Flow Chart: A Poem (13 page)

our very lack of success be turned into an accusation of failure, and the loved things

spiral off to the rungs of distance, as the sandpiper pecks at the shore when the sea rushes out.

The panel impelled consideration of the question. So sure there are some that stay home

and mope, taking the path of least resistance, as

their dreams go to the opera and out to supper afterward, having a marvelous time, one

imagines, coming home at dawn. But for all the good this does anyone, ask the fairies,

and the record is eloquent on this point: no fire sales, none at all, before the end

of friendship. It was the day-to-day banter, you see. Besides, whose business is it if none

of us turns up, we signed no agreement, life gets along quite well without us, don’t

you suppose, and if the sky is rarely green at evening, the water often is, when there is

an overlay of gold leaf and nothing too disgusting shreds one’s patience as it did

the last time these books were taken out. Really, my dear, I

don’t see any point in disturbing people about a few pencil-shavings on the desk-top

any more than your dead tea-leaves annoy
me
. Why then, should people swing toward people

in groups, and when some collide and others keep on going, misstate the occasion?

Either it’s a social event or it isn’t. You can’t get away

with having two kinds of activity back to back: it just won’t work. Otherwise

we’d all be happy, or blissfully out of our minds is more like it, but work

has to get done in the cracks, joists be visible, for it to matter, and happen: you know

the shed was bare in the morning, and when you crept back to it at noon, it still was

and was obviously going to be again when twilight arrived, broom in hand. Now the shocked clocks

jangle otherwise, but back there, when it was doing its being, who thought about time?

Who cared about being caught red-handed when there was so much to hear and complain about,

so many bodies sitting in drafts, backs bared for our added enjoyment when a man with a pipe

tiptoes in, and abruptly one felt uneasy, one’s mood blunted by this seemingly unrelated

conundrum. It was then we got up to go. One simply stormed out of the baroque palace

in arctic weather, clad in a filmy negligee, with no thought for the morrow,

not the least concern for where cash or food were going to come from. Call it a happy ending,

there is much to praise in a decidedly mixed climate of coming-of-age films and old

bear masks, one would say, especially insofar as the current underlying it was cool,

not having made up its mind yet. The few who did escape were considered dangerous

and were put down, so that for a long time there was no really reliable account of what went on

in there: besides, who knew? Even belated guests having fun in a fit of champagne

and ruled legal paper were undercut by their own memories of what this would have been

in a past that can make no sense to them, now. Besides, if
you
said it one of them might obey

and there would be an end of it. Can you imagine? Nothing but ecstatic rooms,

one after the other, and strong possibilities of
becoming
one’s desire and thereby

mastering it and one’s own plans for the future before they begin to drift,

causing the consternation that we know. Come to think of it, why couldn’t we all play at

savoring how the sun seems to grow aware of us gradually, until late in the evening

when one is excused, and can go and write down one’s impressions? At least,

I
thought that’s what it was all about. You may contradict me, but I
see
life

in the dead leaves beginning to blow across the carpet, paraffin skies, the beetle’s forlorn

wail, and all at once it recognizes me, I am valid again, the chapter can close

and later be mounted, as though on a stage or in an album. Really not too much does get

left out, if you count it to the end, not including the hopes and desires that intervened

and made you think of it, but only the smooth moments that were ours,
O

don fatale
, as someone said, and I agree, and now I must post this, feeling you

in my hands and along my arms, as though it were all going to stop and begin

a few minutes after the alarm sounded. Much of it is there, intact and around.

Someone could start it up again. I know. We were all cute kids once.

Lately I have this feeling you were avoiding me. We could sum it all up as a bunch

of nerves, little people peeing around, but there goes my Doberman’s tether, he’s off and running,

not to put too fine a point on it. And the cooling-off period ended, dirty,

this time. As these strangers of our waking existence are consumed, their outlines darken

and are suddenly stronger. We’ll never get rid of them. They erupt as you start to move,

become your belt or maxim, ride roughshod over the ancient imperatives,

and there is nothing to see. You are inside the box. It couldn’t have happened

in a more convenient interval. Yet life

is after all very much what they are all about:

why drag it out, sniff and whine, merely to remain perpendicular

to the afterlife, buying that notion. Visions at sea: the old promontories are there,

an argument I had with my father, the store that sells antique tools, and only a little

about cleaning up my act, really sitting down and just doing the job. Then the abandoned

projects need pampering too. So I walk out into the street, wearing a shirt,

and buy something. And the cake is eaten. No crumb is left over. There were never going to

be any, since what was predicted has already happened. You can turn off that appetite now.

Girls, I don’t know, there were a lot of them but no special one.

Boys handed cigarettes around.

The newspaper had just hit the stands. The airplane was mentioned in it.

No one had come to shake hands. Besides they were just walking. A basin or two. That

shattering discharge of light just when sunset is supposed to occur, striking

terror into your heart, but gone the next moment. To be born eclectic is, I suppose, to die

into my idea of what you are, a basso-profundo fibrillation, an idea like a pit.

Here, I can’t hold it up by myself, you’ve got to help. One can, one does exist like this

but what a thin home it makes. No place to put my despair. Never mind, we’ll unpack it later.

Meanwhile I haven’t told you what the kids said

about the airplane, and how their place on it was nice. Lots of people told stories.

It was grand, a truly grand homecoming: lifers off the sauce, raccoons that dodge, cheese

and pastry for everybody, canons praised, until the knife came

and sat on the chopping block, which was a bit problematical, but we figured out a way

to include it in our rounds, so it never got bored or lonesome. The bigger children had fits.

