Houseboat Days: Poems (8 page)

But we won’t know till we see it, as on a windless day

It suddenly becomes obvious how wonderful the fields are

Before it all sickens and fades to a mélange

Of half-truths, this gray dump. Then double trouble

Arrives, Beppo and Zeppo confront one

Out of a hurricane of colored dots, twin

Windshield wipers dealing the accessories:

Woe, wrack, wet—probably another kingdom.

I was going to say that the sky

Could never become that totally self-absorbed, bachelor’s-

Button blue, yet it has, and nothing is any safer for it,

Though the outlines of what we did stay just a second longer

On the etching of the forest, and we know enough not

To go there. If brimstone were the same as the truth

A gate deep in the ground would unlock to the fumbling

Of a certain key and the dogs at the dog races

Would circumambulate each in his allotted groove

Casting an exaggeratedly long shadow, while other

Malcontents, troublemakers,
esprits frondeurs
moved up

To dissolve in the brightness of the footlights. I would

Withstand, bow in hand, to grieve them. So it is time

To wake up, to commingle with the little walking presences, all

Somehow related, to each other and through each other to us,

Characters in the opera
The Flood,
by the great anonymous composer.

Mostly they are

Shoals, even tricks of the light, armies

In debacle, helter skelter, pell mell,

Fleeing us who sometime did us seek,

And there is no place, nothing

To hide in, if it took weeks and months

With time running out. Nothing could be done.

Those ramparts, granular as Saturn’s rings,

That seem some tomb of pleasures, a Sans Souci,

Are absent clouds. The real diversions on the ground

Are shrub and nettle, planing the way

For asking me to come down, and the snow, the frost, the rain,

The cold, the heat, for dry or wet

We must lodge on the plain…. Later, dying

“Of complications,” only it must really have been much later, her hair

Had that whited look. Now it’s darker.

And an intruder is present.

But it always winds down like this

To the rut of night. Boats no longer come

Plying along the sides of docks in this part

Of the world. We are alone. Only by climbing

A low bluff does the intent get filled in

Along the edge, and then only subtly.

Evening weaves along these open tracts almost

Until the solemn tolling of a bell

Launches its moment of pain and obscurity, wider

Than any net can seize, or star presage. Further on it says

That all the missing parts must be tracked down

By coal-light or igloo-light because

In so doing we navigate these our passages,

And take sides on certain issues, are

Emphatically pro or con about what concerns us,

Such as the strangeness of our architecture,

The diffuse quality of our literature.

Or does each tense fit, and each desire

Drown in the lake of one vague one, featureless

And indeterminate? Which is why one’s own wish

Keeps getting granted for someone else? In the forest

Are no clean sheets, no other house

But leaves and boughs. How many

Other things can one want? Nice hair

And eyes, galoshes on a rainy day? For those who go

Under the green helm know it lets itself

Become known, at different moments, under different aspects.

Unless some movie did it first, or

A stranger came to the door and then the change

Was real until it went away. Or is it

Like a landscape in its inner folds, relaxed

And with the sense of there being about to be some more

Until the first part is digested and then it twists

Only because this is the way we can see things?

It is revisionism in that you are

Always trying to put some part of the past back in,

And although it fits it doesn’t belong in the

Dark blue glass ocean of having been remembered again.

From earliest times we were cautioned not to get excited

About things, so this quality shows up so far only in

Slightly deeper tree-shadows that anticipate this PACING THE FLOOR

That takes in the walls, the window and the woods.

Then it was as if a kind of embarrassment,

The product of a discretion lodged far back in the past,

Blotted them against a wall of haze.

Pursuing time this way, as a dog nudges a bone,

You find it has doubled back, the flanges

Of night having now replaced the big daffy gray clouds.

O now no longer speak, but rather seem

In the way of gardens long ago turned away from,

And now no one any more will have to believe anything

He or she doesn’t want to as golden light wholly

Saturates a wooden fence and speaks for everybody

In a native accent that sounds new and foreign.

But the hesitation stayed on, and came to be permanent

Because they were thinking about each other.

That’s an unusual … As though a new crescent

Reached out and lapped at a succession of multitudes,

Diminished now, but still lively and true.

It seems to say: there are lots of differences inside.

There were differences when only you knew them.

Now they are an element, not themselves,

And hands are idle, or weigh the head

Like an outsize grapefruit, or an ocarina

Closes today with a comical wail.

Go in to them, see

What the session was about, how much they destroyed

And what preserved of what was meant to shuffle

Along in its time: hunched red shoulders

Of huntsmen, what they were doing

There in the grass, ribbons of time fluttering

From the four corners of a square masonry tower.

Having draped ourselves in villas, across verandas

For so many years, having sampled

Rose petals and newspapers, we know that the eye of the storm,

As it moves majestically to engulf us, is alive

With the spirit of confusion, and that these birds

Are stamped with the same dream of exaltation moving

Toward the end. ’Tis said of old, soon

Hot, soon cold. There are other kinds of privacy

Coming in now, and soon,

In three or four months, enough leisure

To examine the claim of each

And to reward each according to his claim

On a sliding scale coinciding with the rush

Into later blue sun-divided weather.

No, but I dug these out of bureau drawers for you,

Told you which ones meant a lot to me,

Which ones I was frankly dubious about, and

Which were destined to blow away.

