Wakefulness: Poems (4 page)

and each morning has a special chime of its own.

Thus we were pitted against the friend who came at midnight

and wanted to replace us with a song. We resisted furiously:

There was too much food on his table, the night was too black,

while all around us shrinking bands of outsiders

entered into negotiations with his darkness. It

seems to omit us, his reasoning, or in the well of time

we may be overdrawn, and cosmetics come to put a good face on us,

asking, why this magic wind, so many angles

against the river’s prism and the burnt blue sky?

To which one answers, nothing is adrift

for long. Perhaps we will be overtaken

even in our happiness, and waves of passion drown us.

Now, wasn’t that easy? A moment’s breath and everyone

has gone inside to ponder the matter further.

Outside, children toboggan endlessly.

but my advice is—be comfortable.

Wear a smock, with fractals. Be native!

You’ll find people are more interested in your story,

and they will, too. Revisit

the recurrent tragedy of life.

Make sure it has its priorities straight.

Then—ziff! Jump off the end of a dock.

Color a monsoon yours, to do business and pleasure with.

With Smokey, everywhere seemed like pastime.

Girls in their girdles wandered up

amazed—they had never seen so many cheekbones.

The irises on the dump bloomed surlier that year—

too many tin cans. But you and I were deriding

ourselves, therefore it couldn’t be over yet

and the past never happened here. Pounding

on his front door, one day or other,

the jasper eggs somehow knew my name.

It was all over, in fits. The tree-house

curtains were drawn, laughter strangely spattered the mist,

stippled the tenement wiring. Oh it’s been gone

too long, tragedy again visits the dying shires,

tells one to hang in, it’s over the top

with you.
Looks like

we’ve been invited to a party
. Treason peppered

the masts of my little skiff. Help! And then

an eternity of silence. Bores

shifted on the upper floors, there are not

enough spider-crabs, spiders of the sea,

for this embroidered doormat to clinch the departure bell.

Surely all’s well—

we’d have heard about it otherwise. Strangers tell

this in shifts, for a little pleasure, a brittle hour.

Not to stumble, to get to tell you something simple

about the way the grass was being waves, how we broke

the world after we made it. Then it was a thorn-bearing crescent.

Now you must be funny. Paranoid gigolos and candy,

lots of it, over the airways, in fact how could you,

you knew he was coming today. Well, better to squash

it once and for all. I was a fool for coconuts, I said

coconuts. Nobody believes me anymore, they think I’ve been

let out, but I haven’t, I’m still locked up, and lovelorn.

Pretty please promise me a dish of scrolls.

After that one nip everything will be nasty and then it will be romantic.

They pass him with muffin heads down along the winter beach.

So many characters. They told him there were too many characters

in your novel, that the plot was still complicated, but still

they keep coming on, there must have been a leak, wait, it’s not even that,

there are just too many people out there. Well I suppose it seems

so to you, who are not normal, but if you could see

it all from the outside you’d find how many are glued

to your coattails, and not too many, never less than enough,

and that includes children. My stars well I

never counted on all this being here. No, and neither

did your daddy, and it’s quiet in the city,

too quiet, except for the largest vans and convertibles, and these

are safely filed under “European”—we can let everything go, really,

and then come back and look at it and pick it up.

Well it sure was farther the way

you always insist on taking us, me and one other person, but in

fine it was not a great distance, only a matter of some blocks

in one ward of the city. Say, I had a great

idea and now it’s gone off and become useless.

So may I someday, sitting at play in my little unknown courtyard.

So may we all, while cats whine and grapes mature

and a prickly dust of unknown origin seems to rise upward from the seats.

She bit the bridge. A photograph can stomach it. I’ll be in

some time in the middle of July. Now the best time

of the year is around now, none can gainsay August

and Mr. Random’s tooth running in the street, he liked to say hi, it was just

him running, which is a bit awkward. A diagonal lipstick

chased him across the street. From there on in it was just damn melancholy,

no anchovies, nothing in particular, nothing to say. If so why, why do it,

says Peter, who fought hard for the post, fought it and won,

and why we are here, in the middle of a secondary terrain, mad and absorbed

by life, by the truth, as always.

But the nice part

I was going to say is fenced out. Take to the hills then. There goes

one petal, the tree is falling apart, zounds I can do almost nothing

while the hills come and separate us, plant us in tomorrow

or until the last dish is unearthed.

Out crept a third one.

Savannas that have been dangerous, now no one remembered,

the evil shifting of feet denounced the lady travelling salesman

to our liposuction expert. A single afternoon cooking at the stove

and all is more or less gone over, too bad

the futile Molotov cocktail exploded

but in any case in another land, with more furniture than we expected.

So we said, grant us this, it shall be done in another kingdom

as in the king’s den. Don’t let the roof fall in!

I was kind of sidelined by the barber pole

but explained practically about the dark petal, that it was good

and we were appearing in its time, and shall be heaven, about time, about

that point. Rockets lifted. Read me. There is no point to all this listless

hive. He took off in a manner that betokened bats

when it was over and they came over. It’s time, now, some are good and alone,

lost up unto the rest. They can go and cancel

around it’s too moot to be played at. They are, for the rest unsavory,

thyme in the corral, three jumps from last school

the patio ignited, sworn to safe-conduct, like bread out of a school

conducted at last to here.

