mugs used by the new young tenants, whose glance

Is elsewhere. The body rounds out the muted

Magic, and sighs.

Unkind to want

To be here, but the way back is cut off:

You can only stand and nod, exchange stares, but

The time of manners is going, the woodpile in the corner

Of the lot exudes the peace of the forest. Perennially,

We die and are taken up again. How is it

With us, we are asked, and the voice

On the old Edison cylinder tells it: obliquity,

The condition of straightness of these tutorials,

Firm when it is held in the hand.

He goes out.

The empty parlor is as big as a hill.

“The skin is broken. The hotel breakfast china

Poking ahead to the last week in August, not really

Very much at all, found the land where you began …”

The hills smouldered up blue that day, again

You walk five feet along the shore, and you duck

As a common heresy sweeps over. We can botanize

About this for centuries, and the little dazey

Blooms again in the cities. The mind

Is so hospitable, taking in everything

Like boarders, and you don’t see until

It’s all over how little there was to learn

Once the stench of knowledge has dissipated, and the trouvailles

Of every one of the senses fallen back. Really, he

Said, that insincerity of reasoning on behalf of one’s

Sincere convictions, true or false in themselves

As the case may be, to which, if we are unwise enough

To argue at all with each other, we must be tempted

At times—do you see where it leads? To pain,

And the triumph over pain, still hidden

In these low-lying hills which rob us

Of all privacy, as though one were always about to meet

One’s double through the chain of cigar smoke