Flow Chart: A Poem (18 page)

I am now responsible though I didn’t make it. And you

can come back, I’m harmless now. Anyway, that’s how it pleases me to

detect myself. When the blossoms reappear, as they can, and the consumers,

someone must pay to keep it poignant. Otherwise one of you will remain an outrider.

Go finance the rigged deal then, and it can’t hurt.

It worked. Now both of us were attracted.

Let me by way of introduction hopefully

try to extricate myself from this peculiar bunch of circumstances,

the slough. Incidentally I am a gentleman

for some of my dealings. Nor do I believe in one set of laws for the rich,

another for the poor, nor in one thing over another, one mother-in-law,

one pasture for ducks, another for swans. Permit me to posit,

though, another way of looking at the situation, awful now,

as it has been in the past when they had less hygiene but more spirit of things

than is alas now the case. What if you let everything bounce off you except those

things whose nature it is to imbed themselves in you? Like a sharpened pencil forever

flailing the dark with one’s own tangles, one nears an edge. There are two possibilities:

ignore it or cross it anyway. In either case we’ll be

rid of our relatives’ nosiness and can get down to business quite quickly. I say “I”

because I’m the experimental model of which mankind is still dreaming, though to myself

I’m full of unworked-out bugs and stagefright, yet manfully I put aside those twenty years

to imagine some croft or bourne in which a few of us can weep, as flute-notes play,

and others can come round nodding approval and must then be on their way.

But—by heaven!—I think we almost knew just then what it meant to be together

without too many people around, how it could challenge the universe’s bluster,

the hee-hawing ages in the time it takes to put an idea together

from its unlikely components, package it, and go on being the genius one was anyway

but not for too long, or without general consent. It’s enough if—

my friend’s mother is the one who believes in me and understands me better

than anybody, but I’m not going to let it delude me. There’s a world out there.

So, drunk, we come back to the dollhouse open to the elements,

its scuffed paper furniture, to try to feed on newsprint once more,

unsuccessfully. But the old lady wants to explain what happened, indeed

there’s no way to ignore her account of what happened, so let’s just

sit still and listen. This, according to her, is what did:

slippery harmonies abound. In fact, I can’t be sure I’m not addressing myself

to one or within one right now, but that’s no matter. I’ve got to tell this

in whatever time remains to me. You and I were young, at lunch, we jumped up

in that mad way one has of wanting to see how things will react, wanting to see them

turn out
, as it were—an ancient, though harmless, temptation. Wait, there was more:

after the gentleman had gone, leaving me his card, I stood in the hall

for a long time, unable to go back to the kitchen or up the stairs

I knew so well. I reflected on all the ways we have of quietly

getting each other’s goat, of stewing over inconsequential things. The morning

had passed without event, and now, on the threshold of afternoon, I could lean out

into the bowl of eternity, like a poster

plastered to the wall of a house, advertising a brand of cigars, as the future

came dripping back with intent, impregnating me like a wick with its contradictory

or spurious commands, futile innuendo, explosions of choices before one is ready

to choose, like team-colors. And as I stood, contemplating the card, sinking

into the primness of outline for which I seemed to have turned into a walking or

at any rate standing testimonial, and the years mounted the wick, I see I am as ever

a terminus of sorts, that is, lots of people arrive in me and switch directions but no one

moves on any farther; this being, in effect, the end of the line, a branch-line

at that, and no one is interested in guessing, in passing through you

or fancying they spy more copious rewards you are presumably keeping them from accepting,

once they have come of age. True, a few dawdlers will move on briskly, then turn

back officiously to salute you, as though polite gestures could dilute the heavy

water of eternity, or what’s left of it, which, it is naturally assumed, is inferior

to what has gone before—and then manage to insult your prudence by ignoring it

on this windblown platform you share with pigeons, not even

another bona fide passenger. And one’s dream of escaping weighs on your

shoulders, like a yoke of steel. Could one even contemplate it

now? Now that so many other things and soldiers are coming to be

what must be, and in fact has always been? A towering tree? But, speechless,

we make it over into miniatures of itself, like miniature automobiles. Then

a perfectly sweet, sickly stench bears this notion over to the main table,

numbers it, sets it down with the others, while the concept of an alphabet can

still be sustained (but the curtain is falling on that particular misunderstanding, and on

much else as well, including some factors I would like to conserve in the new,

stripped-down, presumably more functional civilization the alphabet-wand

seemed to want to announce), walks hurriedly out of the great
gare
, without

so much as a backward glance, into a post-Wagnerian, impressionist world of rivers

and dreaming washerwomen, and stones at the edge. Well, whose maelstrom

was it, and what are you talking about? I think to see a bulb blooming; a little mote

in the sunlight, if that’s it, would be fine for this morning. (Oh, you do,

do you?) And afterwards shut up about it. It’s in the mail anyway.

A fine thing that nobody talks to me or his parents. How am I supposed to know which

ticket goes with which entrance portal?
And the woman with orange-pink hair stood silently by.

And, not knowing, to whose parents am I to address the grievance form?

Believe that a change infuses the young, though they aren’t enthusiastic.

For it is not a shifting of gears nor a vrooming of motors that is the note

one hungers after, but just as the distracted dripping of a stalactite produces,

in the fullness of time, a perfectly viable stalagmite, so one’s fretting and anxious

reverberations are but the negative space that gives birth to this invisible but densely

compacted mass of fibers that filter truth: the Last Judgment (text enclosed).

