Sailing Alone Around the Room (11 page)

And this is the end,

the car running out of road,

the river losing its name in an ocean,

the long nose of the photographed horse

touching the white electronic line.

This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,

the empty wheelchair,

and pigeons floating down in the evening.

Here the stage is littered with bodies,

the narrator leads the characters to their cells,

and the climbers are in their graves.

It is me hitting the period

and you closing the book.

It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen

and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.

This is the final bit

thinning away to nothing.

This is the end, according to Aristotle,

what we have all been waiting for,

what everything comes down to,

the destination we cannot help imagining,

a streak of light in the sky,

a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.

The way the dog trots out the front door

every morning

without a hat or an umbrella,

without any money

or the keys to her doghouse

never fails to fill the saucer of my heart

with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example

of a life without encumbrance—

Thoreau in his curtainless hut

with a single plate, a single spoon?

Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world

with nothing but her brown coat

and her modest blue collar,

following only her wet nose,

the twin portals of her steady breathing,

followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside

every morning

and eat all his food

what a model of self-containment she would be,

what a paragon of earthly detachment.

If only she were not so eager

for a rub behind the ears,

so acrobatic in her welcomes,

if only I were not her god.

It seems these poets have nothing

up their ample sleeves

they turn over so many cards so early,

telling us before the first line

whether it is wet or dry,

night or day, the season the man is standing in,

even how much he has had to drink.

Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.

Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.

“Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune

on a Cloudy Afternoon” is one of Sun Tung Po’s.

“Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea”

is another one, or just

“On a Boat, Awake at Night.”

And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with

“In a Boat on a Summer Evening

I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird.

It Was Very Sad and Seemed to be Saying

My Woman Is Cruel—Moved, I Wrote This Poem”

There is no iron turnstile to push against here

as with headings like “Vortex on a String,”

“The Horn of Neurosis,” or whatever.

No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.

Instead, “I Walk Out on a Summer Morning

to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall”

is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.

And “Ten Days of Spring Rain Have Kept Me Indoors”

is a servant who shows me into the room

where a poet with a thin beard

is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine

whispering something about clouds and cold wind,

about sickness and the loss of friends

How easy he has made it for me to enter here,

to sit down in a corner;

cross my legs like his, and listen.

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,

its white flag waving over everything,

the landscape vanished,

not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,

and beyond these windows

the government buildings smothered,

schools and libraries buried, the post office lost

under the noiseless drift,

the paths of trains softly blocked,

the world fallen under this falling.

In a while, I will put on some boots

and step out like someone walking in water,

and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,

and I will shake a laden branch

sending a cold shower down on us both.

But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house,

a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow.

I will make a pot of tea

and listen to the plastic radio on the counter,

as glad as anyone to hear the news

that the Kiddie Corner School is closed,

the Ding-Dong School, closed.

the All Aboard Children’s School, closed,

the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed,

along with—some will be delighted to hear—

the Toadstool School, the Little School,

Little Sparrows Nursery School,

Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School

the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed,

and—clap your hands—the Peanuts Play School.

So this is where the children hide all day,

These are the nests where they letter and draw,

where they put on their bright miniature jackets,

all darting and climbing and sliding,

all but the few girls whispering by the fence.

And now I am listening hard

in the grandiose silence of the snow,

trying to hear what those three girls are plotting,

what riot is afoot,

which small queen is about to be brought down.

Even though the house is deeply silent

and the room, with no moon,

is perfectly dark,

even though the body is a sack of exhaustion

inert on the bed,

someone inside me will not

get off his tricycle,

will not stop tracing the same tight circle

on the same green threadbare carpet.

It makes no difference whether I lie

staring at the ceiling

or pace the living-room floor,

he keeps on making his furious rounds,

little pedaler in his frenzy,

my own worst enemy, my oldest friend.

What is there to do but close my eyes

and watch him circling the night,

schoolboy in an ill-fitting jacket,

leaning forward, his cap on backwards,

wringing the handlebars,

maintaining a certain speed?

Does anything exist at this hour

in this nest of dark rooms

but the spectacle of him

and the hope that before dawn

I can lift out some curious detail

that will carry me off to sleep—

the watch that encircles his pale wrist,

the expandable band,

the tiny hands that keep pointing this way and that.

They say you can jinx a poem

if you talk about it before it is done.

