Flow Chart: A Poem (25 page)

you shut up and don’t read too much into the dog’s picture. After all,

the mutt said he wanted it taken, and in the backyard, so how was I to know

there’d be hell to pay for even this seeming indulgence? And how did I get away

after fourteen years? I’m afraid that’s one you’ll have to save for the answer man, besides,

my time is up and nothing too terrible has happened, only clouds, wind, stone, sometimes

a distant engine, purring in the morning fog, before the others are up, but I can see it.

It unwinds shelteringly.

But there were dreams to sell, ill didst thou buy:

not the man walking, the woman sitting on the toilet, the tuba-player unscrewing the mouthpiece

of his instrument and blowing into it, not the azaleas blooming in tubs; but the three policemen and the man

scratching his groin, turning to say something to someone you couldn’t see; the women

who wandered up to you at a cookout, waiting for you to give them an affectionate

peck on the cheek; the marching band in Rio, and the one in New Orleans, who knew

the music very well, and played it as they walked; the African violets you called
violettes

du Cap
, white, pink and blue, doing nicely in a northern window: these, for your trouble,

you may have mastered and accomplished much else besides, not least turning yourself from a

slightly unruly child into a sophisticated and cultivated adult with a number of books

to his credit and many more projects in the works; as well as the unattractive dreamer,

stained with sleep, who grasps at these as they elude him, and grasps at still others

which elude him not, all the time swilling the taste of one in his mouth. Forgetful,

you hang up the receiver allowing others to get through: in your garden

there may have been much confusion but also attentive things growing, now cut adrift,

floundering for lack of direction from you. And we see it even in the tall houses

that fan out from here: each has its family

who are not much concerned with you, but to whom a truce was offered, and who missed out on it

because of misplaced consideration for you; and then in the dark forests that slant down

ravines quite close to the town, whose emptiness you could have peopled

merely by taking them up, in conversation; and the vast, greenish-gray seas punctuated

with scudding whitecaps that are a mystery and will always remain so, but you could have

addressed yourself to that, at least, included them in some memorial address

at the proper time, and so saved a speck of righteousness for your otherwise unproductive antics, summoned

dazed spirits “out of hell’s murky haze, heaven’s blue hall,” accommodated them even

as you sat beside me, reading or listening to music. Thus, it becomes time to relax

e’en so. Funny, isn’t it? The last thing on your list, and now

it is being approached even as afternoon makes room for evening, when all our

aspirations shall be quietened. And if no post arrives, no hens cluck,

then it shall be just as if it had happened. Why? Because it’s completed. Don’t you

see the light, seeing the light? Now you see it, now you don’t,

is about right, having given up all lust, all hope.

There is a time for trying on new clothes.

Yet the spirits are still angry that you woke them, if that’s what you did.

Dreaming a dream to prize
—way to go, Thomas L. It matters not how puke-encrusted

the areaway, how charged with punishments the jazz-inflected scroll—this
is
your time, by golly,

so change your clothes and get it right. THIS IS AN ILLUSTRATION OF SOMETHING.

What people never really wanted to talk about—Stonehenge. Last year it was a phantom’s

breath upset you. Incorporate it—no second chance will be given

but what an old man said, quietly sitting at a coffee table, eyes shielded from the light.

A blast of gramophone music veers into the shutters from time to time. In those days and

in that time you had to have a sister and brother and be known. Now anyone

may play, but the stakes, alas, are much higher. Few

can afford to lose. Yet you see brothers, and sons, caught in the lure of it,

swapping new clothes for food, in short doing all the things you were warned against,

like talking to strangers. I like that. I only wish more of ’em would listen to me, but they

too have their business to attend to, curious as it seems, even as your mouth waters

at the sight of one of them, who hurries on, unfeeling. It’s at night they come back,

once they know they’ve got you, or can have you, and then the caterwauling begins

unchecked. How would you like a plastron front to wear with this? Of course you wouldn’t,

but that don’t keep none of them from trying to play the Ripper, more shitted against

than shitting, so then they
do
rise up, and it can be one hell of a sight,

especially for those unaccustomed to it. I prefer to sit here and “rest” my eyes.

Usually my hunches are good, but last week comes one of ’em, and they always

asks you for something, begs a little jam or some string, and once you give it

you’re in their power. But you knew
that
. Then the fun begins in earnest, blows rain

down from all over, chopping-block sounds, you think mechanically of Mary Stuart and Lady

Jane Grey, holding on to your forelock, cap in hand, of course. I don’t know how long

the mist and smog have overlain this city, the dreaded heat, rising out of the sewers,

that can seem like the odor of fresh-baked buttered rolls. Then you must go to it again

and fill out a new application, for they have mislaid the first.

We nightingales

sing boldly from our hearts, so listen to us:

First, a saxophone quartet told me we have lived too much

in the minds of others, have too much unguaranteed capital on deposit there.

Why are you here? Why did you scream?

Only that one told me a new-laid owl’s egg is sovereign

against the gripes, and now I find you here too. I have found you out. You seem

convinced the killer is one of us. Why? Did a drowned virgin

tell you that, or Tim the ostler, or the one-eyed hay-baler

with a hook for a hand? Or was it something else—some letter

you might have received from some distant land

where all is peace under the umbrella-pines and a serpent guards

the golden apples still? Seal it didst thou,

to send it back across the water as a sigh

to those unknowable?

