Flow Chart: A Poem (10 page)

And here one would take some comfort in the waved gesture that told how far the sun had shriveled

since we began our climb, the hazards put away under our feet.

“The sun was still high in the heavens,” yet a narrow ruffle of flux edged the huge

saucer-like plain, and one began to think of other sets of conditions:

the old people in the house, a long day away; the carbons of pets and other mooted toys,

or motion at a stranger in a hat who thinks he knows you from somewhere, but it scarcely

matters since you are separating amiably now again, forever, it seems, and the clues we

all leave behind are fated not to be found this time,

or if they are it will resemble something a squirrel laid there, a good while ago; but since charm can never

be quite rinsed from these bones it befits us to go along with it, congratulate it

at last for having had something to say and not said it, as torrents frazzle a canyon

without contributing to its demise unless one chooses to consider inexorably

slow processes that score even the cosmic mind at rarest intervals, and superficially;

secure in the adding up of all things

into a block of hay from which no strand is permitted to extrude.

And while the fire-mind tries out its images on us one last time an unsettling tableau

of doom constructs itself from greenish chalk on the green blackboard, but not yet

for these eyes, while the brandy decanter is bent and yards of cretonne

smother the schoolyard and take their place among the popping trees, yet unendorsably, O nargileh.

Long ago the earth rendered this pablum unholy or at least unappetizing.

Then the men began to speak in unison: why not sacrifice something

ordinary, such as a hairnet, and if that doesn’t work one can consider what steps

are to be taken, but usually it suffices to

part with some insignificant possession. That leaves nothing to sniff at, later

when details are to be worked out, and as a matter of fact in most cases

the god will make you a gift of it or forget about it, going about his business, casehardened,

even as we humans do in strange lands. Of course the troublesome minority of

plaintiffs sometimes chases him back to his hole, and, oddly enough, often celebrates this

“triumph” with a drinking feast, little suspecting

how the god likes to wait and catch his enemies off balance, and then, woe to the litigious

and even their associates when he hits the comeback trail, nostrils aflare, only

it was funny this time, nobody seemed anxious to stir up hostilities on either side.

A few warning shots were fired, in the air, but even these might easily have been produced

by a car backfiring, or random firecrackers—that sort of thing.

Meanwhile the god licks his wounds, fiercely abiding: or so, at any rate, we have been taught

to believe, hunkered down in the fallout shelter, awaiting pestilence, a rain of arrows, or whatever

the chef may have whipped up for us today.

Yet in fact nothing of the kind has ever happened. We even
feel
pure and not devoid

of merit; our neighbors are nice as pie to us; even strangers salute us decorously in the street,

beautifully dressed, for this is indeed a secular feast day.

Shouts, the smoke from campfires almost drown it out. We have almost leveled off;

there is so much to say, but cisterns enclose the precious substance, not much will escape.

Oddly, under giant trees we seem smaller to each other, though the hopes the great race kindled

burn even more majestically than before the roll-call

that went on so many centuries to the accompaniment of battle-axes and cats-o’-nine-tails,

before such courtesies as we now command became acceptable to that god, the dew-weeper, and civilization began to grovel

in the dust for torn sausage-casings and bits of shrimp. But any pedigree

is by definition a long one, so that now it must seem to some called to be aristocrats as if

the whole shining night were stitched together to hide their port-wine stains

and even gnomes have some inner sense of nobility that will save the world

when it does begin to fall apart as, at last report, it hadn’t yet done, the boiler-plate

contradictions ennobled in it being such as can last millenniums without exhibiting the slightest signs of wear,

though we have only ourselves to thank for that. When the convention finally assembles

there may be flak to take on that score. In which case we can always plead ignorance of the law,

that noblest, since most artless, of defenses, and dig our heels in and ask the cliff

to explain itself and the ferns erupting from its crevices: I too

have stood here faceless and seemingly angry for a long time, yet for all that

don’t feel it time to intimidate someone, make him or her feel lonesome just because there is

indeed a horizon, but prefer to sit back on my haunches, contemplating my navel to see what good

if any will come of it. Frightening noises are in poor taste; silence must be sorted out

however, its path followed back to where the tucks gather, and each random furrow

be gaily explored in a spirit of setting out to conquer the world someday. That’s all.

I have no further bread and cheese for you; these days I count little

but the linens folded in my scented cedar closets, folded up against time, in case

I ever have a use for them; and you, you others, have only to break away

like chunks of ice from the much larger iceberg to accomplish your destiny, that day in court

the monkeys and jesters seemed to promise you—or was it a bad dream? But now, surely,

your mettle has been tested; let the perfume of burning archives

assault our olfactory sense once more as radically as the grape hyacinth in the fond gullies of spring.

