Wakefulness: Poems (6 page)

reinterpreted it, we’ll have it on the ground soon

he said coming back, my hand blotted with crystals, your breath calls.

No, something to lug up behind the office at noon.

It was great to see you the other day

at the carnival. My enchiladas were delicious,

and I hope that yours were too.

I wanted to fulfill your dream of me

in some suitable way. Giving away my new gloves,

for instance, or putting a box around all that’s wrong with us.

But these gutta-percha lamps do not whisper on our behalf.

Now sometimes in the evenings, I am lonely

with dread. A rambunctious wind fills the pine

at my doorstep, the woodbine is enchanted,

and I must be off before the clock strikes

whatever hour it is intent on.

Do not leave me in this wilderness!

Or, if you do, pay me to stay behind.

I’ll see you in my dreams she said

then they let the gate down

unplugged the coffee

It was time for my annual cure at Wiesbaden

What good are rules anyway

They apply only to themselves and other rules

This rule rules out this other one

The rule of glass, sleek and dark

was poring over my auto-autobiography

like an intensely private person

with hazelnut eyes

When it came time to invent, invest someone or something

you look to the urgent fallen petals

each imbibing its share of life’s mystery

as a cat sips and turns away and sips some more

Little mystery are you good for anything?

No she says I came out in time for school

then went back inside to resist sleep

that is still coming as all my absent years are coming

The slower time speaks the less majestic its tower

the fewer bats warbling to interrupt

whatever domestic tasks we believe we have set ourselves

in a truth that is mostly underground

The settled rhythm revives ancient purposes

What did I think going out

and never a tiny random note creeps back in

but all alone a star weeps, watches in the drizzle

and the four magicians fell down.

One took a train to Pennsylvania.

One abstracted his gold hair

picked up a cushion and said

And how is it with you back where you are now?

How many worms to a dozen

How long how many of the others cheat seeing

elbows at this windowsill serious as bunting

on a cloudy day

Which of the antique manners has changed?

For as yet morning is a long way off

Puckered mists trash the hill ecstatic as lozenges

People are buying store-dolls.

I wonder if that’s forbidden too.

Does it mean one isn’t to lead one’s life?

Today, a day that makes very little sense,

like America,

in clear disarray

everything’s getting worse.

Besides, who are we not to endorse it?

And these shattered ornaments to truth

almost grew up to me.

The sun and the yard

paused over a thousand times,

unable to explain the arch that is daylight.

And the tribes that were before

this panicked band announced it was quitting

saw the crocuses too. They were purple and awful.

It’s almost leaking to say it.

But how much longer could I go on not missing the point?

Boy I can remember when February

gave out and it was all “no quarter”—the sect of the

levellers passed over and was as night and fire

and more peace. He returned in an hour.

Perpetually flummoxed doorkeepers trying to kill

the men who did the migration proceedings

on the evening news

were backed up all the way to the Arctic Circle.

The aunts were out in zones

of cozy brilliance I

noticed with teapots to their names

like birthing, and they could do Finland then.

It was a kind of parenting. I notice they

doubled our salaries. It was all over

by 6 p.m.

Many causes later he came

in and hurt himself. I

saw a lot of cherry bombs. Is this the place

where one foregathers?

If so, what are all the urchins doing?

Oh she warned it’s just to the end of the block

where knee-high tulips pucker and all is reassuring

as they’d rather not have you believe. Does

that clear everything up? Well I think so well I

would like to see the proof of the invitation:

a hand print. I’m so sorry these are inexcusable.

I’ll dust myself up, or off;

meanwhile in the clearing they are pouring something.

Do you think you could be kind to come in

and matter where the horse esteems mechanized shortcuts?

Say rather he came in and hurt himself,

and now the bagpipers have nothing left to mourn,

the day just wheezes and goes down a funnel

counterclockwise. It was all just a fit

to have made you start bolt upright

on the steppe terns parted from

with little glovelike cries

awaiting the refrigerator that was to have us all

on its digital menu.

Wait, there are extenuating circumstances

and I myself am just a bum;

whatever came in with the weather

and dematerialized in the corners of the room, just so

am I to myself and others around.

But how do you justify

the crank silhouetted against the sky?

That’s just it, I don’t; it is all leftovers

and why am I crying

when the boats pass

in the narrow ship channel

with corduroy undies for all the years

I took off from Mrs. Bacon’s

and the way they came flooding back at me

like complaints in a gyroscope

or an armillary of vexations.

Then she proposed take this needle

and thread it for the two

messages you have missed.

I’ll not start another reptile war;

I look to the end of the komodo dragons thundering overhead.

Otherwise I sleep under the eaves; the cabbages

keep me company at evening, and are all

the society anyone wants. And Yes,

I keep up the sewing, the round robin

of Lettergate wherever a spare postal employer

taxes us with unlived puns:
There

do we stop and pitch camp,

and I’ll tell you it’s not going to get easier,

only harder.

With that they

took off, just a bundle

of stems to make a totem with.

I sit on the site over and over,

let it absorb hard doing,

piecemeal reconciliations, laundry

marks rubbed out in the wash, seasonal

hares and conviviality and the rest,

the rest.

