Flow Chart: A Poem (7 page)

as you go along looking in the dirt for a whistle. But that day

it was all roses. And it turned out that the inquiry was silenced,

deliberately erased from the file.

And if a man wanted this, and got it, how about the heathen rest of us

who wait in silence for food

as though a drug got planted in one’s abdomen? Sooner or later, boys and girls declare, there

will be someone on whom a care like this could devolve,

a woman made to see through, analyze, and correct the errant circuitry

and in doing so bring us back to the harbor of recollection

from which we strayed so long ago, but it was a mistake in a dream.

The formula is now reconstituted.

From the awfulness of times long gone by it wrests

a polite excuse, small even by its standards, but alive to us, and harsh, dry, a wrong prism.

Or stand: all right, lowering the teabag into the mug until something

comes of it, is plumbed, but meanwhile what of zombies standing around in clinging seersucker

in frigid temperatures, awaiting your decision? When the curse

arrives, are you prepared to deal with it? Apologies don’t matter any more; it’s

a question of biting off the end, spitting it out, and sucking the poison through a small tube

if you want to go that way. Otherwise, listless years of atrophy could be your fate

though there are undoubtedly worse ones. Pick a channel, explore, document it—

please take
all
the evidence into account in your report, when you write it:

you’ll find your story isn’t so different from any honest man’s, nor less

bizarre and compelling: was it always a savage rite? Weren’t there times

in childhood when one felt neutral, a shy appraiser gazing unendangered into

the reflecting globe, and when you turned back, moments later, the horrible clashes

hadn’t gone away, but you were somehow separated, a person with things to do? And if

the urgency thinned out in later decades, why be compromised? Because these others

were waging war on things and people with words and things does it follow that your employment

was slighted, that you weren’t free to clean out your desk? Sullen

newsprint blows back and forth, a double sheet of it is suddenly tossed six stories high

and drops back, heavy as a sinker: does this have something

to do to you; more to the point, are you alive severed from it? The old ghouls

will have to be derided before one faces up to the specter of the empty stadium

at dusk, bare branches aquiver. How about your friend

in the hospital: did you call him? How many bridges between here and the end of that journey?

Over wells, along walls, silently one creeps along. Employment is difficult: I mean

it’s difficult for me to hold a job long, not that I’m not efficient, it’s, well,

so easy not to understand, to take full possession of one’s unawareness and

then refuse to leave, a squatter in one’s own house. And so much will

have happened by the time even this minor wrangle is settled. It’s impossible

to keep abreast of the times, and yet we still think of wings.

How soft were those mute,

eloquent colors; even the plaids were like subtle hints. One baked

under trees, too lazy to notice the fading hour, until

the alarm sounded, the park went berserk, and then? Meanwhile a decision about keeping and

refinancing the old records had been reached, sure enough, just as one arrived home out

of breath. They said no one will ever speak to you now. Because in the dark

you knew something and didn’t tell it, though the darkened spaces under the trees were at that

point intolerable, their bulk like mere hulls in the shattered night light. Better

to go into exile early rather than late, you thought, not saying anything, but the notion

became a battle-cry and soon everybody was trying to disconnect his life and seal it

off, unsuccessfully. The idea had occurred to you during a performance of a high-school play.

You weren’t ashamed to take credit for it—why should you be? And thus a field

got sorted out; all the husks, shadows and little bells counted and clear in the rising

tide of shadow that steeped and proclaimed it: here was another place

to take orders in, to be from if convenient; only don’t die

yet, we’ll need you for the next act; it suited everybody.

Not on the agenda was the piercing squeal of puffins

newly released from captivity—but we’d get to that, later. Now the news

was of inflation. How to combat it? Is there any world-power so stupid it thinks it

must have the answer, or that an answer actually exists? You can bet there isn’t,

which isn’t a reason for a lot of ink and newsprint not to get chewed up in the approach

to an argument on the subject. Those peaceful voices, rising tier on tier

in the storied gothic cathedral, go unheard. Nobody thinks it’s time for them,

and so, when one has become a little more exhausted, one

sinks down with one’s lunch under a lofty elm in the breathless, shrunken noon.

Did one perhaps oversell oneself,

and if so how many instances are left? Miss Winslow was just telling us about your island

and its cormorants and the—er—other problems. How do the natives feel

about what you’re doing? Is there any way to escape butchery

before it’s too late, except in the exploding haystacks? But I get ahead of myself—I’ll

do anything—that is, anything I can—to avoid the appearance of inequity, only please,

please call those spear-carriers or whatever you call them off.

Once two were saddled with each other’s lies which became as a sacramental trust

for them. They listened, they put forth feelers, pouted on cue, but in due

course banshees exploited the situation. And once the climate of trust is destroyed

only lust for vengeance can take its place—or so
one
would have us believe.

After school I told some of the parents about it. On this site

exactly ten years ago stood an oblong wooden toll booth. Now there’s not

a trace to indicate anything ever existed here. Kind of makes you wonder how

this
place will look when you’re gone. Oh you needn’t throw bones

at it, the attendants are churlish enough—still, I’ve got to see one of those

so-called ant men before I leave here, which better be quick. But don’t drag us

back to the water hole, I can see my reflection just fine in this bent

piece of aluminum. My hair, today, is beautifully combed. I am on a roll, I guess, and two

medicine men are coming to tea, and their letters of recommendation have already been mailed,

and so for two years out of vanity I shifted my position on the stool, pretending indifference

to everything, though I knew, in my heart of hearts, this wasn’t the way

to gain their trust, or mine. And now that it’s time to give out prizes, why

there just isn’t any gumption left, only wheezes, so we all must stay and then go

away unsatisfied. It was no good grumbling about the weather;

it always came just the same, and left us

feeling vaguely unsatisfied.

