Chinese Whispers: Poems (7 page)

I was almost home then, by subterfuge or sheer pluck.

In the underbrush a walrus crows,

all decency shed, or shredded.

Little wonder that home is a bright place to be

if living’s your thing.

We crawled out of the car

into the rest stop. Lady Baltimore cake

was served by Madame du Barry look-alikes.

“Don’t hurry, Mr. Executioner,” one chirped,

pressing the unwanted crumbs against my lips.

“It’ll all be over in a second,” she added encouragingly.

Red Skelton asked me if I had a book coming out. He seemed drowned

in lists of trivia and itching-powder dreams—

the kind that make you wake up

and then sort of fall back into sleep again.

His brother was cleaning up after the elephants. He

wore a crisp white uniform. Could have been a soda jerk,

or just a jerk. My scented glove offends

the daintiest among them, for they have no recourse

but cries of old London—an exhaustive repertory,

one first thought, but soon its coda reared—

a clutch of mordant shrieks.

I supposed it was the witching hour.

Nothing unusual happened. Soon we were leaving home

forever, to be pitched about on storm-tossed seas,

flagrant to be back amid multiple directions. For though there are some

who can live without compasses, it dissolves all complexity

if one is perpetually in the know. Sleep, directions—that’s all

I need at my chaste fireside, to take in the sights,

just as the wind starts and darkness longs

to take us down a peg.

Like a fool, I let him into my house,

and he began dropping jottings everywhere.

Where once crepe-paper flowers had been,

jottings overflowed the basin into the water closet.

Urban affairs had kept him—

something about a rendezvous with kelp. “Hurry,

the paths of nature are creeping

to the corrugated tooth. And it’s a blitz of old stars,

tonight!” Something in me leaned into the vacant doorframe.

It was a still life of bottles and a jar

that once had held cold cream. We mustn’t wait here

for him, that’s what he wants, and

if we do so he’ll want to eat us.

No more us to be with in the morning,

among the cups and shards. No more sticky places on the railing.

We held hands there too, once, for years, watching the

palms move out into the harbor.

The pianola never recovered from the loss.

Today the air is bright again and fresh with pods.

No mourners were sighted on the post road.

He came down to us with relaxed meaning in his grin,

cudgeled, cajoled us, told us breezy stories

about a widow in the henhouse.

After all regrets have been pocketed, the counter wiped clean

of terrible fingerprints, assuredly one moves westward

into sheepherding country. The ranchers won’t like it,

but they’ll let us live, closer to dying

than many insects are now, attracted by the chiming and gleams of the cash register.

Other oaths, other options will follow

in the wake of spring.

Millions of mullions waken, gesticulate to us.

The way you look tonight

is perishable, unphotographable, laughable. Sometimes

dyslexia strikes in late middle age. You are

the way I look tonight.
At last

my love has come along
.

And you are mine at last.

Slowly the orchestra wives pick over the set,

go behind a wall. The big smiley man is thinking,

thinking he has an IDEA! Well, if he says so,

You gotta believe him. One orchestra wife comes back.

She has forgotten her pearls. The orchestra riffs around,

they come back. “Well, I never! Of all things!”

Oh, it plays

to the breach. You see it. Her lover and best friend came

along the hall. “I’m sorry, Dan.

But I just couldn’t.” So it’s all alright,

he thinks. He thinks it’s a secret.

The winter voice adjusts: “As I was saying

(before I was so rudely interrupted),

we don’t have to go downstairs and get the plants.

Some of them, at least, are already here.”

More innocent people, gnawed by pests.

Death agreed to lie low for a while.

Nobody was very grateful. “After all,

if it hadn’t been for him the anteaters

might have noticed us. Now potstickers take up

the cry: ‘It was great to have you in that glen!’”

Out on the ice children are being sick

as grown men whirl round and round

the devil in coattails. “He had a passion for straw marquetry.

Other than that, little is known

of him or of his descendants.”

In the valley of the school all is well anew.

“I told you all would be well

on a certain day.” That rivulets

would course past their snowy banks, singing the song of

a sudden thaw in January.

“Each of us checked out the others,

got down to work.” His disguise worked,

he made it through the breadline with blue

Etruscan flowers in his galvanized wrists:

“It is time for the debit to begin,

the rush of evening.” “No one likes being abandoned

on a rapidly disintegrating floe, and dawn coming.”

He stood just outside.

We were the undeserving ones now, though his warmth

cradles us,

as the road becomes a kiss.

Look,

the savage glitter of downtown,

those walls of glycerin

inspissated by tears—

yes, and why does the smell not go away?

