Sailing Alone Around the Room (6 page)

This is also what Samuel Pepys did, jotting down in

private ciphers minor events that would have otherwise

slipped into the dark amnesiac waters of the Thames.

His vigilance finally paid off when London caught fire

as mine does when the painter comes in for coffee

and says how much he likes this slow vocal rendition

of “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and I figure I will

make him a tape when he goes back to his brushes and pails.

Under the music I can hear the rush of cars and trucks

on the highway and every so often the new kitten, Felix,

hops into my lap and watches my fingers drumming out

a running record of this particular June Tuesday

as it unrolls before my eyes, a long intricate carpet

that I am walking on slowly with my head bowed

knowing that it is leading me to the quiet shrine

of the afternoon and the melancholy candles of evening.

If I look up, I see out the window the white stars

of clematis climbing a ladder of strings, a woodpile,

a stack of faded bricks, a small green garden of herbs,

things you would expect to find outside a window,

all written down now and placed in the setting

of a stanza as unalterably as they are seated

in their chairs in the ontological rooms of the world.

Yes, this is the kind of job I could succeed in,

an unpaid but contented amanuensis whose hands

are two birds fluttering on the lettered keys,

whose eyes see sunlight splashing through the leaves,

and the bright pink asterisks of honeysuckle

and the piano at the other end of this room with

its small vase of faded flowers and its empty bench.

So convinced am I that I have found my vocation,

tomorrow I will begin my chronicling earlier, at dawn,

a time when hangmen and farmers are up and doing,

when men holding pistols stand in a field back to back.

It is the time the ancients imagined in robes, as Eos

or Aurora, who would leave her sleeping husband in bed,

not to take her botany final, but to pull the sun,

her brother, over the horizon’s brilliant rim,

her four-horse chariot aimed at the zenith of the sky.

But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her,

barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window

in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor.

She will look in at me with her thin arms extended,

offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.

I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark

that I cut from a tree with a penknife.

There is no other way to express adequately

the immensity of the clouds that are passing over the farms

and wooded lakes of Ontario and the endless visibility

that hands you the horizon on a platter.

I am also writing this in a wooden canoe,

a point of balance in the middle of Lake Couchiching,

resting the birch bark against my knees.

I can feel the sun’s hands on my bare back,

but I am thinking of winter,

snow piled up in all the provinces

and the solemnity of the long grain-ships

that pass the cold months moored at Owen Sound.

O Canada, as the anthem goes,

scene of my boyhood summers,

you are the pack of Sweet Caporals on the table,

you are the dove-soft train whistle in the night,

you are the empty chair at the end of an empty dock.

You are the shelves of books in a lakeside cottage:

Gift from the Sea
by Anne Morrow Lindbergh,

A Child’s Garden of Verses
by Robert Louis Stevenson,

Ann of Avonlea
by L. M. Montgomery,

So You’re Going to Paris!
by Clara E. Laughlin,

and
Peril Over the Airport
, one

of the Vicky Barr Flight Stewardess series

by Helen Wills whom some will remember

as the author of the Cherry Ames Nurse stories.

What has become of the languorous girls

who would pass the long limp summer evenings reading

Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse
,

Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse
, and
Cherry Ames, Flight Nurse
?

Where are they now, the ones who shared her adventures

as a veterans’ nurse, private duty nurse, visiting nurse,

cruise nurse, night supervisor, mountaineer nurse,

dude ranch nurse (there is little she has not done),

rest home nurse, department store nurse,

boarding school nurse, and country doctor’s nurse?

O Canada, I have not forgotten you,

and as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision

of a bookcase, I pray that I remain in your vast,

polar, North American memory.

You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.

You are Jean de Brébeuf with his martyr’s necklace of hatchet heads.

You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on the wall.

You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.

You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.

But not only that.

You are the two boys with pails walking along that road,

and one of them, the taller one minus the straw hat, is me.

The whole idea of it makes me feel

like I’m coming down with something,

something worse than any stomach ache

or the headaches I get from reading in bad light—

a kind of measles of the spirit,

a mumps of the psyche,

a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,

but that is because you have forgotten

the perfect simplicity of being one

and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.

But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.

At four I was an Arabian wizard.

I could make myself invisible

by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.

At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window

watching the late afternoon light.

Back then it never fell so solemnly

against the side of my tree house,

and my bicycle never leaned against the garage

as it does today,

all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,

as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.

It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,

time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe

there was nothing under my skin but light.

If you cut me I would shine.

But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,

I skin my knees. I bleed.

I might as well begin by saying how much I like the title.

It gets me right away because I’m in a workshop now

so immediately the poem has my attention,

like the Ancient Mariner grabbing me by the sleeve.