A proud pair they were: unscathed for a day.

Interestingly, he hadn’t done all the things he said he had.

Which doesn’t solve the problem of white-glove inspections and seeds that roll

after they have been planted. Should he have been feeling more anxiety? Nah. Generating

trust? Depends on whose. Any one of several roadblocks could have deterred whatever

was escaping, and she (in green dress) was doing a masterful job of distracting the parking-

lot attendant. On the morning of the following day we found ourselves confronted with the

familiar problem of too much desert and too little time. Friends—you know the feeling—

are going to insist on knowing whose story it is. Better tell them. But wait—

you can’t relate something and then connect it to some specific person. No job

says you ought to. But, heavy with garlands, we were being followed by the police

into a set-up storefront. Here, it all ends. Not so fast—we may have other information

to absolve wage-earners of paying dues

to your rotten club with all its intimate signs and shivers

of remorseless joy. Thought you had me. You’ll face the Luftwaffe—alone. Now there’s

a young woman outside says she has some important information about Mrs. Butterfield.

Young lady, is this a trick? What about the spiders that drilled all day, maneuvers

that took up so much time the judge never got around to depositing the check and the

bingo night went kerflooey, what with the sounds of drenching rain, leaks in the shutters,

pivotal oilcloth sentiments peeling, junked party ornaments, a woman who says he’s a size 11

and other gadabouts, listless ones, too revealing to report on? The chimney seemed about to collapse,

disguising the fact that a mountain of sludge was moving on

the hysterical town, all of whose gaily decorated ridgepoles were in danger, only now no one

stopped to think about it, the more massive southwestern face being turned toward one

and all, who, mesmerized by the silence of death, made sure their seams

were straight. It seemed but a few moments later though actually it was probably more like

years that the evangelist profited and whispered: all of his

town made sense, his relatives enjoyed positions of respect, and so

what trouble could there be? No, there is no knocking in the walls, nothing

like that. The operation is a success from the point of view of the furthest tangle

of violet cliff-face that sometimes flashes toward one, far across the valley, as though revealing

an ecstatic, deep-buried message. This is the price we have to pay,

it seems to say, and though all future debts will have been incurred gladly, one must

shoulder the burden of the interest payments NOW, otherwise there’ll be such a scare

in the curriculum as only the oldest ones will want to get out, the others

impeded or impeached by the books they have a right to read

in this our own time. Only I say to you, don’t look askance at the singers

just because they’re not responsible for the awful libretto, bearing in mind the tropes

each had to traverse to get here, and now their music delights the eye

and the mind as well as the ear, they have surely calibrated their longings to us;

there will be more surprises to come and the well-nursed fantasy expands, blooms

with the hair of their yearning, turning desire to a trick and love to its own advantage.

Yet come speak with me behind the screen of the waterfall’s Holophane, yet be not too

distant lest the muggers suspect us and the children bear away our burden, our only

secret. For nurseries have their news agencies as surely as garlic repels vampires

among others. Today a tree talked to us. What it said was don’t

plunge too deeply into the microbe-infested waters, there may be an alternate plan

which will allow us to save more lives and so become our own resurrection of sorts

on the simple chart. Pin it here, it says, this place is the most valuable and least

congested with shit and other rungs of the ladder of hysterical flight

from the pages of a magazine to the dime-store trophy that is your secret, haunted

by memories both reluctant and relaxed, as long as it wants to take you away. But beware

the instant in which it doesn’t: utopias can crumble

in that split-second, and you may wake up finding you have more than you ever wanted to own,

but by that time the dream is falling in on itself in slow motion or someone is dismantling it.

Here at Shadowlawn the question is always: O what awful thing are they doing now?

What make-believe? Idiotic proposals are advanced, then they blab it,

it won’t work. It doesn’t work. Not that anyone is what I would call conceited, or

outgoing either, I guess. There’s a certain image…But that went out in 1971. No one has

been back there since. A small road leads to it, called “the esplanade.” In small groups

they recur, since the fence was last painted, and are up to discussing it—who knows,

maybe an interesting idea will emerge, yet the handwriting on the wall seems to indicate otherwise:

return to your abstractions, it said, life

has no need of you just yet. I was sitting in my car

and suddenly I could see down the whole distance I had come, and the fog-shrouded destination

became clear again, as it has so many times over the past weeks. I thought I should

sharpen my appearance, for that way lies light, lies life, and yes I am

talking about new clothes as well. He wore a black suit—

that’s what image those threads project? Arts & leisure—80 bucks! As quiet as my

contentment is the voice at my shoulder: make it over. Perhaps not a total

from-the-ground-up rehab, perhaps only a few cosmetic touches

would have an earth-shaking impact, in this instance. It’s what you
can
do that matters

more than the whole picture, but the older we grow, the more unused to the idea of dying—

and I’m sorry I brought the subject up—we become. We are set in our ways. The breath

of autumn is vast again, we see vague but kind-hearted auguries

in it, then forget. It’s the way our silhouette gets projected on invisible nature

that seduces one to come down from the top of the leaf-pile. By then it’s dark,

of course. One’s sedan’s not on schedule, and the rear-view mirror is brittle, too

polished to shine, just visible enough to see the hairs

on one’s face by. Is it going to cripple