Honey, it’s been ages, take off your hat and coat,

rest your feet awhile? Now, where were we?

Wave upon wave of new construction

(some of it shoddy), then that too plowed under

as new waves bare their teeth—

where’s it gotten us? I say, you

look a little disheveled—want to freshen up?

Play doctor? Uh, I’ll be with you

in a moment. Yes, the doctor is in,

yuk yuk. Now, what was it we were learning to say?

“Change the value systems. All incandescence and fear

have their origin there. In not nice night

one must strip down silently, and quickly.

See, a little headway has been made.”

The snow shovel’s disclaimer

defused the situation. Soon the host was ruddy

with his own reflected good cheer.

And it was again time to creep back a ways,

to rest, sheltered by soffits,

and pronounce one’s own alphabet, nasally and distinctly, backwards

like it was supposed to be all along. We’d arrived

again, it seemed, though we only came along for the ride.

A nice, normal morning:

feet setting out as though in a trance,

doubling the yesterdays, a doubled man

under the stairs, and strange surrealist fish

from so much disappearance, damaged in the mail.

Or the spry cutting edge of another day.

Here, we have these in

sizes and colors—

day goes fluttering by.

Like ivy behind a chimney

it grows and grows in ropes.

Mouse teams unslay it,

yeomen can’t hear yet.

A shadow purling,

up into the sky.

Silence in the vandalized vomitorium.

It’s great that you can be here too.

Passivity rests its case.

Set this down too:

That one who was cognizant

(belief in one to three things)

turned at last to the roulette table

and gasped her last—or else, why not let the building sleep

while it collapses, spineless. In a second

the faith that was as large as my life was split,

edge to edge—

And tell them this:

If it was for nothing that I aged in a dawdle

beside a slow-knocking stream

out from under the reader,

why am I being criticized?

Do you react to fine breath of the anvil

in a cold room?

More, then, another time—but we will have to

fit note to note,

unclenchingly

going over more territory until it all rises

smooth from the gulf,

a pure provocation,

arc of seamless energy.

The wall-bearing fragments move on over

the main chancel.

All the tesserae fly apart.

Bracts are fresh and new.

In the main parlor the governor

seated around his table, smilingly assented

to whatever assignment was raised.

Pawky, canny—not one of your average sterns

fitted against the exodus

out of old harbors and disks in chains—

Say they came to see you,

now is calm, and whatever remaining communicants leased your

indoor policy.

Amazing, to amaze,

falling light over and in on its own imperfect

sense of the appropriate,

the main argument emerges:

how to be understand please, not with

a harpsichord at one’s traces—

the dreams only pool off again, that way.

Other firm magnets enticed

girls out in summer night

where a pale loggia echoed. The neighbors fell silent,

or it was not a day in which to have elicited model policy demeanors.

The arty set adheres

to the stolen pavement. Inside

are sherbets and “Barbara.”

Strange, how one day

you’ll come over “all queer,”

then next day we’re scrambling to stamp it out.

Such are our inspirations:

of unequal value, one chasing the better

ones until he stops, forgetting. That’s

the time I like best, cold color of cistern.

Values show up in the neighborhood house;

next day it’s moved on.

In the Pennsylvania of my youth, tungsten filaments

daubed hoardings ludicrous shades, one after another.

The crowds have bicycled far out to see you fail.

Don’t disappoint them.

Three on a match he said

is how it all began. Seven years’ bad luck

and after that, roseate perspectives garlanded

with octaves of blooms. Keeping next to her

and the door closes, kindly.

All that’s behind us, or

so we used to say.

Kettle’s on the hob, ghost dancers

are fierce tonight. Yet it collects

in the hollow of my palm, somehow,

tears in an appetizing equation.

Door is shut,

but hasn’t been locked yet.

We owe this to our childhood dogs,

sprig of hope. Where clarity once ruled

dreams are still active,

a clarinet floats ashore,

a good time was had by all.

Many there were that.

There were many who that.

Many did that to what.

Many undid that to what.

Many there were worse than that.

To undo that many did that.

More of an obstacle to this than that

where the upcoming is done to that.

The undone is done is that.

They are speaking to what is done

not left on the stove.

The done is that to that done.

There were many who did this and that,

meanwhile were many who undid that.

The undone undid the that.

The crisis under the batter’s hat.

Do you manage a common if?

If so why is the crisis that?

Who did the crisis there?

Why is the crisis after my time that.

Ordinarily men go around

seeking wedgies the corner is out.

They this and why and in this bat

an eyelash to be better than that

on the day that.

And that was all a better than that day had that

unto the jousting which was unto a way down that.

They mortared the way under the man hat

that wanted to under a bill be that that.