More and more obviously, the trainer won’t handle things

his way, or ours—beats me how cute everything
used
to be.

We stood poised in a circle, and

some note of admiration bloomed and faded.

The cow was coming to ask our forgiveness

for the blue flax. Then everybody segued into a canon,

more ships were lost, more men at sea, the carload of opals

bringing bad luck from Anatolia. And in a wash,

it was gone. No more having to pick up one’s room,

one’s socks.

Luckily there is an umpire who sees that

behavior is coded, that it all shakes down into the mesh

where the train never minded, that there is still fun out on the horizon.

The blues—did we mention that?

And the energy that was coming to unsex all but the lifeless on Mars,

the initiated, grasping at handlebars.

Of handedness and the Brothers Handedness,

too often that tale had been told by Yore,

fifth-century scribe. He liked inking in details.

If one is a cigarette lighter

that’s lonely, which is lonely. Or a tricycle

coasting in gales, there is a secret satisfaction

fins emulate. Here, keep my scalp,

I’m seeing a pattern here, divestiture of some knave.

It was likely to be our last onus, this plaid scarecrow

out of a Braille encyclopedia. Hurry with the milk,

be here. Fortune placed tots in escrow. Good to monitor ’em,

go with the feed. In Manhattan merely

two minutes to two, moonlit torso returns. Sheesh.

Some abbey’s got him. Let Fido lick

last year’s olive branch. I’m outta here.

I told you, no way, it’s dorsal.

John came into town at night

and the clock was striking.

The damn boat leaked. Well, I …

It
was
pretty unusual.

Never mind, hand me that eyesore.

He came to see a tailor.

More about it I do not know

out on the canal.

The twins schlepped raisins and plums,

my dogbeat, for as far as we forgotten

come together to make sense

by midnight’s shattered drum.

There was more walking around and talking.

Then all got into a car and drove away.

Its tail was silver red, and a

banjo stood on end in the car.

The waves of freshman and sophomore grief

slide by me somehow.

We are old and dated

and cannot of our lives make any sense.

It was in the way he put it to me,

muddied or on a rock

at the center of a field puts us to shame.

There is more than the spirit jabs,

under the little hollow birds creep

and are asked forgiveness. Some are afraid

that they will fly away.

By morning all is shot to hell.

A cautionary mister,

The thaumaturge poked holes in my trope.

I said what are you doing that for.

His theorem wasn’t too complicated,

just complicated enough. In brief,

this was it. The governor should peel

no more shadow apples, and about teatime

it was as if the lemon of Descartes

had risen to full prominence on the opulent skyline.

There were children in drawers, and others trying to shovel them out.

In a word, shopping had never been so tenuous,

but it seems
we
had let the cat out of the bag, in spurts.

Often, from that balcony

I’d interrogate the jutting profile of night

for what few psalms or coins it might

in other circumstances have been tempted to shower down

on the feeble heathen oppressor, and my wife.

Always you get the same bedizened answer back.

It was like something else, or it wasn’t,

and if it wasn’t going to be as much, why,

it might as well be less, for all anyone’d care.

And the ditches brought it home dramatically

to the horizon, socked the airport in.

We, we are only mad clouds,

a dauphin’s reach from civilization,

with its perfumed citadels, its quotas. What did that

mean you were going to do to
me
?

Why, in another land and time we’d be situated, separate

from each other and the ooze of life. But here, within

the palisade of brambles it only comes often enough to what

can be sloughed off quickly, with the least amount of fuss.

For the ebony cage claims its constituents

as all were going away, thankful the affair had ended.

As rain cobbles itself

together, puts an expectant face

on things, we lived those

greasy times. Sordid

with excess rapture, blue

as a cow’s face. We came out of it pretty well

at the end.

Worth looking up, these tepid old

things

could still jiggle

a thug’s arms, thrum the upholstery’s

lilacs. Warehouses make like

marauding castles in the heat, I am always steep

when being remembered.

Ash on a coed’s face,

this barren step planted in Thieves’ Row, more where

your mother muddled all things. And if it be not,

where is its funnel—pass the luster,

please, something’s abiding: love-in-a-storm,

it says.

There is a chastening to it,

a hymnlike hemline.

Hyperbole in another disguise.

Dainty foresters walk through it.

On the splashed polyester walls

a tooth fairy held court. And that was like mud gravy,

a sop to the reigning
idées reçues
.

It’s all too—

charming.

It makes you want to scream

and hug your neighbor like he was your best friend.

I’m over my head with it.

Suddenly there was a travelling salesman with balls,

like an ant on V-J day.

And easing through the night we felt scoops

of clay like tired ice cream.

Here, here’s your vigil. Now get it out of here. One of us—

Gus the plumber—is entranced.

Of course you could let them come to you

as if you’d asked, and don’t blame it on me

when they get silted up to the snow line.

A master craftsman is coming to stay with you, to save you.

Yes and my horse knew all about this

but wasn’t letting on

until the time you and I got over the fix on his importance he had,

only to discover another’s hip-huggers in the brown dust

under the mailbox.

And we all came quietly.

In what axis I’ve heard you ringing—

there is no time to do that.

This is no time to do that.

The passion police are on your case

and we’ll get back to picking winners anon, at eventide, asunder.