If you let it out too early, they warn,

your poem will fly away,

and this time they are absolutely right.

Take the night I mentioned to you

I wanted to write about the madmen,

as the newspapers so blithely call them,

who attack art, not in reviews,

but with breadknives and hammers

in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.

Actually, they are the real artists,

you said, spinning the ice in your glass.

The screwdriver is their brush.

The restorers are the true vandals,

you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,

the ones in the white smocks

always closing the wound in the landscape

and ruining the art of the mad.

I watched my poem fly down to the front

of the bar and hover there

until the next customer walked in—

then I watched it fly out the door into the night

and sail away, I could only imagine,

over the dark tenements of the city.

All I had wished to say

was that art, too, was short,

as a razor can teach with a blind slash;

it only seems long when you compare it to life,

but that night I drove home alone

with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart

but the faint hope that I might catch

in the fan of my headlights

a glimpse of the thing,

maybe perched on a road sign or a streetlamp—

poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,

staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,

and after this one just a dozen

to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas,

then only ten more left like rows of beans.

How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan

and insist the iambic bongos must be played

and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,

one for every station of the cross.

But hang on here while we make the turn

into the final six where all will be resolved,

where longing and heartache will find an end,

where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,

take off those crazy medieval tights,

blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

It is a big question to pose so early in the morning

or “in the light woven by birds,”

as the Estonians say,

but still I must ask what is my place in life?

my “seat on the invisible train,”

as they say in Hungary.

I mean why am I just sitting here

in a lawn chair listening to a thrush,

“the little entertainer of the woods,”

as the Swiss call him,

while out there in the world

mobs of people are rushing over bridges

in and out of the cities?

Vegetables grow heavy in their fields,

clouds fly across the “face of the earth,”

as we call it in English,

and sometimes rockets lift off in the distance—

and I mean that quite literally,

“from the top of the table” as the Portuguese have it,

real rockets rising from the horizon,

or “the big line,” if you’re an Australian,

leaving behind rich gowns of exhaust smoke,

long, smooth trajectories,

and always the ocean below,

“the water machine,” as the South Sea islanders put it—

everything taking place right on schedule,

“by the clock of the devil,”

as our grandparents were fond of saying.

And still here I sit with my shirt off,

the dog at my side, daydreaming—

“juggling balls of cotton,” as they like to say in France.

She brings a drink to the table,

pivots, and turns away

with a smile

and soon she brings me

a menu, smiles,

and takes the empty glass away.

She brings me a fillet of sole

on a plate with parsley

and thin wheels of lemon,

then more bread in a basket,

smiling as she walks away,

then comes back

to see if everything is OK

to fill my glass with wine,

turning away

then circling back to my table

until she is every waitress

who has ever served me,

and every waiter, too,

young and old,

the eager and the sleepy ones alike.

I hold my fork in the air—

the blades of the fans

turn slowly on the ceiling—

and I begin to picture them all,

living and dead,

gathered together for one night

in an amphitheater, or armory

or some vast silvery ballroom

where they have come

to remove their bow ties,

to hang up their red jackets and aprons,

and now they are having a cigarette

or dancing with each other,

turning slowly in one another’s arms

to a five-piece, rented band.

And that is all I can think about

after I pay the bill,

leave a large, sentimental tip,

then walk into the fluorescent streets,

collar up against the chill—

all the waitresses and waiters of my life,

until the night makes me realize

that this place where they pace and dance

under colored lights,

is made of nothing but autumn leaves,

red, yellow, gold,

waiting for a sudden gust of wind

to scatter it all

into the dark spaces

beyond these late-night, practically empty streets.

The one resting now on a plant stem

somewhere deep in the vine-hung

interior of South America

whose wings are about to flutter

thus causing it to rain heavily

on your wedding day

several years from now,

and spinning you down

a path to calamity and ruin

is—if it’s any consolation—

a gorgeous swallowtail,

a brilliant mix of bright orange

and vivid yellow with a soft

dusting of light brown along the edges.

What’s more, the two black dots

on the wings are so prominent

as to make one wonder

if this is not an example of mimicry,

an adaptation technique whereby one species

takes on the appearance

of another less-edible one,

first brought to light,

it might interest you to know

and possibly distract you from

your vexatious dread

with regards to the hopelessness of the future,

by two British naturalists, namely,

H.W. Bates in 1862 and A. R. Wallace in 1865.