Access to the poll-takers is limited, yet there are times, I feel, when this artificial barrier

along with so many others ought to be rescinded. Once in the booby hatch the setting sun

drilled its powerful horizontal rays, as strong as any you’d ever want to see at noon, through my

window just above the sill, striking this sheet of paper with the shadows of a flower pot

and an old faucet, that were lying there, with so much force that they seemed about to be embedded in it,

like a sentiment above a door. At such times, one gathers

that gravity isn’t about to save us, that it wasn’t installed as some sort of built-in smoke alarm

to discourage us from rash actions. We evolve naturally in its aura, there is so much

to say it gets weighted down like a pear tree with fruit, so that when the branch

breaks and the fruit must be harvested at once or discarded, we get stage fright and do imitations

of opera singers or anything to break the monotony of the pace

set for us by its metronome. And yes, it’s like living in an atmosphere one can breathe, but

at the same time one can never take it for granted; like air, it slips by too easily

for anyone to care, once the dust has settled, what that minor commotion betokened. The giant

umbrella creations of our history of knowledge have that disconcerting side-effect. So one

concentrates on the line tangential to the thick, pebbled bulge of the fruit’s skin: know it and

one can understand everything’s the theory, though in practice

things don’t go as smoothly as that. The top of a tower that is visible one minute

may be only a straw blowing across a courtyard the next; so, at any rate, has patience, deduction’s

handmaid, taught us, and when we go out of doors, we never exhibit bad manners or any kind of feeling,

envy in particular. What enters your gate is my own inference, not some

colossal steed pawing the dust in a protracted spasm of preparedness, for what voyage

can any of us undertake until the lotus moon has risen to vanquish

squibs or rumors concerning its eligibility that blew up while one was seated, somewhat

taken aback, disinclined to candor that day, or anything that might compromise intelligent

speculation about the origin of dreams. So one sees couples

turn back from the altar, it not being quite right for them, and as quickly, cities,

ghouls, ghost ships bite the bullet and plunge from sight, to be resuscitated in some more

“normal” atmosphere where telling tall tales comes under the head of bystander entertainment,

a special budget item subsumed under crass though meticulous ganders at what the staff

has been up to in one’s absence, how it looks, what it feels like.

And the dark mahogany

of his mood, how one loved all that! Why is it too late to be simple,

out riding, pointing at something, when all you loved was there anyway? Too late

to be inventoried or caressed, as one lays in a stock of family anecdotes for the future,

poses to assume, frippery, harmless tomfoolery, until in a cocoon

made of commas it will all seem to come right, but the ashes have been left far behind

on a nameless road, in whose ruts glass still flashes magisterially,

not merrily short-circuited as when we were among people, but a thing on its own now,

to weep over rather than think of saving? If only we could get the message out further,

yet here all kinds of sacred cows hinder one, so there is no longer any point

in pursuing the implications today. Tomorrow will be good enough for that. The stationary

saraband of our considering it but deciding not to put it to a vote absorbs any

hint of the disorder that highmindedness sometimes trails in its wake like a wisp of

something in the sky, and in any case, our hands, our faces are clean, our plates empty

and brimming with moonlight, a pious reminder to the unwashed and unready that we will come

again someday and make sense of this arbitrary and tangled forest of misplaced

motives and other shades of imperfect sympathies that do not compromise us perhaps

as yet, yet I feel their aura, Mother, like a water table ascending,

and I haven’t the answer, don’t know if I’ll ever have it, yet it looks so young,

pitiful and hopeless in morning light that one tries to suppress the intuition that to go

forward will be to do battle with some angry titan, sooner or later, and all one’s

bad reactions will confront at every one of the house’s apertures: slay me and then

leave me here, if that’s going to help; just don’t stand around

looking at me that way, that’s all. Am I some kind of a freak? No. Am I disingenuous? Maybe,

but the case hasn’t been proved; only an executioner could decide it, and besides I feel too well

to get into other feral arrangements when the night and its night-light are still

not far off. And besides other people are too interested right now, the ambiance can never

be gauged accurately enough in the feverish commotion that surrounds this, and our other

travel plans. There is no point in giving them the slip. It is never too late to mend

no matter how we clamor to redo everything from the ground up; the chatter never subsides

but like the tide of dust of the oceans, returns and retreats, forever opaque, forever itself:

a longing one does not subdue.

Yet time, for all that, hadn’t abandoned

the grotty little amusement park though the wind now seethed through every rent

in its shell, and others now had plans which didn’t take it into account:

in the foundry he sang it once and here was this sudden magnificent opportunity

to create a forum, an audience for oneself! Gosh, it’s so long ago! Still, one must hold back,

feigning disinterest until the proper moment, and then, and then,

it shall fall into our hands and seem what the Lord probably meant for us, would have,

without a doubt, if we were known to Him. Which brings up…But anyway, it would all get

fixed up and then we’d hold a contest and people would learn about it through that, and we’d have

more people than we knew what to do with queuing up and asking questions, wanting to get involved,

to pledge something, anything, even a nickel a week, it’s the thought that counts

and don’t you ever forget that. Try sleeping on it. And then we’d have a nice car

and options about things to do; we’d entertain beggars and watch them come back for more,

and that’s part of the fun, forgetting just what you have done, have given someone, in

the intoxication of your and everyone else’s finally winning something in the free-for-all

of life just like Betty and your father said, only please don’t release it all over me now,

I have to think some. Here, this chair ought to mean something, if I intuit

your philosophy correctly, or maybe it’s me, maybe I’m a chair, that’s what you

meant isn’t it? Swift as a missile the cloud leaves the horizon, rising

in our direction to blanket the city in a minute, and sure, somebody will think of something;

sunlight does continue to drizzle on us, but by God we

haven’t any right to it, we haven’t figured out one thing, and

darkness will too arrive soon and be more unexpectedly lascivious than you thought. How do

you wriggle out of the knowledge that we shall all have to answer separately

for our truths if such they are when dying, and meanwhile music wants to take the load

off our chests and point the way to a possible recreation period? Oh, but there were nights…

Your father and I were away much of the time;

it was like not having a home, string, and wads of serge to stuff in the cracks,

yet there were so many of them! I don’t wonder now that it all didn’t get done,

that practically nothing did, and I don’t blame anyone or myself either. At this time in one’s