The Double Dream of Spring (3 page)

In all likelihood you will not need these

So take it easy and learn your ABC’s

And trust in the dream that will never come true

’Cause that is the scheme that is best for you

And the gleam that is the most suitable too.

“MAKE MY DREAM COME TRUE.” This message, set in 84-point Hobo type, startled in the morning editions of the paper: the old, half-won security troubles the new pause. And with the approach of the holidays, the present is clearly here to stay: the big brass band of its particular moment’s consciousness invades the plazas and the narrow alleys. Three-fourths of the houses in this city are on narrow stilts, finer than a girl’s wrists: it is largely a question of keeping one’s feet dry, and of privacy. In the morning you forget what the punishment was. Probably it was something like eating a pretzel or going into the back yard. Still, you can’t tell. These things could be a lot clearer without hurting anybody. But it does not follow that such issues will produce the most dynamic capital gains for you.

Friday. We are really missing you.

“The most suitable,” however, was not the one specially asked for nor the one hanging around the lobby. It was just the one asked after, day after day—what spilled over, claimed by the spillway. The distinction of a dog, of how a dog walks. The thought of a dog walking. No one ever referred to the incident again. The case was officially closed. Maybe there were choruses of silent gratitude, welling up in the spring night like a column of cloud, reaching to the very rafters of the sky—but this was their own business. The point is no ear ever heard them. Thus, the incident, to call it by one of its names—choice, conduct, absent-minded frown might be others—came to be not only as though it had never happened, but as though it never
could
have happened. Sealed into the wall of all that season’s coming on. And thus, for a mere handful of people—roustabouts and degenerates, most of them—it became the only true version. Nothing else mattered. It was bread by morning and night, the dates falling listlessly from the trees—man, woman, child, festering glistering in a single orb. The reply to “hello.”

Pink purple and blue

The way you used to do

The next two days passed oddly for Peter and Christine, and were among the most absorbing they had ever known. On the one hand, a vast open basin—or sea; on the other a narrow spit of land, terminating in a copse, with a few broken-down out-buildings lying here and there. It made no difference that the bey—b-e-y this time, oriental potentate—had ordained their release, there was this funny feeling that they should always be there, sustained by looks out over the ether, missing Mother and Alan and the others but really quiet, in a kind of activity that offers its own way of life, sunflower chained to the sun. Can it ever be resolved? Or are the forms of a person’s thoughts controlled by inexorable laws, as in Dürer’s Adam and Eve? So mutually exclusive, and so steep—Himalayas jammed side by side like New York apartment buildings. Oh the blame of it, the de-crescendo. My vice is worry. Forget it. The continual splitting up, the ear-shattering volumes of a polar ice-cap breaking up are just what you wanted. You’ve got it, so shut up.

The crystal haze

For days and days

Lots of sleep is an important factor, and rubbing the eyes. Getting off the subway he suddenly felt hungry. He went into one place, a place he knew, and ordered a hamburger and a cup of coffee. He hadn’t been in this neighborhood in a long time—not since he was a kid. He used to play stickball in the vacant lot across the street. Sometimes his bunch would get into a fight with some of the older boys, and he’d go home tired and bleeding. Most days were the same though. He’d say “Hi” to the other kids and they’d say “Hi” to him. Nice bunch of guys. Finally he decided to take a turn past the old grade school he’d attended as a kid. It was a rambling structure of yellow brick, now gone in seediness and shabbiness which the late-afternoon shadows mercifully softened. The gravel playground in front was choked with weeds. Large trees and shrubbery would do no harm flanking the main entrance. Time farted.

The first shock rattles the cruets in their stand,

The second rips the door from its hinges.

“My dear friend,” he said gently, “you said you were Professor Hertz. You must pardon me if I say that the information startles and mystifies me. When you are stronger I have some questions to ask you, if you will be kind enough to answer them.”

No one was prepared for the man’s answer to that apparently harmless statement.

Weak as he was, Gustavus Hertz raised himself on his elbow. He stared wildly about him, peering fearfully into the shadowy corners of the room.

“I will tell you nothing! Nothing, do you hear?” he shrieked. “Go away! Go away!”

The song tells us of our old way of living,

Of life in former times. Fragrance of florals,

How things merely ended when they ended,

Of beginning again into a sigh. Later

Some movement is reversed and the urgent masks

Speed toward a totally unexpected end

Like clocks out of control. Is this the gesture

That was meant, long ago, the curving in

Of frustrated denials, like jungle foliage

And the simplicity of the ending all to be let go

In quick, suffocating sweetness? The day

Puts toward a nothingness of sky

Its face of rusticated brick. Sooner or later,

The cars lament, the whole business will be hurled down.