Who are we to suffer after this?

The fragrant cunt, the stubborn penis, winding

Paths of despair and memory, reproach in

The stairwell, and new confidence: “We’ll

Do something about that,” until a later date

When pines march stiffly right down to the edge of the water.

And after all this, finding

Someone at home, as though memory

Had placed chairs around

So that these seem to come and go in the present

And will escape the anger of a fixed

Destiny causing them to lean all the way over to one side

Like wind-heaped foam.

It’s enough that they are had,

Allowed to run loose.

As I was walking all alone,

The idea of a field of particulars—that

Each is shaped, illustratable, accountable

To us and to no man—leached into the pervading

Gray-blue sense of moving somewhere with coevals,

Palmers and pardoners, a raucous yet erasable

Rout pent in the glimmer of

An American Bar. Whereupon Barry Sullivan-type avers

To Bruce Bennett-type that inert wet blackness is

Superior to boudoir light in which

Dull separateness blazes and is shriven and

Knows it isn’t right.

And shall, like a Moebius strip

Of a tapestry, play to our absences and soothe them,

Whether in some deprived tropic or some

Boudoir-cave where it finds that just

Paving the interest on the bonanza is dressier.

Alas, but there are others,
he thought, and we are children

Again, the children our parents were, trampling

Under foot the delicate boundary, last thing of day

Before night, that resurrects and comforts us here. Patience

Of articulation between us is still what it is,

No more and no less, but this time the night shift

Will have to be disturbed, and wiping out the quality

Of yesterday with the sponge of dreams is being phased out.

You’re making a big mistake. Just because Goofus has been lucky for you, you imagine others will make a fuss over you, all the others, who will matriculate. You’ll be left with a trowel and a lot of empty flowerpots, imagining that the sun as it enters this window is somehow a blessing that will make up for everything else—those very years in the cold. That the running faucet is a sacred stream. That the glint of light from a silver ball on that far-off flagpole is the equivalent of a career devoted to life, to improving the minds and the welfare of others, when in reality it is a common thing like these, and less profitable than any hobby or sideline that is a source of retirement income, such as an antique stall, pecan harvest or root-beer stand. In short, although the broad outlines of your intentions are a credit to you, what fills them up isn’t. You are like someone whose face was photographed in a crowd scene once and then gradually retreated from people’s memories, and from life as well.

But the real “world”

Stretches its pretending into the side yard

Where I was waiting, at peace with my feelings, though now,

I see, resentful from the beginning for the change to happen

Like lilacs. We were walking

All along toward a door that seemed to recede

In the distance and now is somehow behind us, shut,

Though apparently it didn’t lock automatically. How

Wonderful the fields are. They are

Like love poetry, all the automatic breathing going on

All around, and there are enchanted, many-colored

Things like houses to explore, if there were time,

But the house is built under a waterfall. The slanting

Roof and the walls are made of opaque glass, and

The emerald-green wall-to-wall carpeting is sopping moss.

And last, perhaps, as darkness

Begins to infuse the lawns and silent streets

And the remote estuary, and thickens here, you mention

The slamming of a door I wasn’t supposed to know about,

That took years. Each of us circles

Around some simple but vital missing piece of information,

And, at the end, as now, finding no substitute,

Writes his own mark grotesquely with a stick in snow,

The signature of many connected seconds of indecision.

What I am writing to say is, the timing, not

The contents, is what matters. All this could have happened

Long ago, or at least on some other day,

And not meant much except insofar as the eye

Extracts a progress from almost anything. But then

It wouldn’t have become a toy.

And all the myths,

Legends and misinterpretations, would have scattered

At a single pistol shot. And it would no longer know what I know.

It was arriving now, the eyes thick

With their black music, the wooden misquotable side

Thrust forward. Tell about the affair she’d had

With Bennett Palmer, the Minnesota highwayman,

Back when she was staying at Lake Geneva, Wisc.,

In the early forties. That paynim’d

Go to any lengths to shut her up, now,

Now that the time of truth telling from tall towers

Had come. Only old Thomas a Tattamus with his two tups

Seemed really to care. Even Ellen herself

Could muster but a few weak saws about loving—how it leaves us

Naked at a time when we would rather be clothed, and

She looked all around the room with a satisfied air.

Everything was in order, even unto bareness, waiting to receive

Whatever stamp or seal. The light coming in off the kale

In the kaleyard outside was like the joyous, ravening

Light over the ocean the morning after a storm.

It hadn’t betrayed her and it never would.

To him, the holiday-making crowds were

Engines of a parallel disaster, the fulfilling

Of all prophecies between now and the day of

Judgment. Spiralling like fish,

Toward a distant, unperceived surface, was all

The reflection there was. Somewhere it had its opaque

Momentary existence.

But if each act

Is reflexive, concerned with itself on another level

As well as with us, the strangers who live here,

Can one advance one step further without sinking equally

Far back into the past? There was always something to see,

Something going on, for the historical past owed it

To itself, our historical present. Another month a huge

Used-car sale on the lawn shredded the sense of much

Of the sun coming through the wires, or a cape

Would be rounded by a slim white sail almost

Invisible in the specific design, or children would come

Clattering down fire escapes until the margin