Soon all was gray, and gay. Honeybunch had never seen

so many distasteful lives intertwined, and Mary Ellen hadn’t either. When the fray comes

undone, and the world is a frump, why it’s time to make hay in the rain, leaving

the door closed, that tells its own story: a world of pimps, a season on a pink beach,

mauve twilights that plop down on you in the tropics and then ask
you
the way out, insist

on the recipe—still, one could have a fine time or two,

then. We were younger, but not as rich. By the time we were old, everyone cared,

and it was time to try something new, but the wine had taken over, what was supposed to be a lark

ended in the dark, and then how do you count them? The waivers, I mean

the insects, in the bloody awful place you brought me to. I suppose I could forgive you,

given the era, but then they all shouted. It was supposed to be embarrassing for me,

coming back, I mean. So I just put on the halter and waited, for what seemed

like tall summer afternoons, and a breeze came and kissed me on the head, and I was out of it,

finally, free to collect my things—you know how that feels. So I swaggered

over to the bar, was refused admission. Then I lay on my back in the street

for a while, gazing up at the stars, but soon tired of that too. So I got up, traded places

with a beggar standing next to me, and set out in rags to see the world itself,

a pretty tired place by that time. And so arrived home without further incident, “the trip

was uneventful,” as they say, except in between I need more time with you, and primroses,

which I collect. There was a bad day too at school, but you see this

no longer concerns me, I am kind of semi-retired now, and don’t wish to go pushing people

or putting on airs. Some of the young people came to stay. It was lovely, then.

But I’ll tell you one thing: it wasn’t easy. Mornings, I’d be at the library

while it was still dark outside, straining my eyes over useless newsprint, all

in the interests of some dumb theory I was trying to prove,

even after I’d forgotten what it was. There’d be times I thought I’d hit on something—

eureka! And then I’d realize I’d ignored an important bit of chronology, for instance

that A and B weren’t even alive during the same century, and I’d be forced to backtrack,

treading water, then as always. Sometimes an important fact would come to light

only to reveal itself as someone else’s discovery, while I felt my brain getting chafed

as everything in the reading room took on an unreal, somber aspect. But outside, the streetscape

always looked refreshingly right, as though scene-painters had been at work, and then,

at such moments, it was truly a pleasure to walk along, surprised yet not too surprised

by every new, dimpled vista. People would smile at me, as though we shared some pleasant

secret, or a tree would swoon into its fragrance, like a freshly unwrapped bouquet

from the florist’s. I knew then that nature was my friend. “We do it,” the contractor said,

“routinely.” And sure enough, it was as though everything were posing for a photographer,

helping you to get the right angle. A snowy panorama would automatically appear framed

by a lych-gate; parked cars would reveal carved wooden heads, of unknown origin, affixed

to the house behind them. Beautiful girls wearing peasant aprons would sink, laughing,

in a circle on the grass, one of them tilting her head thoughtfully upward

as she chewed on a spear of hay. You can bet this helped me along with my work. Or if

the water in a vase appeared clouded, someone would have replaced it

the next time you noticed, and gone on to other happy, thankless tasks. I kept my counsel

as I continued to write, and then, because that is the way I do it, would greet

or compliment someone when they weren’t expecting it, and you know something—I do it

because they expect me to, and that’s the way I want everything to be. Because when

darkness does come we’ll need advice, and the only way we’ll get it is by looking at what

we wrote down a long time ago, thinking it of no importance and laying it

in a shallow box or drawer. But when you do really need to know the essential

nature of a thing, recognize it by its texture only, the cup by the handle, the gas

from its sudden volatility, you’ll be glad you

wasted so much time in youth jotting down seemingly unrelated random characteristics of things,

rested on your elbows at the windowsill looking out over everything that was going to be night,

as dismay took two steps backward into curiosity and brought momentary relief in the form

of an incorrect solution that might be read later on as a stain

on your record, before everything became justified by age, antiquity

having usurped a moral force hitherto in suspension, now focused

on all the manifold exploits of men and animals. And not a moment too soon—the page

that was waiting to be turned had grown heavy as a barren mountain range, and armies

of civil engineers equipped with the latest in pulleys, winches, sprockets and windlasses

were just at that moment attempting to negotiate its sheer sides, with little success,

until in your sleep you muttered the word that released them, it sank, and all returned

to normal for a while. Music had gotten caught in the chinks of their argument,

that is, their history: it too disengaged itself and flew off, lapwing-wise, into the air

and the sun came out as though to congratulate earth on the felicitous result which

might so easily have proved far other, setting the race to humanity back a couple of hundred

years. At such times we are allies, rejoicing to feel the firm pavement under our feet.

And when things stagnate we can easily stir them up to produce an evocation

of freshness, until the next major change is called for. You’d better believe we can

bestir ourselves when necessary, though leisure is always productive, too,

leading, at the end, to truths it was never possible to envisage, or, even now, to formulate.

Let the weather of it all wash over me like a wall, I am not foolish, only a little

fanatical, but I do not intend to let that hinder me or discourage all of us

from taking ourselves down a peg, if needful; I have only the world to ask for, and,

when granted, to return to its pedestal, sealed, resolved, restful, a thing

of magic enmity no longer, an object merely, but one that watches us

secretly, and if necessary guides us

through the passes, the deserts, the windswept tumult that is to be our home