The Double Dream of Spring (8 page)

With one another, and our meeting escapes through the dark

Like a well.

Our habits ask us for instructions.

The news is to return by stages

Of uncertainty, too early or too late. It is the invisible

Shapes, the bed’s confusion and prattling. The late quiet. This is how it feels.

The pictures were really pictures

Of loving and small things. There was a winter scene

And half-hidden sketches of the other three seasons.

Autumn was a giant with a gray woollen cap.

Near him was spring, a girl in green draperies

Half sitting, half standing near the trunk of an old tree.

Summer was a band of nondescript children

Bordering the picture of winter, which was indistinct

And gray like the sky of a winter afternoon.

The other pictures told in an infinity of tiny ways

Stories of the past: separate incidents

Recounted in touching detail, or vast histories

Murmured confusingly, as though the speaker

Were choked by sighs and tears, and had forgotten

The reason why he was telling the story.

It was these finally that made the strongest

Impression, they shook you like wind

Roaring through branches with no leaves left on them.

The vagueness was bigger than life and its apotheosis

Of shining incidents, colored or dark, vivid or serious.

But now the tidings are dark in the

Expected late afternoon suddenly dipping into

Reserves of anxiety and restlessness which dutifully

Puff out these late, lax sails, pennants;

The vertical black-and-white-striped weather indicator’s

One sign of triumph, a small one, to stand

For universal concessions, charters and deeds to

Wilderness or the forested sea, cord after cord

Equaling possession and possessiveness

Instantaneously extending your hesitation to an

Empire, back lands whose sparsely populated look is

Supreme dominion. It will be divided into tracks

And these be lived in the way now the lowered

Angles of this room. Waxed moustache against the impiety

Of so much air of change, but always and nowhere

A cave. Gradually old letters used as bookmarks

Inform the neighbors; an approximate version

Circulates and the incident is officially closed.

And I some joy of this have, returning to the throbbing

Mirror’s stiff enclave, the sides of my face steep and overrun.

So many ways grew over to this

Mild decline. The grave of authority

Matches wits with upward-spinning lemon spirals

Telling of the influences of night, so many decisions

Not to act accruing to the outward stretches.

The civilities of day also creep

To extremities, fly on a windowpane, sweeping

The changed refuse under the rug. Just one step

Takes you into so much outside, the candor

Of what had been going on makes you pause momentarily,

A bag of October, without being able to tell it

To the others, so that it loses silence.

I haven’t made clear that I want it all from you

In writing, so as to study your facial expressions

Simultaneously: hesitations, reverse darts, the sky

Of your plans run through with many sutured points.

Only in this way can a true basis for understanding be

Set up. But meanwhile if I try to turn away

Looking for my own shadow in the excess

Like quarreling jays our heads fall to in agreement.

It exposed us on a moving gangway.

Leaning from an upper story

We should not separate in misunderstanding.

Where you were going was the key to

Saturday afternoon spent in shopping and washing dishes

Just right so the newly strengthened land would

Disinter the music box what keeps happening to

The photo of a baby girl disguised as an old man

With a long white beard. What comes after

The purge, she not mentioning it yet.

This meant (and the tone voice, repeating

“He’s hurt real bad” worked up the wall of celerity

To inaudible foam) all divers and all speechless

Apostrophes of solar unit stay on the bottom.

At last there was a chance to explore the forest,

Shadow of yawning magnetic poles, in which the castle

Had been inserted like an afterthought—bare walls

With somewhere a center and even further, a widening

To accommodate eventual reaction, such as ropes,

Pikes, chains of memory, of sleep, and an end of board.

The apotheosis had sunk away

As wind incarnates its glass cone

Aiming where further identifications should

Not be worked for, are reached. The whole

Is a mound of changing valors for some who

Live out as under a dome, are participated in

As the ordinary grandeur of a dome’s the thing that

Keeps them living so that additional grace

Is eternal procrastination, not to be considered

Unless a description of the actual scene.

Shedding perennial beauty on angles

Of questions asked and often answered in a

Given period. It all moves more slowly, yet

The change is more complete than ever before:

A pessimistic lighting up as of autumn woods

Demanding more than ever to be considered, for full

Substance. For the calculable stutter of a laugh.

Returning late you were not surprised to meet

This gray visitor, perpendicular to the weather.

Quiet ambition of the note variously sounded.

All space was to be shut out. Now there was no

Earthly reason for living; solitude proceeded

From want of money, her quincunxes standing

To protect the stillness of the air. Darkness

Intruded everywhere. This was the first day

Of the new experience. The familiar brown trees

Stirred indifferent at their roots, deeply transformed.

Like a sail its question disappeared into

An ocean of newsprint. To be precipitated

In desire, as hats are handed. Awnings raised.

Coming in the phaeton to the end of the

Day that had served on previous occasions

An orchard diminishes the already tiny

Notion of abstract good and bad qualities

Pod of darkness which goes vociferating early

Unchangeables that in time’s mire have hid weapons.

Past waterfall wooden huts open places

Assaulted by the wind, the usual surroundings chafed

Foreknowledge of the immense journey, as the sea

Flattens, uncritical, beyond wide docks.

To persist in the revision of very old

Studies, as though mounted on a charger,

With the door to the next room partly open

To the borrowed density, what keeps happening to

So much dead surprise, a weight of spring.

