Houseboat Days: Poems (5 page)

And then it … happens, like an explosion in the brain,

Only it’s a catastrophe on another planet to which

One has been invited, and as surely cannot refuse:

Pain in the cistern, in the gutters, and if we merely

Wait awhile, that denial, as though a universe of pain

Had been created just so as to deny its own existence.

But I don’t set much stock in things

Beyond the weather and the certainties of living and dying:

The rest is optional. To praise this, blame that,

Leads one subtly away from the beginning, where

We must stay, in motion. To flash light

Into the house within, its many chambers,

Its memories and associations, upon its inscribed

And pictured walls, argues enough that life is various.

Life is beautiful. He who reads that

As in the window of some distant, speeding train

Knows what he wants, and what will befall.

Pinpricks of rain fall again.

And from across the quite wide median with its

Little white flowers, a reply is broadcast:

“Dissolve parliament. Hold new elections.”

It would be deplorable if the rain also washed away

This profile at the window that moves, and moves on,

Knowing that it moves, and knows nothing else. It is the light

At the end of the tunnel as it might be seen

By him looking out somberly at the shower,

The picture of hope a dying man might turn away from,

Realizing that hope is something else, something concrete

You can’t have. So, winding past certain pillars

Until you get to evening’s malachite one, it becomes a vast dream

Of having that can topple governments, level towns and cities

With the pressure of sleep building up behind it.

The surge creates its own edge

And you must proceed this way: mornings of assent,

Indifferent noons leading to the ripple of the question

Of late afternoon projected into evening.

Arabesques and runnels are the result

Over the public address system, on the seismograph at Berkeley.

A little simple arithmetic tells you that to be with you

In this passage, this movement, is what the instance costs:

A sail out of some afternoon, beyond amazement, astonished,

Apparently not tampered with. As the rain gathers and protects

Its own darkness, the place in the slipcover is noticed

For the first and last time, fading like the spine

Of an adventure novel behind glass, behind the teacups.

All through the fifties and sixties the land tilted

Toward the bowl of life. Now life

Has moved in that direction. We taste the conviction

Minus the rind, the pulp and the seeds. It

Goes down smoothly.

At a later date I added color

And the field became a shed in ways I no longer remember.

Familiarly, but without tenderness, the sunset pours its

Dance music on the (again) slanting barrens.

The problems we were speaking of move up toward them.

For the disciple nothing had changed. The mood was still

Gray tolerance, as the road marched along

Singing its little song of despair. Once, a cry

Started up out of the hills. That old, puzzling persuasion

Again. Sex was part of this,

And the shock of day turning into night.

Though we always found something delicate (too delicate

For some tastes, perhaps) to touch, to desire.

And we made much of this sort of materiality

That clogged the weight of starlight, made it seem

Fibrous, yet there was a chance in this

To see the present as it never had existed,

Clear and shapeless, in an atmosphere like cut glass.

At Latour-Maubourg you said this was a good thing, and on the steps

Of Métro Jasmin the couriers nodded to us correctly, and the

Pact was sealed in the sky. But now moments surround us

Like a crowd, some inquisitive faces, some hostile ones,

Some enigmatic or turned away to an anterior form of time

Given once and for all. The jetstream inscribes a final flourish

That melts as it stays. The problem isn’t how to proceed

But is one of being: whether this ever was, and whose

It shall be. To be starting out, just one step

Off the sidewalk, and as such pulled back into the glittering

Snowstorm of stinging tentacles of how that would be worked out

If we ever work it out. And the voice came back at him

Across the water, rubbing it the wrong way: “Thou

Canst but undo the wrong thou hast done.” The sackbuts

Embellish it, and we are never any closer to the collision

Of the waters, the peace of light drowning light,

Grabbing it, holding it up streaming. It is all one. It lies

All around, its new message, guilt, the admission

Of guilt, your new act. Time buys

The receiver, the onlooker of the earlier system, but cannot

Buy back the rest. It is night that fell

At the edge of your footsteps as the music stopped.

And we heard the bells for the first time. It is your chapter, I said.

A sudden, acrid smell of roses, and the urchin

Turns away, tears level in the eyes. Waffled feeling:

“You’d scarce credit it, mum,” as the starched

Moment of outline recedes down a corridor, some parts

Lighter, but the ensemble always darker as the vanishing point

Is reached and turns itself

Into an old army blanket, or something flat and material

As this idea of an old stump in a woods somewhere.

Then it is true…. It is you, who, that

Wet evening in March … Madam, say no more,

Your very lack of information is special to me,

Your emptying glance, prisms which I treasure up.

Only let your voice not become this clarion,

Alarum in the wilderness, calling me back to piety, to sense,

Else I am undone, for late haze drapes the golf links

And the gilded spines of these tomes blaze too bright.

You can’t say it that way any more.

