Houseboat Days: Poems (2 page)

Speaking into it like a megaphone, not hearing

Or caring, although these still live and are generous

And all ways contained, allowed to come and go

Indefinitely in and out of the stockade

They have so much trouble remembering, when your forgetting

Rescues them at last, as a star absorbs the night.

Sometimes a word will start it, like

Hands and feet, sun and gloves. The way

Is fraught with danger, you say, and I

Notice the word “fraught” as you are telling

Me about huge secret valleys some distance from

The mired fighting—“but always, lightly wooded

As they are, more deeply involved with the outcome

That will someday paste a black, bleeding label

In the sky, but until then

The echo, flowing freely in corridors, alleys,

And tame, surprised places far from anywhere,

Will be automatically locked out—
vox

Clamans
—do you see? End of tomorrow.

Don’t try to start the car or look deeper

Into the eternal wimpling of the sky: luster

On luster, transparency floated onto the topmost layer

Until the whole thing overflows like a silver

Wedding cake or Christmas tree, in a cascade of tears.”

You can have whatever you want.

Own it, I mean. In the sense

Of twisting it to you, through long, spiralling afternoons.

It has a sense beyond that meaning that was dropped there

And left to rot. The glacier seems

Impervious but is all shot through

With amethyst and the loud, distraught notes of the cuckoo.

They say the town is coming apart.

And people go around with a fragment of a smile

Missing from their faces. Life is getting cheaper

In some senses. Over the tops of old hills

The sunset jabs down, angled in a way it couldn’t have

Been before. The bird-sellers walk back into it.

“We needn’t fire their kilns; tonight is the epic

Night of the world. Grettir is coming back to us.

His severed hand has grabbed the short sword

And jumped back onto his wrist. The whole man is waking up.

The island is becoming a sun. Wait by this

Mistletoe bush and you will get the feeling of really

Being out of the world and with it. The sun

Is now an inlet of freshness whose very nature

Causes it to dry up.” The old poems

In the book have changed value once again. Their black letter

Fools only themselves into ignoring their stiff, formal qualities, and they move

Insatiably out of reach of bathos and the bad line

Into a weird ether of forgotten dismemberments. Was it

This rosebud? Who said that?

The time of all forgotten

Things is at hand.

Therefore I write you

This bread and butter letter, you my friend

Who saved me from the mill pond of chill doubt

As to my own viability, and from the proud village

Of bourgeois comfort and despair, the mirrored spectacles of grief.

Let who can take courage from the dawn’s

Coming up with the same idiot solution under another guise

So that all meanings should be scrambled this way

No matter how important they were to the men

Coming in the future, since this is the way it has to happen

For all things under the shrinking light to change

And the pattern to follow them, unheeded, bargained for

As it too is absorbed. But the guesswork

Has been taken out of millions of nights. The gasworks

Know it and fall to the ground, though no doom

Says it through the long cool hours of rest

While it sleeps as it can, as in fact it must, for the man to find himself.

The tests are good. You need a million of them.

You’d die laughing as I write to you

Through leaves and articulations, yes, laughing

Myself silly too. The funniest little thing …

That’s how it all began. Looking back on it,

I wonder now if it could have been on some day

Findable in an old calendar? But no,

It wasn’t out of history, but inside it.

That’s the thing. On whatever day we came

To a small house built just above the water,

You had to stoop over to see inside the attic window.

Someone had judged the height to be just right

The way the light came in, and they are

Giving that party, to turn on that dishwasher

And we may be led, then, upward through more

Powerful forms of poetry, past columns

With peeling posters on them, to the country of indifference.

Meanwhile if the swell diapasons, blooms

Unhappily and too soon, the little people are nonetheless real.

Out here on Cottage Grove it matters. The galloping

Wind balks at its shadow. The carriages

Are drawn forward under a sky of fumed oak.

This is America calling:

The mirroring of state to state,

Of voice to voice on the wires,

The force of colloquial greetings like golden

Pollen sinking on the afternoon breeze.

In service stairs the sweet corruption thrives;

The page of dusk turns like a creaking revolving stage in Warren, Ohio.

If this is the way it is let’s leave,

They agree, and soon the slow boxcar journey begins,

Gradually accelerating until the gyrating fans of suburbs

Enfolding the darkness of cities are remembered

Only as a recurring tic. And midway

We meet the disappointed, returning ones, without its

Being able to stop us in the headlong night

Toward the nothing of the coast. At Bolinas

The houses doze and seem to wonder why through the

Pacific haze, and the dreams alternately glow and grow dull.

Why be hanging on here? Like kites, circling,

Slipping on a ramp of air, but always circling?

But the variable cloudiness is pouring it on,

Flooding back to you like the meaning of a joke.

The land wasn’t immediately appealing; we built it

Partly over with fake ruins, in the image of ourselves:

An arch that terminates in mid-keystone, a crumbling stone pier

For laundresses, an open-air theater, never completed

And only partially designed. How are we to inhabit

This space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing,

As in a stage-set or dollhouse, except by staying as we are,

In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yet

Unrealized projects, and a strict sense

Of time running out, of evening presenting

The tactfully folded-over bill? And we fit

Rather too easily into it, become transparent,

Almost ghosts. One day

The birds and animals in the pasture have absorbed

The color, the density of the surroundings,

The leaves are alive, and too heavy with life.