And I like the first couple of stanzas,

the way they establish this mode of self-pointing

that runs through the whole poem

and tells us that words are food thrown down

on the ground for other words to eat.

I can almost taste the tail of the snake

in its own mouth,

if you know what I mean.

But what I’m not sure about is the voice,

which sounds in places very casual, very blue jeans,

but other times seems standoffish,

professorial in the worst sense of the word

like the poem is blowing pipe smoke in my face.

But maybe that’s just what it wants to do.

What I did find engaging were the middle stanzas,

especially the fourth one.

I like the image of clouds flying like lozenges

which gives me a very clear picture.

And I really like how this drawbridge operator

just appears out of the blue

with his feet up on the iron railing

and his fishing pole jigging—I like jigging—

a hook in the slow industrial canal below.

I love slow industrial canal below. All those
l
’s.

Maybe it’s just me,

but the next stanza is where I start to have a problem.

I mean how can the evening bump into the stars?

And what’s an obbligato of snow?

Also, I roam the decaffeinated streets.

At that point I’m lost. I need help.

The other thing that throws me off,

and maybe this is just me,

is the way the scene keeps shifting around.

First, we’re in this big aerodrome

and the speaker is inspecting a row of dirigibles,

which makes me think this could be a dream.

Then he takes us into his garden,

the part with the dahlias and the coiling hose,

though that’s nice, the coiling hose,

but then I’m not sure where we’re supposed to be.

The rain and the mint green light,

that makes it feel outdoors, but what about this wallpaper?

Or is it a kind of indoor cemetery?

There’s something about death going on here.

In fact, I start to wonder if what we have here

is really two poems, or three, or four,

or possibly none.

But then there’s that last stanza, my favorite.

This is where the poem wins me back,

especially the lines spoken in the voice of the mouse.

I mean we’ve all seen these images in cartoons before,

but I still love the details he uses

when he’s describing where he lives.

The perfect little arch of an entrance in the baseboard,

the bed made out of a curled-back sardine can,

the spool of thread for a table.

I start thinking about how hard the mouse had to work

night after night collecting all these things

while the people in the house were fast asleep,

and that gives me a very strong feeling,

a very powerful sense of something.

But I don’t know if anyone else was feeling that.

Maybe that was just me.

Maybe that’s just the way I read it.

It has a bronze covering inlaid with silver,

originally gilt;

the sides are decorated with openwork zoomorphic

panels depicting events in the history

of an unknown religion.

The convoluted top-piece shows a high

level of relief articulation

as do the interworked spirals at the edges.

It was presumably carried in the house-shaped

reliquary alongside it, an object of exceptional

ornament, one of the few such pieces extant.

The handle, worn smooth, indicates its use

in long-forgotten rituals, perhaps

of a sacrificial nature.

It is engirdled with an inventive example

of gold interlacing, no doubt of Celtic influence.

Previously thought to be a pre-Carolingian work,

it is now considered to be of more recent provenance,

probably the early 1940s.

The ball at the center, visible

through the interstices of the lead webbing

and the elaborate copper grillwork,

is composed possibly of jelly

or an early version of water,

certainly a liquid, remarkably suspended

within the intricate craftsmanship of its encasement.

My pen moves along the page

like the snout of a strange animal

shaped like a human arm

and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater.

I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly,

intent as any forager that has nothing

on its mind but the grubs and insects

that will allow it to live another day.

It wants only to be here tomorrow,

dressed perhaps in the sleeve of a plaid shirt,

nose pressed against the page,

writing a few more dutiful lines

while I gaze out the window and imagine Budapest

or some other city where I have never been.

If there is only enough time in the final

minutes of the twentieth century for one last dance

I would like to be dancing it slowly with you,

say, in the ballroom of a seaside hotel.

My palm would press into the small of your back

as the past hundred years collapsed into a pile

of mirrors or buttons or frivolous shoes,

just as the floor of the nineteenth century gave way

and disappeared in a red cloud of brick dust.

There will be no time to order another drink

or worry about what was never said,

not with the orchestra sliding into the sea

and all our attention devoted to humming

whatever it was they were playing.

The complacency of this student, late

for the final, who chews her pen for an hour,

who sits in her sunny chair,

with a container of coffee and an orange,

a cockatoo swinging freely in her green mind

as if on some drug dissolved,

mingling to give her a wholly ancient rush.

She dreams a little and she fears the mark

she might well get—a catastrophe—

as a frown darkens the hauteur of her light brow.

The orange peels and her bright senior ring

make her think of some procession of classmates,

walking across the wide campus, without a sound,

stalled for the passing of her sneakered feet

over the lawn, to silent pals and steins,

dorm of nobody who would bother to pull an A or care.