Bothered about beauty you have to

Come out into the open, into a clearing,

And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you

Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange

Of you, you who have so many lovers,

People who look up to you and are willing

To do things for you, but you think

It’s not right, that if they really knew you …

So much for self-analysis. Now,

About what to put in your poem-painting:

Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.

Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,

Skyrockets are good—do they still exist?

There are a lot of other things of the same quality

As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must

Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed,

Dull-sounding ones. She approached me

About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was

Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments.

Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head

Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something

Ought to be written about how this affects

You when you write poetry:

The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind

Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate

Something between breaths, if only for the sake

Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you

For other centers of communication, so that understanding

May begin, and in doing so be undone.

The medieval town, with frieze

Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

That came when we wanted it to snow?

Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

Ideas, as in this poem? But we

Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

The mistress we desire? Now they

Will have to believe it

As we believe it. In school

All the thought got combed out:

What was left was like a field.

Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.

Now open them on a thin vertical path.

It might give us—what?—some flowers soon?

Are built out of the meshing of life and space

At the point where we are wholly revealed

In the lozenge-shaped openings. Because

It is argued that these structures address themselves

To exclusively aesthetic concerns, like windmills

On a vast plain. To which it is answered

That there are no other questions than these,

Half squashed in mud, emerging out of the moment

We all live, learning to like it. No sonnet

On this furthest strip of land, no pebbles,

No plants. To extend one’s life

All day on the dirty stone of some plaza,

Unaware among the pretty lunging of the wind,

Light and shade, is like coming out of

A coma that is a white, interesting country,

Prepared to lose the main memory in a meeting

By torchlight under the twisted end of the stairs.

I teach in a high school

And see the nurses in some of the hospitals,

And if all teachers are like that

Maybe I can give you a buzz some day,

Maybe we can get together for lunch or coffee or something.

The white marble statues in the auditorium

Are colder to the touch than the rain that falls

Past the post-office inscription about rain or snow

Or gloom of night. I think

About what these archaic meanings mean,

That unfurl like a rope ladder down through history,

To fall at our feet like crocuses.

All of our lives is a rebus

Of little wooden animals painted shy,

Terrific colors, magnificent and horrible,

Close together. The message is learned

The way light at the edge of a beach in autumn is learned.

The seasons are superimposed.

In New York we have winter in August

As they do in Argentina and Australia.

Spring is leafy and cold, autumn pale and dry.

And changes build up

Forever, like birds released into the light

Of an August sky, falling away forever

To define the handful of things we know for sure,

Followed by musical evenings.

Yes, friends, these clouds pulled along on invisible ropes

Are, as you have guessed, merely stage machinery,

And the funny thing is it knows we know

About it and still wants us to go on believing

In what it so unskillfully imitates, and wants

To be loved not for that but for itself:

The murky atmosphere of a park, tattered

Foliage, wise old treetrunks, rainbow tissue-paper wadded

Clouds down near where the perspective

Intersects the sunset, so we may know

We too are somehow impossible, formed of so many different things,

Too many to make sense to anybody.

We straggle on as quotients, hard-to-combine

Ingredients, and what continues

Does so with our participation and consent.

Try milk of tears, but it is not the same.

The dandelions will have to know why, and your comic

Dirge routine will be lost on the unfolding sheaves

Of the wind, a lucky one, though it will carry you

Too far, to some manageable, cold, open

Shore of sorrows you expected to reach,

Then leave behind.

Thus, friend, this distilled,

Dispersed musk of moving around, the product

Of leaf after transparent leaf, of too many

Comings and goings, visitors at all hours.

Each night

Is trifoliate, strange to the touch.

The kinds of thing are more important than the

Individual thing, though the specific is supremely

Interesting. Right? As each particular

Goes over Niagara Falls in a barrel one may

Justifiably ask: Where does this come from?

Whither goes my concern? What you are wearing

Has vanished along with other concepts.

They are lined up by the factory balcony railing

Against blue sky with some clumsy white paper clouds

Pasted on it. Where does the east meet the west?

At sunset there is a choice of two smiles: discreet or serious.

In this best of all possible worlds, that is enough.

I like to speak in rhymes,

because I am a rhyme myself.

N
IJINSKY

I saw a cottage in the sky.

I saw a balloon made of lead.

I cannot restrain my tears, and they fall

On my left hand and on my silken tie,

But I cannot and do not want to hold them back.

One day the neighbors complain about an unpleasant odor

Coming from his room.
I went for a walk

But met no friends.
Another time I go outside

Into the world. It rocks on and on.

It was rocking before I saw it

And is presumably doing so still.

The banker lays his hand on mine.

His face is as clean as a white handkerchief.

We talk nonsense as usual.

I trace little circles on the light that comes in

Through the window on saw-horse legs.

Afterwards I see that we are three.

Someone had entered the room while I was discussing my money problems.

I wish God would put a stop to this. I

Turn and see the new moon through glass. I am yanked away