What were you telling him about,

and why were veins implanted in the marsh

where everyone looks? Today

is the first day of spring, I think.

Sailing near us on a monocle,

the spray tapped and jiggled,

forever like a lifeboat.

And true some were found perjured

in cornshocks, there was no meat left that day,

no edge one could run around on.

There were peepers in the loose chaos called

oblivion, and not much else on the table.

Miss—er—Jones, what is the order of events?

I think not sir she cabled

from a vantage point in Toronto where all ships

and trains have their terminus. And if it’s Wednesday?

Then man the egrets, the snowplow is coming

to rest where all of us have our workshoes on

and it will be a tough call to divide up the rope

and Saturday.

There was no hope in the statue

of the saint, eyeballs collapsed, sloping forward

like a scythe, and yet we came to know

how he was doing, and appreciated a chat

at his knees. Now this was only the fourth time

any had done so. So we squeegeed

the happy-face off home plate, and bunches

of aristocrats all around us applauded

what came to seem fair, and in time

were whisked away—the ox in his pumps,

forgotten for daydreaming, the tangled marl

of old Sol’s beard. Everything was decimated,

which was devastating, yet we went on

living, along the row we had been set down in

and soon we had reached the end. A conniving quiver

set compass needles skittering, prize lists

fairly glittering. And I looked to thee

to see what a retroactive spouse might be

yet we got lost somehow in the confusion

attendant on the formal victory. We were back

home, in fact, but no one thought to look

for us there. We were let out to pasture

in the shade, and six more volumes dovetailed.

The first part of the novel was now complete,

a hundred years in the making, yet its style

seemed chaste, if not downright lackluster, in the best sense,

as many terriers were starting to run,

yappingly. If there was a space for us

in all this fireside, it got debunked. We were kept waiting

right up until the announced departure,

and so became part of humanity. Part and parcel, I was going to say.

In the dim

eclectic din, beaters waited.

Let’s handsel it, love, O my love, I said.

After only a week of taking your pills

I confess I am seized with a boundless energy:

My plate fills up even as I scarf vegetable fragments

from the lucent blue around us. My firmament,

as I see it, was never this impartial.

The body’s discomfiture, bodies of moonlit beggars,

sex in all its strangeness: Everything conspires

to hide the mess of inner living, raze

the skyscraper of inching desire.

Kill the grandchildren, leave a trail

of paper over the long interesting paths in the wood.

Transgress. In a word, be other than yourself

in turning into your love-soaked opposite. Plant

his parterre with antlers, burping

statue of when-was-the-last-time-you-saw Eros;

go get a job in the monument industry.

Candid jeremiads drizzle from his lips,

the store looks as if it isn’t locked today.

A gauzy syllabus happens, smoke is stenciled

on the moss-green highway.

This is what we invented the suburbs for,

so we could look back at the lovable dishonest city,

tears clogging our arteries.

The nausea and pain we released to float in the sky.

The dead men are summoning our smiles and indifference.

We climb the brilliant ladder toward their appetites,

homophobes, hermaphrodites, clinging together like socks

hanging out to dry on a glaring day in winter.

You could have told me all about that

but of course preferred not to,

so fearful of the first-person singular

and all the singular adventures it implies.

for Mark Ford

Still in spring, my coat

travels with the pack, unbuttoned as they.

The weather report is useless. So,

sigh and begin again the letter.

“This is the first time in weeks

I’ve had to communicate with you. It all

falls, in balls of fire. I guess the

North Dakota landscape doesn’t do much for you. Have you

no conscience, or conscious, conscious conscience?

May I remind you that every sentence, everywhere,

ends with a period? A disclaimer of sorts?”

He thought we’d gotten to the middle of the grass.

His glass fire hydrants can have no end.

Oh it was just an idea;

there, don’t rail. The posse is coming

by for drinks, we can skip enslavement today.

Concentrate, instead, on this day’s canonicity.

It has to be from somewhere,

right? Many prisoners have left downtown, the old man

assents. He was tremendous and bald. Liked a practical joke

now and again. Look, the white rain is writing on the wall

of his saloon. Could be he was over the hill,

we’d assumed, but the flapping in the net’s too

strong for that. Don’t you agree? Have you

had any further ideas on the subject? Yes, you

could well afford to give up a few.

The things that were in the drawer were dispersed a long time ago.

Some were wetted by snow. Others were dry but could not refract the light.

On the harbor’s side a frazzled touch obtained.

Peace of mind fell through a grating in the sidewalk

where it lay visible for a few hours

and then it went away. Anyway, what can I tell you?

Not the things you want to hear, I suppose.

Nor can your interest deflect my moodiness. I shovel all the things you want to hear

into a wheelbarrow and leave it on your front step.

Perhaps some of it will reflect on me, on you, hell,

who knows what will jump out of it?

Some other passports were issued. Pilgrims

with scrip and staffs lined the stairwell and the near reaches of the street

in the moony swell that always seems to take over there, at a certain point

when I’m far from you. That’s the message of it all—

of life, even.

You say you shied away from every event

in our small house. Yet at the end it turned sociable;

there was a breeze in the flags that they noticed

and one felt like running toward some inescapable doom, just for the fun of it.

Some were on vacation, a busman’s holiday