A long period of adjustment followed.

In the cities at the turn of the century they knew about it

But were careful not to let on as the iceman and the milkman

Disappeared down the block and the postman shouted

His daily rounds. The children under the trees knew it

But all the fathers returning home

On streetcars after a satisfying day at the office undid it:

The climate was still floral and all the wallpaper

In a million homes all over the land conspired to hide it.

One day we thought of painted furniture, of how

It just slightly changes everything in the room

And in the yard outside, and how, if we were going

To be able to write the history of our time, starting with today,

It would be necessary to model all these unimportant details

So as to be able to include them; otherwise the narrative

Would have that flat, sandpapered look the sky gets

Out in the middle west toward the end of summer,

The look of wanting to back out before the argument

Has been resolved, and at the same time to save appearances

So that tomorrow will be pure. Therefore, since we have to do our business

In spite of things, why not make it in spite of everything?

That way, maybe the feeble lakes and swamps

Of the back country will get plugged into the circuit

And not just the major events but the whole incredible

Mass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off,

Channeling itself into history, will unroll

As carefully and as casually as a conversation in the next room,

And the purity of today will invest us like a breeze,

Only be hard, spare, ironical: something one can

Tip one’s hat to and still get some use out of.

The parade is turning into our street.

My stars, the burnished uniforms and prismatic

Features of this instant belong here. The land

Is pulling away from the magic, glittering coastal towns

To an aforementioned rendezvous with August and December.

The hunch is it will always be this way,

The look, the way things first scared you

In the night light, and later turned out to be,

Yet still capable, all the same, of a narrow fidelity

To what you and they wanted to become:

No sighs like Russian music, only a vast unraveling

Out toward the junctions and to the darkness beyond

To these bare fields, built at today’s expense.

The tires slowly came to a rubbery stop.

Alliterative festoons in the sky noted

That this branchy birthplace of presidents was also

The big frigidaire-cum-cowbarn where mendicant

And margrave alike waited out the results

Of the natural elections. So any openness of song

Was the plainer way. O take me to the banks

Of your Mississippi over there, etc. Like a plant

Rooted in parched earth I am

A stranger myself in the dramatic lighting,

The result of war. That which is given to see

At any moment is the residue, shadowed

In gold or emerging into the clear bluish haze

Of uncertainty. We come back to ourselves

Through the rubbish of cloud and tree-spattered pavement.

These days stand like vapor under the trees.

There is no reason for the surcharge to bother you.

Living in a city one is nonplussed by some

Of the inhabitants. The weather has grown gray with age.

Poltergeists go about their business, sometimes

Demanding a sweeping revision. The breath of the air

Is invisible. People stay

Next to the edges of fields, hoping that out of nothing

Something will come, and it does, but what? Embers

Of the rain tamp down the shitty darkness that issues

From nowhere. A man in her room, you say.

I like the really wonderful way you express things

So that it might be said, that of all the ways in which to

Emphasize a posture or a particular mental climate

Like this gray-violet one with a thin white irregular line

Descending the two vertical sides, these are those which

Can also unsay an infinite number of pauses

In the ceramic day. Every invitation

To every stranger is met at the station.

She liked the blue drapes. They made a star

At the angle. A boy in leather moved in.

Later they found names from the turn of the century

Coming home one evening. The whole of being

Unknown absorbed into the stalk. A free

Bride on the rails warning to notice other

Hers and the great graves that outwore them

Like faces on a building, the lightning rod

Of a name calibrated all their musing differences.

Another day. Deliberations are recessed

In an iron-blue chamber of that afternoon

On which we wore things and looked well at

A slab of business rising behind the stars.

The luxury of now is that the cancelled gala has been

Put back in. The orchestra is starting to tune up.

The tone-row of a dripping faucet is batted back and forth

Among the kitchen, the confusion outside, the pale bluster

Of the sky, the correct but insidious grass.

The conductor, a glass of water, permits all kinds

Of wacky analogies to glance off him, and, circling outward,

To bring in the night. Nothing is too “unimportant”

Or too important, for that matter. The newspaper and the garbage

Wrapped in it, the over, the under.

You get thrown to one side

Into a kind of broom closet as the argument continues carolling

Ideas from the novel of which this is the unsuccessful

Stage adaptation. Too much, perhaps, gets lost.

What about arriving after sunset on the beach of a

Dank but extremely beautiful island to hear the speeches

Of the invisible natives, whose punishment is speech?

At the top of his teddy-bear throne, the ruler,

Still lit by the sun, gazes blankly across at something

Opposite. His eyes are empty rectangles, shaped

Like slightly curved sticks of chewing gum. He witnesses.

But we are the witnesses.

In the increasingly convincing darkness

The words become palpable, like a fruit

That is too beautiful to eat. We want these

Down here on our level. But the tedium persists

In the form of remarks exchanged by birds

Before the curtain. What am I doing up here?

Pretending to resist but secretly giving in so as to reappear

In a completely new outfit and group of colors once today’s