Wakefulness: Poems (2 page)

and higher.

Here,

a sow’s purse translates into a silk ear, and communications

are jammed.

No one takes hold any more.

Look, the flower has escaped from its trellis,

the bear goes down into the lake.

In my second house rare footage

of metempsychosis plays endlessly, like a tune

variously tooted.

I often feel I’m a buyer,

but the painted carnival head reasons otherwise,

badgers me. There is no release in sight,

in the works, down the pike.

Horrified spectators jam the football field;

it was like night and day.

We can’t go back to the restaurant;

the roof is snatched away.

What
were
expectations back then?

Do we know how high the astronauts carried us,

let us fall, bouncing for what seemed an eternity,

until all was well again?

I’ve got my cool

in these pants, keeping it for you.

You keep asking me that four times.

Why trust me I think.

There is, in fact, nobody here.

Nobody in the past.

Nobody to turn to for advice.

A yellow flagpole rears thoughtfully.

Now if you were that nice.

He was pulled from space,

as from a shark. After they examined him

they let him go. What does that prove?

And called him Old Hickory.

As in hickory. No there were

at that time none living

out of a sideshow at the edge of a forest

and were mistreated in proportion,

with understanding, so they all grew

into the shade and for once it seemed

about right. Oh, call down to me.

It seemed about right.

Then there was something of a letdown.

Patrol boats converged

but it was decided that the…

and could continue its voyage

upriver

to the point where it tails off

and then there was a large misunderstanding.

It was misunderstanding, mudsliding

from the side where the thing was let in.

And it was all goose, let me tell you,

braised goose. From which a longing in the original

loins came forward to mark you.

So many brave skippers,

such a long time at sea. But I was going

to remind you of this new story

I can’t remember, of the two chums meeting in the overfed waste land and it supported them. And one got

off at the front. The other wandered for days and daze, and by the time nobody remembered it it was summer again

and wandered around defensively. Sure the organ meat

was pumping and somebody’s boy came up to the correct

thing at the well head. Sure as you can claim Dixie your tax accountant

wandered over the remaining riviera, all to be blue again. And the rascals…

and I was going to say keep it. You can keep it.

Granted she has no reputation, an eye

here, another clovered savior here, they pretend to us, and it was time for the firemobile too.

seeking to convince the supreme Jester

that I am indeed the man in those commercials.

Simultaneously it peaked in Bolivia, the moon,

I mean. Then we were walking over what seemed to be

heather, or was called that. The downtown riot

of free speech occurred. Plastered to its muzzle,

Randy the dog’s decoding apparatus went astray.

By then it was afternoon in much of the world;

iced tea was served on vast terraces

overlooking a crumbling sea. You can’t juggle

four toddlers. Three is enough. Out of the beckoning

sea they arrived, in white ruffles with black coin-dots

attached; the lawn was closer to a farm

this time; it mouthed “Farm.” Will vacuumed the whole of space

as far as the mind-your-own-business wire stretched, that is,

from Cadiz to Enterprise, Alaska. We thought we had seen a few new

adjectives, but nobody was too sure. They might have been

gerunds, or bunches of breakfast…

What could I tell you? I couldn’t tell you any other way.

We, meanwhile, have witnessed changes, and now change

floods in from every angle. Stop me if you’ve heard this one,

but if you haven’t, just go about your business. I’ll catch up with you

at the exit. Who are the Blands? The second change was perhaps nothing more than

the possibility of changes, one by one, side by side, until the whole

canyon was carpeted with them. Nice. Summer, it said,

ever rested my mind. Something occurs everywhere then,

an immediate engagement with the atmosphere

we’d like to have around, but it was big, then, and obvious,

and oh, this is for your pains. No, really. Take it. I insist.

He thought if he lived amid leaves

everything would surface again, by which he meant, balance out,

only look what this random memory’s done to him!

He eats no more, neither does he sleep. A permanent bell tone

seems to create his hearing at each moment of his elevator. Obey. We’re

in for it. There are no two ways about it. Wait—

did I say two ways?
That’s it!
We’ll fix his wagon with
too
many ways—

so it’ll be lopsided, with no judges to pay, and we can all go home.

Sweetheart? I fancy you now—

Hence it ends up with a scenario of them all getting paid,

the bums, and walking out into the eternal twilight

with gurus and girlfriends on their arms, one for each fist.

I like that way about it. I’m making believe

it never happened, that we got this way

merely by having been here forever. Millions of languages

became extinct, and not because there was nothing left to say in them,

but because it was all said too well, with

nary a dewdrop on the moment of glottal expulsion.

But now I’ve got to go put out the signs on the chairs

so folks’ll know when to stop, and where, really, only a poodle

separates us from this life and the next.

It will take us longer to get from here to there.

And the cigar band is ecstatic,

stunning in its mauve and gold obsolescence,

an erratic bloom on sheer night, faintly deleterious …

I was lying, lying down,

reading the last plays of Shakespeare.

A brat came to me, eyes squealing,

excitement its thing. Until I put two and two together

I never crossed the inlet

or realized what tributary meant.

O we all have fine times

in the spring she said.

No one needs to know pretty much

about that attitude I suppose,

yet there are riders, and puzzles, and soon,

baking at the long end of day

a poor cloud measures its shadow,

the intent of all those gone away.