An odor of explosives hangs over the change,

Now at its apogee. This presupposes a will

To carry out all instructions, dotting the last i

Though cancelling with one stroke of a pen all

The provisions, revisions and so on made until now.

But why should the present seem so particularly urgent?

A time of spotted lakes and the whippoorwill

Sounding over everything? To release the importance

Of what will always remain invisible?

In spite of near and distant events, gladly

Built? To speak the plaits of argument,

Loosened? Vast shadows are pushed down toward

The hour. It is ideation, incrimination

Proceeding from necessity to find it at

A time of day, beside the creek, uncounted stars and buttons.

We talked, and after that went out.

It was nice. There was lots of time left

And we could always come back to it, and use it later

But the flowers dropped in the conservatory

For this was the last day of the year

Conclusion of many ups and downs, it had begun

To be foreshadowed, leaning out into novelty

As into a bank of subtraction. The night

A dull varnish muffled the comic eagerness

Of those first steps, halted for all eternity.

Then the accounts must be reexamined,

Shifting ropes of figures. Expressions of hope

Too late, a few seconds before. Only normal

Transparent width separated them from the smaller,

Flame-colored phenomena of each settled day.

This information was like a road no one ever took

Perhaps because the end was widely known, a collection

Of ceiling fumes, inert curiosity, attacked

Rarely, and out of compunction, by millionaires

Bent on turning everyday affairs into something tragic.

Thus there was a time for all activity

As memory of regret not made known

Except as illegal pilfering on the furthest

Sketchy place of the course of a day

Which scarcely matters even for anxious

Gendarmes of these late, recent hours, now

So frequently referred to. Thus floods,

Surprising us, seem to subside

When scarcely begun. Yet so much in time for

What arrives, unnoticed our separate, parallel thought.

It is that the moment of sinking in

Is always past, yet always in question, on the surface

Of the goggles of memory. Nothing is stationary

Nor yet uncertain; a rhythm of standing still

Keeps us in continual equilibrium, like an arch

That frames swiftly receding clouds, never

Getting deeper. The shouts of children

Penetrate this motion toward, as a drop of water

Slides under a lens. Soon all is shining, mined,

Tears dissolving laughter, the isolated clouds spent.

It is appropriate that this extension is,

Has been, and always should be independent

Of elaborate misgivings concerning the future status

Of a hostile address toward each other.

Not being able to see one’s way clear to

Approving ecstatic, past projects is

Equivalent to destruction of all these myths,

Wiped, like dust, from the lips. So

The weather of that day, and scalloped

Appearance of those who went by you

Are changed like mist. You see, it is

Not wrong to have nothing. But

It is important that the latter be not just

The points of disappearance, signs of the

Reduction of the little that was left, which

Disappeared all the faster because it was so little.

This part of the game keeps you for old ostracism

Long mixed with wrinkles of that horrible, blatant day

To be avoided at all costs because already known

And perhaps even more because, unlike carelessness, avoidable.

That hole, towering secret, familiar

If one is poking among the evening rubbish, yet how

Square behind you in the mirror, so much authority

And intelligence in such a miserable result.

Could it bind you because of the simplicity

Or could you in fact escape because of that limp frame,

Those conditions tumbling upward, like piles of smoke?

In that way any disorderly result is often seen

As the result of the general’s fixed smile, calipers,

Moustache, and the other way was closed too.

Out of this intolerant swarm of freedom as it

Is called in your press, the future, an open

Structure, is rising even now, to be invaded by the present

As the past stands to one side, dark and theoretical

Yet most important of all, for his midnight interpretation

Is suddenly clasped to you with the force of a hand

But a clear moonlight night in which distant

Masses are traced with parental concern.

After silent, colored storms the reply quickly

Wakens, has already begun its life, its past, just whole and sunny.

Thus reasoned the ancestor, and everything

Happened as he had foretold, but in a funny kind of way.

There was no telling whether the thought had unrolled

Down to the heap of pebbles and golden sand now

Only one step ahead, and itself both a trial and

The possibility of turning aside forever. It was the front page

Of today, looming as white as

The furthest mountains, and oh, all kinds of things

Caught in that net and shaken, so often

The way people respond to things.

It had grown up without anybody’s

Thinking or doing anything about it, so that now

It was the point of where you wanted it to go.

The fathers asked that it be made permanent,

A vessel cleaving the dungeon of the waves.

All the details had been worked out

And the decks were clear for sensations

Of joy and defeat, not so closely worked in

As to demolish the possibility of the game’s ever

Becoming dangerous again, or of an eventual meeting.

But it was not easy to tell in what direction

The permanence tended, whether it was

Easy decline, like swallows after the rough

Business of the long day, or eternal suspension

Over emptiness, dangerous perhaps, in any case

Not the peaceful cawing of which so much had been

Made. I can tell you all

About freedom that has turned into a painting;

The other is more difficult, though prompt—in fact

A little too prompt: therein lies the difficulty.

And still not satisfied with the elder

Version, to see the painting as pitch black

Was no cause for happiness among those who surround

The young, and had expected peevish

Fires lit by the setting sun, and sunken boats.

It seemed the only honorable way, and fertile

If darkness is ever anything else. But the way