I’ll be perfectly frank with you. Though the sun’s crisply charred

entrails have slumped behind yonder peak, no one has stepped forward to claim

the amazing sum promised by the clerk. You know not one minnesinger has ever

reneged on a pledge. Until today, that is. When by the loose curtain’s distracted

fall I spy the contour of an ankle, and the ferrous glint

of a meat-cleaver. Go to the judge! Tell him what you have told me

and your daughter! Implore his mercy! Then if you dare

look round to see what impression your sudden fit of sincerity hath produced. I’ll wager you

no one leaves the room, and that the tool chest be empty! Go on! Try it! Last one in’s

a rotten apple, or a—a booby. That’s my last offer. Chain me to the iron bedstead

and electrocute me, so help me, that’s all you’re going to get out of me, harden my arteries

to obsidian as they will, let the mostly empty bottles

be drained till not one drop remaineth in them. Now that the killer is caught

you can return the map to Mr. Isbark.

A little loathing,

a cautious wind that pads softly

like a cat about thine loin

and argues persuasively for a cease-fire, in which one might read

much if one were wide awake and made aware, in whose bright fire

hell’s thistle gleams, a league or so away. Marry, save that alibi

for your autobiography. Serve me fresh drink, I’ll drink on’t.

They were getting closer to your name in the list; now,

nothing will remove that stain. So how’s about a walk around the old neighborhood?

Eleanor’s here too. You remember Eleanor. So, nice and easy,

until it becomes something like grub, or a slug, something shapeless and horrible

you can talk back to, even scream invective at—you’ve got the time. And meanwhile our balls and

asses got to shamble on. But the daddies were keen on it.

They all liked it. Yon dork in the petting zoo,

Who, what, is it?

Two nights ago when I was complaining about all the weather we’ve been having lately,

and about how no one can do anything about it—much as I’d like to—

I was still happy, but today it turns out the drought has been secretly installed for weeks:

we’re only beginning to feel the brunt of it. Of course, measures will be taken

but that’s scarcely the point. It won’t like you any better for it.

And what about mud? If we lose it, we lose everything.

Distinctions would no longer get muddied. There’d be nothing in life to wriggle out of,

no ooze to drop back into. We need water, heaven knows, but mud—it’s so all over the place,

like air, that the thought of its not being there is even scarier.

Like a home that must be abandoned quickly, whose carpets and wallpaper get that faintly

distressed look, earth would go on without us, leave us waiting in space

for a connection that never comes. Somehow we’d survive—we always do—but at what cost

of mud and cosmetics. Different forms of address

would have to be adopted. Manners would become pallid, and the plot of one’s life

like a thin membrane in which one can still recognize the shapes

that brought us here, and lure us on, but stronger too, to survive business,

and that would wreck our average partygoing.

I live at the bottom of the sea now.

But I can still sense a stranger

even when far off

and count the threads of partings still to be formalized.

And later when we stayed talking quietly apart

in the roofless outdoor room, she had discovered

my beloved: “Well!
Improvvisatore!
It would seem God’s wrath

has taken us both down a peg. I have my money. And you, I suppose, will wing it

as in the past of windy Marches and stifling Augusts we have known

together, nor regretted them once past, but say,

if not some thread, a token then, a coupon

for pats and fondlings? Was this thy gratitude for pats and fondlings,

to die like any other mortal ass?

And why, O dearest, could’st not keep thy legs,

that sacred pair, sacred to sacred me?” Why, then, risk it?

Why go after it? Anyhow, I left it in the crypt.

And all that time was much fussing, to-ing and fro-ing, and above all waiting

to see the result on the street next day. As it happened, it was a lady

in yellow, with nice legs, who turned to me and said: “Haven’t you anything better to do?”

I wanted to cry back at her: “Yes! And these are those things! Let’s

discuss your legs!” But I knew she couldn’t imagine herself

filling more than the allotted space, one for her and one for herself,

so I said nothing, and she resumed her walking.
You

understand it, though, don’t you? I mean how objects, including people, can be one thing

and mean something else, and therefore these two are subtly disconnected? I don’t see how

a bunch of attributes can go walking around with a coatrack labeled “person” loosely tied

to it with apron strings. That blows my mind. I see that you want to mean it, though.

Yes, I love it, but that doesn’t mean…

A girl named Christine asked me why I have so much trouble at the office.

It’s just that I don’t enjoy taking orders from my inferiors, and besides,

there are so many other, nicer things to be doing! Sleeping while the navigator

is poised, adrift, and sucking each other’s dicks is only one.

Travel is another. Dinard! Was ever such a place? And when you are tired

but not yet ready to return home, you can be that person again, the one who dragged you

here. And we made love on a car-seat

in the moonlight, except there wasn’t much of it. And I was the only one!

These adventures had passed through my head while I was alone

and I thought I was having them. But you need an audience

for them to reach the third dimension. Spooks in the manor

won’t do, no pre-school-age children. That night in the car, though…

Then we clambered down some rocks. There was a girl there who spoke of finance, of how

it’s going to be the next most important thing. I said nothing, but wondered if I could

take my stories with me when that happens, maybe read them to others

who would appreciate them in the new financial age that offers better reception

to things of the future, like mine. False dewdrops starred her eyelashes,

and I realized we were no better off in this age than in any other, except

perhaps the Ice Age. How if we are always going to be doing things for each other

why then of course we’ll miss the point, since what happens, happens off in a trailer

and we really know no more of each other than ever, and that is what

ought to be our tree, our piece of happening.

My
standing
, in the French sense of the word. How everybody accepts me

and knows they are going to see a nice sight. Forget it. None of it matters

except what I am as I am to others. Trees floating around. Hard-ons

and what to do about them. But it is arranged so that you cannot begin to play.