The crisis has just passed.

Uh oh, here it comes again,

looking for someone to blame itself on, you, I …

All these people coming in …

The last time we necked

I noticed this lobe on your ear.

Please, tell me we may begin.

All the wolves in the wolf factory paused

at noon, for a moment of silence.

The dress code is casual, the atmosphere relaxed

in the licensed quarters of our city;

young couples graciously stopping beneath umbrellas

in the street …

And this is not a thing that matters:

walks on grass, through flaring Adirondack chairs.

You caught me napping said the belle-lettriste.

No, perhaps it’s not that, that’s the point. You’ve

been in to see these?

And we should have decided to go there, gone for a second time.

Yes, well, they’re working on it, et cetera, etc.

The summer capital exits past us, we have to

sell product. It “fell through” the European system,

now it’s time for avatars. At four in the morning

the art demonstrations begin, psalteries jingle, the whole damn ocean

is there, up for review, for us. It’s just

that we don’t understand. It’s my negative capability acting up

again. Well, I’m within my rights.

It’s like apples and pears, or oranges and lemons,

what I always say.

From nests as admirable as these, wallpaper islands,

the vivid flow reverses. That’s in-house.

And we go as far

with them as possible, suffer stupid reverses, get plastered,

the goateed scorpion insists.

And it was while waiting for the drying to happen that we all got lost.

Please, he insisted, there’s more to the point than two doors, O I know

it I said, I can’t be damned to travel

any time. You should have pointed the way to me while I can,

while it’s still light, otherwise what will all your gnashing accomplish,

the oatmeal? Please. Now just go away. It’s

raining, the sun is shining, braver outdoors. Can we come listen to that.

“…and as the last will come a sort of moderate part, (which some is of multiple motions, quick, slow, hampered, expressive, popular, and peopled speech…)”

—
Stepan Wolpe

The fox brooding and the old people smelling

and the tiebreaker—why did I not think of that?

Why have doubts upon me come? Why

this worldliness?

And I remember no longer at the age of sixteen,

and at the age of seventeen great rollers

eating into night, I uncared for,

stopping among the weeds along the way. Phantom

harvesters hovered. And the great, dry creekbed was a sea

of gravel and stones, the willows were capsized ships,

and none of it was for now.

There is a draught

in the room

and all along the room a sight that is like living

and looking out over a situation. The periods danced in a sentence,

and it was my way, the one I chose, even if I didn’t choose it,

or like it; was all a coming on,

downpour,

marooned on slopes.

And then the burst of it.

He knew what the world’s going to be like I think,

so why the explosions? And caught in the draught,

one fell from darkness, two fell from darkness,

yet another. Maybe that’s dust a very fine kind of dust and I eat it,

it goes on thrumming, seated in the back row of the orchestra,

men masturbating here and there and like I said the clock

is tremendous,

wider than any minute hand or hour hand.

And sheepish it fell out of books:

the land of painful blisses,

the man who stubbed his toe.

All around us pain came sledding in,

and am I like this today, tomorrow, and two

tickets please, the boy and the ruffian come undone,

he was in the park, it was the salutary last person

to hoodwink you and all is well.

There were times a kind of cream was on the jagged borders

or suchlike events and carnivals, and you sat, smiling,

the tongue unleashed from its surroundings. Why was I never here?

Why such playacting? Didn’t I ever realize the kernels
are
deep-seated,

that everyman will overrun his banks just like an errant stream,

and cardboard principles be jostled? O who

mentioned this session? What is the matter with truth and paying

and all over the paisley fields dominoes are braying,

a matter of luck, or chance, it seems? Who broke the next dish?

Why is that man crying,

what does he mean to do? Impertinent, in person,

what does he mean to do,

if these capers are not unusual

and bricks merge with sand, the unusual

at its best as usual, and can’t we give up? What

would be the point of continuing? I can’t smoke this weed,

I give it back, we are all blessed, commensurates within

a star where many things fit, too many, or not too many, whatever

it says about you, whatever saves.

Roll up your sleeves,

another day has ended. I am not a part of the vine

that was going to put me through school

but instead got sidetracked and wandered over the brink of an abyss

while we were having a good time

in full view of the nearest mountains.
Mon trésor,
she said, this is where I

disappear for a few moments, I want you to be brave.

Sure, nothing like a date in bed,

waking after midnight to the blank TV screen

that wants us all to listen to its cute life and someday understand

what rhomboids the earth took

on its way down to get us,

that we must be happy and sad forever after. No I don’t think

it was in your best interests nor do I shave with an old-fashioned straight-edge,

you dolt. But I was coming to that,

doing the mystifying. So if he says not to be aloha, not again,

well gee in this old-fashioned bar, however will the runts learn from their again imploded

hair balls how straight everything is.

The rest, as they say, as they say, is history:

I captured a barracuda, it was midnight in the old steeple, the clans casually

moved on us, leggings barely jerked out of the ditch. It was folly

to be noticed, then, astir on the perhaps more urgent

surface of what becomes one, indeed comes to become one

through impossible rain and the sly glee of mirrored xylophones.

Say only it was one for the books,

and we, we did belong, though not to anything anybody’d recognize