The Double Dream of Spring (4 page)

Haughty sky all striated with invisible marblings.

And it does seem that all the force of

The cosmic temperature lives in the form of contacts

That no intervention could resolve,

Even that of a creator returned to the desolate

Scene of this first experiment: this microcosm.

All kinds of things exist, and, what is more,

Specimens of these things, which do not make themselves known.

I am speaking of the laugh of the squire and the spur

Which are like a hole in the armor of the day.

It’s annoying and then it’s so natural

That we experience almost no feeling

Except a certain lightness which matches

The recent closed ambiance which is, besides,

Full of attentions for us. Thus, lightness and wealth.

But the existence of all these things and especially

The amazing fullness of their number must be

For us a source of unforgettable questions:

Such as: whence does all this come? and again:

Shall I some day be a part of all this fullness?

For it does seem as though everything will once again become number and smile

And that no hope of completing the magnitude which surrounds us

Is permitted us. But this hope (which doesn’t exist) is

Precisely a form of suspended birth,

Of that
invisible light
which spatters the silence

Of our everyday festivities. A glebe which has pursued

Its intentions of duration at the same time as reinforcing

Its basic position so that it is now

A boiling crater, form of everything that is beautiful for us.

Simple, the trees placed on the landscape

Like sheaves of wheat that someone might have left there.

The manure of vanished horses, the stones that imitate it,

Everything speaks of the heavens, which created this scene

For our position alone.

Now, in associating oneself too strictly with the trajectories of things

One loses that sublime hope made of the light that sprinkles the trees.

For each progress is negation, of movement and in particular of number.

This number having lost its indescribable fineness,

Everything must be perceived as infinite quantities of things.

Everything is landscape:

Perspectives of cliffs beaten by innumerable waves,

More wheatfields than you can count, forests

With disappearing paths, stone towers

And finally and above all the great urban centers, with

Their office buildings and populations, at the center of which

We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of isolated instants

So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things.

It is probably on one of the inside pages

That the history of his timidity will be written,

With all the libertine thoughts of a trajectory

Roughly in the shape of a heart, around a swamp

Which for many of us will be the ultimate voyage

In view of the small amount of grace which has been accorded us,

This banality which in the last analysis is our

Most precious possession, because allowing us to

Rise above ourselves, which would not be very much

Without the presence of a lot of friends and enemies, all

Willing to swear allegiance to us, entering thus

The factory of our lives. The greatest among us, counting little

On this last-minute ennoblement, remain

Colossal, our wide-brimmed hats representing

All the shame of glory, shutting us up in the idea of number:

The ether dividing our victories, past and future: teeth and blood.

Mixed days, the mindless years, perceived

With half-parted lips

The way the breath of spring creeps up on you and floors you.

I had thought of all this years before

But now it was making no sense. And the song had finished:

This was the story.

Just as you find men with yellow hair and blue eyes

Among certain islands

The design is complete

And one keeps walking down to the shore

Footsteps searching it

Yet they can’t have it can’t not have the tune that way

And we keep stepping … down …

The rowboat rocked as you stepped into it. How flat its bottom

The little poles pushed away from the small waves in the water

And so outward. Yet we turn

To examine each other in the dream. Was it sap

Coursing in the tree

That made the buds stand out, each with a peculiar coherency?

For certainly the sidewalk led

To a point somewhere beyond itself

Caught, lost in millions of tree-analogies

Being the furthest step one might find.

And now amid the churring of locomotives

Moving on the land the grass lies over passive

Beetling its “end of the journey” mentality into your forehead

Like so much blond hair awash

Sick starlight on the night

That is readying its defenses again

As day comes up

Wasn’t there some way in which you too understood

About being there in the time as it was then?

A golden moment, full of life and health?

Why can’t this moment be enough for us as we have become?

Is it because it was mostly made up of understanding

How the future would behave when we had moved on

To other lands, other suns, to say all there is time for

Because time is just what this instant is?

Even at the beginning the manner of the hourglass

Was all-severing, weaning of that delicious thread

That comes down even to us,
“Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude”

Sand shaper, whistler of affectionate destinies, flames and fruit.

And now you are this thing that is outside me,

And how I in token of it am like you is

In place. In between are the bits of information

That circulate around you, all that ancient stuff,

Brought here, reassembled, carted off again

Into the back yard of your dream. If we are closer

To anything, it is in this sense that doesn’t count,

Like the last few blank pages of a book.

This is why I look at you

With the eyes you once liked so much in animals:

When, in that sense, is it to be?

An ultimate warm day of the year

With the light unapproachable on the beaches?