Paganini on his cloud fiddles; lambs gambol; appealing nonsense would seem to have

had the last word again. Yet when you see from a great distance how it forms a

pattern, then other conditions have to be taken into account, their probability admitted

into the record, a court order produced putting it all on hold and speedily overruled as the

dynamics gets into your blood and you find you can live without it. Yes, but

meaningfully? No, the hold order is still in effect, though it was supposed

to have been lifted; the tape is blank. But I thought those were

unimportant details somebody else was supposed to see about? Sure they were

but time is up now, and the pugilists have returned to their corners. Write about it,

if you were going to be interested in it, right now, if not

otherwise involved with its destiny. It’s the old “elaborate charade” accusation

again, and I’m not going to have any truck with it, or with you either. I don’t

know how many times I’ve spelled the B-word accurately without being credited,

so in the time of doppelgangers I be a lost bairn—without spelling, I mean,

though I used to do well in the spelling bees.

Which reminds me,

how are Alf and Al? Did I leave anything out? Does the lagoon

still stink? Or did somebody drain it after all those years of miasma

and not-too-amusing going about one’s business, sometimes

with a handshake or a smile?

But if one’s destiny is enclosed in one’s brain, or brain pan, how about free will

and predestination, to say nothing of self-determination? Just how do they

fit together? I know I explained this once but

that was a cold while ago and now this upstart rephrasing of it seems to be

causing a lot of attention, I don’t know why. It’s only a re-working, a scissors- and-paste

job; the wording is almost identical, and still there are some benighted souls

who follow it, day by day in its lumbering, tumbrel-like progress across edifices,

burial sites, unnamed and unnamable sumps, for all the world

to see in its glory, for all the world as though something were emerging

and they were going to a circus or a party. Too bad the old people couldn’t have

known about it before it was actually announced. Some of the young too were

tempted to skip until I stepped down from my soap-box to have a go at lecturing them

in real earnest, though with a joke or two added as leavening, or gilding the

pill as you might say. For if they had known first

they wouldn’t have minded not knowing after it had all happened, in vain,

one supposes, again. It’s too bad there aren’t more students

or even a few customers. The weather and the rushes scare tourists away

and waste sets in. The season is spectacular. Here, take my viola

da gamba, that dump again, it had a…Sipping ouzo is something.

But in all the thirty-nine territorial states drains are backing up;

for the first time something like resentment is making itself felt

in the trees, on the lawns. It’s still possible to chat with one’s neighbor over

the back fence, but the quality of life has been imperceptibly diminished

by too much arguing over the status of life today—that is, how is it felt subtly

in one’s veins, how does it differ from before, how is it that one day we think we see it

and the next day it seems gone, gone forever? Yet we do go on living—how does

that work? In the next field, a farmer is driving a rig of some kind—who is

expected to pay for the difference between what he sees up close and what is in the skies

now, with better labeling? More importantly, are they gone, the old familiar faces?

In time living on into a new share of English promise, some of

the junior ones went over the wall, and that was the last we saw of
them
.

Still, it’s a chance. One can easily side with some who offer no

moral incentive to cling together, who are, in their own words, “racked up,”

meaning blighted, for as long as cosmopolitan history chooses to entertain them, and no

offense either. That is, some are neanderthal diehards, you always get a few, but in

a notable number of instances there is no or not much prejudice; the eyes, wiped clean,

are ready for the prepared statement as it sings in the street like a serpent.

There isn’t much you can do, and it’s

a little darker. Tell it the time. And on no account lose your bearings

unless you want to wash up like a piece of polyester at the gulf’s

festering edge. That tanker took on more water. The consensus was there
would
be a

symposium, if anyone could be found to host it. Meanwhile things are getting a little better

on that front too, which includes romance. It too

is highly nutritious. Homey. Just in time for some fun, pranks, feelings; it may

be time to get off now, to swap it for a bigger parcel, trade up

to new ruthless schoolroom dreams while keeping the coded receipt just in case

we may make another big slip and water cannot satisfy competing demands.

We’ll still have an area with water, but like I say, juvenile bombast and highjinks bid fair

to drown out the other uproar, domesticate it and pass it on to their offspring

in Rome, where the dahlias blow, and sweet crocuses and cats by the score as the spring

billboard begins again. But
durch ein ander
. Smell it yourself he said my gosh.

And admit of sexual practices? Proclivities? The right to kill and maim? I suppose…

Night was floral at that post. It was fashionable to throw out last year’s buggery

along with the rented skis, and hope no one saw you. Besides, what could be said

about those mosaics? That they looked on, wore down, smooth as old storks’ nests,

witnesses to so much casual butchery, that a stringy music rose out of it

to command our measured pace back into history and then see it alive, tobacco- and

offal-stained, till we knew not who we were but only what we had to do.

The thunder could be heard all over the city.

Sometimes it is taken to extremes; the “extreme mind” thinks it can

understand what it means to it. The peculiar magic

of our idiom so enchanted her, with the vacuum of each thought,

that it even seemed permissible to escape around the edges and start running away,

though that is another story. What matters to us is that an unstable air

of permissiveness was in the streets, close, like a thick mist

or mitt, on the tongue, leading in some instances to crushes.

Little was ever made of the anomaly that we grew up here; indeed

it was never factored into the partial account that we succeeded only after

many demands in having read aloud, in a halting tone, next to a fountain, so that the tumbling

of pebbles obscured our larger words, in some cases replicating them in miniature,