Meanwhile we sit, scarcely daring to speak,

To breathe, as though this closeness cost us life.

The pretensions of a past will some day

Make it over into progress, a growing up,

As beautiful as a new history book

With uncut pages, unseen illustrations,

And the purpose of the many stops and starts will be made clear:

Backing into the old affair of not wanting to grow

Into the night, which becomes a house, a parting of the ways

Taking us far into sleep. A dumb love.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

That ostracism, both political and moral, has

Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things;

That urban chaos is the problem we have been seeing into and seeing into,

For the factory, deadpanned by its very existence into a

Descending code of values, has moved right across the road from total financial upheaval

And caught regression head-on. The descending scale does not imply

A corresponding deterioration of moral values, punctuated

By acts of corporate vandalism every five years,

Like a bunch of violets pinned to a dress, that knows and ignores its own standing.

There is every reason to rejoice with those self-styled prophets of commercial disaster, those harbingers of gloom,

Over the imminent lateness of the denouement that, advancing slowly, never arrives,

At the same time keeping the door open to a tongue-and-cheek attitude on the part of the perpetrators,

The men who sit down to their vast desks on Monday to begin planning the week’s notations, jotting memoranda that take

Invisible form in the air, like flocks of sparrows

Above the city pavements, turning and wheeling aimlessly

But on the average directed by discernible motives.

To sum up: We are fond of plotting itineraries

And our pyramiding memories, alert as dandelion fuzz, dart from one pretext to the next

Seeking in occasions new sources of memories, for memory is profit

Until the day it spreads out all its accumulation, delta-like, on the plain

For that day no good can come of remembering, and the anomalies cancel each other out.

But until then foreshortened memories will keep us going, alive, one to the other.

There was never any excuse for this and perhaps there need be none,

For kicking out into the morning, on the wide bed,

Waking far apart on the bed, the two of them:

Husband and wife

Man and wife

I am still completely happy.

My resolve to win further I have

Thrown out, and am charged by the thrill

Of the sun coming up. Birds and trees, houses,

These are but the stations for the new sign of being

In me that is to close late, long

After the sun has set and darkness come

To the surrounding fields and hills.

But if breath could kill, then there would not be

Such an easy time of it, with men locked back there

In the smokestacks and corruption of the city.

Now as my questioning but admiring gaze expands

To magnificent outposts, I am not so much at home

With these memorabilia of vision as on a tour

Of my remotest properties, and the eidolon

Sinks into the effective “being” of each thing,

Stump or shrub, and they carry me inside

On motionless explorations of how dense a thing can be,

How light, and these are finished before they have begun

Leaving me refreshed and somehow younger.

Night has deployed rather awesome forces

Against this state of affairs: ten thousand helmeted footsoldiers,

A Spanish armada stretching to the horizon, all

Absolutely motionless until the hour to strike

But I think there is not too much to be said or be done

And that these things eventually take care of themselves

With rest and fresh air and the outdoors, and a good view of things.

So we might pass over this to the real

Subject of our concern, and that is

Have you begun to be in the context you feel

Now that the danger has been removed?

Light falls on your shoulders, as is its way,

And the process of purification continues happily,

Unimpeded, but has the motion started

That is to quiver your head, send anxious beams

Into the dusty corners of the rooms

Eventually shoot out over the landscape

In stars and bursts? For other than this we know nothing

And space is a coffin, and the sky will put out the light.

I see you eager in your wishing it the way

We may join it, if it passes close enough:

This sets the seal of distinction on the success or failure of your attempt.

There is growing in that knowledge

We may perhaps remain here, cautious yet free

On the edge, as it rolls its unblinking chariot

Into the vast open, the incredible violence and yielding

Turmoil that is to be our route.

Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone’s mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything—bush and tree—to take the roisterer’s mind off his caroling—so it’s like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it’s like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years’ time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future—the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.

There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope—letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier—if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one’s blood. Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside—costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay.

It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction. The whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it. The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind—and yet it’s keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky. Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it’s their time too—nothing says they aren’t to make something of it. As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin’ to tell us somethin’, but that’s just it, she couldn’t even if she wanted to—dumb bird. But the others—and they in some way must know too—it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon. So their comment is: “No comment.” Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.

The sources of these things being very distant

It is appropriate to find them, which is why mist

And night have “affixed the seals” to all the ardor

Of the secret of the search. Not to confound it

But to assure its living aeration.

And yet it is more in the mass

Of the mist that some day the same contacts

Will be able to unfold. I am thinking of the dance of the

Solid lightning-flashes under the cold and