In which case you return to the fork in the road

Doubtless to take the same path again? The second-time knowledge

Gives it fluency, makes it less of a choice

As you are older and in a dream touch bottom.

The laburnum darkened, denser at the deserted lake;

Mountain ash mindlessly dropping berries: to whom is all this?

I tell you, we are being called back

For having forgotten these names

For forgetting our proper names, for falling like nameless things

On unfamiliar slopes. To be seen again, churlishly into life,

Returning, as to the scene of a crime.

That is how the singer spoke,

In vague terms, but with an eternity of thirst

To end with a small tumbler of water

Or a single pink, leaning against the window frame in the bubble evening,

The mind of our birth. It was all sad and real.

They slept together at the commercial school.

The binding of a book made a tall V, like undone hair,

“To say all there was never time for.”

It is no triumph to point out

That no accounting was ever asked.

The land lies flat under the umbrella

Of anxiety perpetually smoothed over

As though some token were required of how each

Arrived early for the appointment in different cities.

The least suspicion would have crumbled,

Positive, but in the end you were right to

Pillage and obstruct. And she

Stared at her toes. The argument

Can be brought back intact to the point

Of summarizing how it’s just a cheap way

Of letting you off, and finally

How blue objects protruded out of the

Potential, dying and recoiling, returning as you meet them

Touching forever, water lifted out of the sea.

Whatever your eye alights on this morning is yours:

Dotted rhythms of colors as they fade to the color,

A gray agate, translucent and firm, with nothing

Beyond its purifying reach. It’s all there.

These are things offered to your participation.

These pebbles in a row are the seasons.

This is a house in which you may wish to live.

There are more than any of us to choose from

But each must live its own time.

And with the urging of the year each hastens onward separately

In strange sensations of emptiness, anguish, romantic

Outbursts, visions and wraiths. One meeting

Cancels another. “The seven-league boot

Gliding hither and thither of its own accord”

Salutes these forms for what they now are:

Fables that time invents

To explain its passing. They entertain

The very young and the very old, and not

One’s standing up in them to shoulder

Task and vision, vision in the form of a task

So that the present seems like yesterday

And yesterday the place where we left off a little while ago.

The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,

Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,

From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.”

Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant

To spend one’s vacation
en la casa de Popeye,”
she scratched

Her cleft chin’s solitary hair. She remembered spinach

And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.

“M’love,” he intercepted, “the plains are decked out in thunder

Today, and it shall be as you wish.” He scratched

The part of his head under his hat. The apartment

Seemed to grow smaller. “But what if no pleasant

Inspiration plunge us now to the stars?
For this is my country
.”

Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.

Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach

When the door opened and Swee’pea crept in. “How pleasant!”

But Swee’pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib. “Thunder

And tears are unavailing,” it read. “Henceforth shall Popeye’s apartment

Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or scratched.”

Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched

Her long thigh. “I have news!” she gasped. “Popeye, forced as you know to flee the country

One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jealous of the apartment

And all that it contains, myself and spinach

In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder

At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant

Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant

Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the scratched

Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and thunder.”

She grabbed Swee’pea. “I’m taking the brat to the country.”

“But you can’t do that—he hasn’t even finished his spinach,”

Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment.

But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment

Succumbed to a strange new hush. “Actually it’s quite pleasant

Here,” thought the Sea Hag. “If this is all we need fear from spinach

Then I don’t mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon over”—she scratched

One dug pensively—“but Wimpy is such a country

Bumpkin, always burping like that.” Minute at first, the thunder

Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder,

The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched

His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.

The tone is hard is heard

Is the coming of strength out of night: unfeared;

Still the colors are there and they

Ask the question of this what is to be

Out of a desert of chance in which being is life

But like a paradox, death reinforcing the life,

Sound under memory, as though our right to hear

Hid old unwillingness to continue

Or a style of turning to the window

Hands directing the air, and no design sticks,

Only agreement not to let it die.

Others will bend these as it is possible

And a new mode will be sunning into the past:

Refreshment and ease to the statement

And back to the safe beginning, because it starts out

Once more, drawn to and fro in a warm current of breathing

As fires start in hope and cold and

Color those nearest and only warm the most distant.

The inflection is suspended,

Not to be thoroughly initiated, under a spell to continue;

Its articulate flatness, goal, barrier and climate.

Through the clutter of

The unbound year, the first dazed marks of waking

Stir on the cloud-face like texture of paper, breath at elbow

And the collapsed sign of yesterday afternoon, its

Variance put up like a shutter,

Taxing you into January of stomping, cursing and the breath-bite.

The entrance you need is

Sideways in pentagonal fields cursive in advance

Before the fathoming of spring and

Sound let deep into the flank of occurrence