Flow Chart: A Poem (8 page)

our image of our self-esteem? Where were we in the dark? Can you see it? Positive?

Not so nice now
, as the deep cranberry-colored berries linger

on the trees though shriveled and cold—surely not till summer? But that’s

ages away and I have to finish my story, and character

is what I forgot to add. O but it will change

the negative nature of it, put in something we don’t need all right,

gigantic though it be. Still, and though the leaves are only threaded on the branches now,

someone has to look after it. I never had a servant. Always, I was accustomed

to doing my own cleaning, even as others were not. Heck, what creeps

are these? And I forgot the way back, forgot the back of the story,

perhaps for the better, since I was refreshed and could remember nothing,

nothing of what happened so long ago, on a certain evening

in July. We called across

shallow lagoons to each other; it seemed to help. Now to expunge

the revenge-motif, and get it all right for once. Life is an embroidery-frame, and what you put

into it gets left there, there are so many kinds of designs, literally millions of them

and the combinations of these—well. So perhaps what happened at Nuremberg in 1658 is

of some importance to me, but surely

the burden of proof doesn’t rest on you. It’s all I can do

for you baby now that I have to get going, but think

of the diminishing tiers of clouds clustered to the ever-more-distant horizon: do you want

our heritage? Or should you invest in something? And as one tendril

after another unclasps, what more is there to say? I can see you

in the ski-picture, as dazed and clean as in the old days behind the laundry,

and yet each word of what we said to each other matters, pulls, I don’t know, away

like a sheet from the substance, and what are you going to get after that?

What me, huh?

I wish I could hear birdsong in those old days,

you know, the kind there used to be. It seemed every thorn was alight.

Here there is nowhere near the expansive atmosphere

we imagine we miss. Only a sullen waiter

in a soiled white jacket who slams down the coffee cups in front of you and then walks away.

I was told about it on a Sunday. By Monday the dogs were back, fighting over some used

excrement, half in the water. Wow. What a dumb thing. Only I hear he used to go behind

the other building, and no one knew him. But he can’t say for sure. It’s like a chicken.

I’m sure Babs remembers the time of the arguments we used to go through.

That’s ancient history now, though. And, like history, it has a definite interest,

like Thebes. Curiously I was just talking

about it professor, to get it not quite wrong again, and you came up and asked me

how my theorem was and I blurted out the truth. It’s all okay. It’s not going to be divided,

not divided up among several participants anyway.

It was decided to proceed another way

while I was out of the room.

The startling freshness of it blinkered me

opposing me to many angles of lights

that fell before the door frame. A weathered quince

asked to be included. Round shrubs duly unwrapped

after winter and how do you get hold of these? Sipping a glass of brandy

my mother high above the city shooed

inset chimes to their places; how far

and how many balloons see the light of morning each time this year

and one must have a peg to hang it on, and something to walk upon,

yet it got no worse,

the time between the horse’s lazily but abruptly twitched tail to

the flies from off the stable:

fellows who hurry by you,

they are taking you, out of the catalog, to

obnoxious rendezvous. Meetings. Was it ever a catbird that called thus,

got us late after school, how much we were loving it, instant

in each other’s arms, and one thin one called down, that was a wave of air

to take the place away. And you and I, in our sun-kit,

we must have mastered many foreign dances,

been seen tall at the fair, for one or more of them to recognize us outside

the precinct, and to have got off scot-free for a wad

of cloth, roll of hair brushed from the comb, that’s

all we were meant to see. But in the dark you see more,

especially if you’re a child, and know instinctively what goes on there,

how matchbooks are bent open backwards, what warts they all

came to learn, in thin haze

out over San Francisco. I said you are my teacher Herr Schmidt,

I am the toad and pupil, you are after all all

you set out to be and it’s true isn’t it? It’s come true, look? And his puppy-eyes

appraised mine, I was won over instantly, from that day

never thought forward, looked backward, rain

or shine, from that anointed moment

I first kissed a king in you. What reflections!

We are lucky to have this

yet one doesn’t want to go, makes

excuses not to, toe twisting in door-jamb.

You flattered me I was higher up on the ladder

than any of the other pupils, and when I came to be eight, straight

as two twigs in the barn after love,

the waters receded and left.

Now’s the time. But my fatal shyness overcame me

once again. I hurried out, threw

myself down the street. You see I wasn’t going to be a good boy.

They just came. Took me. Now I angle pleasantly

toward the surface, thinking a good, fat dream: oh to be stuck

in there again. But the fire-engine

won’t let me, the banging hurtling toward a concussion

on rocks, a broken pedestal and here,

here we stand, the breeze is pleasant so let’s take

our time and sing one more song, eyes rolling,

and roam at will, timeless:

indeed I have no doubt it can be so.

Oh I don’t know, do you?

What is it makes the window-maker go off on his own, if not

this sacred season of lips,

gray moisture that squeezes down on us so hard. And we are never

on our own. Because someone decreed we were not to be. And in glacial

pockets of this repercussion were still not meant to be ourselves, until

some cruel stranger forces us to be, and leaves. Ah, but then, what new

problems, taxis, taking years to get an accounting, while daffodils, long dead, continue

to droop sideways. Meanwhile the same film strip

is projected endlessly across one’s forehead. One has seen it so many times!

Yet one dares to admit there are details, each time, that escaped one before,

like the title on the spine of the book laying on the table: The Taming of the Shrew. Once

mastered all this can still instruct far into the pale vacuum

one wants so much to come to know. It is strangely familiar, like a woodcutter

eating bread
dans un bois solitaire:
O my friends and sisters, haven’t you

ever taken the position that what knows, grows? And familiar noodles are served.

One wants, not to like, but to live in, the structure of things, and this is

the first great mistake, from which all the others, down to the tiniest

speck, bead of snot on a child’s nose, proceed in brisk military fashion, encouraging

to some on a chilly afternoon in March. What they have to say about you never recurs;

the fräulein, in the nadir of a pause, takes up some other subject. It’s jewels.

Or a foray into the unexplained outside. We can never have tears enough,

in fact, so why regret the sun’s pointing

these acerated surfaces? Once, a whale will be kind, and no other grief can exist after

that. You just have to choose, making sure all the choices are wrong, and the sky then

of your own privacy caves in on you, collapses, is comfortable as sleep. In that distant

forest nothing can live separate, and it’s a dream. A difficulty. For one.

For one exchanging one neutral memory for another.

And one fans out over the abyss. This is spring, the warning:

herring may never happen again, and if one gray suit bulges before your eyes be sure

to take it in again: others may be found wanting, the gold rush having resumed, and operas

are once again in demand. By the time I got to the movies it was incredibly

quiet in the dark, only birds peeped, the silent man turned, and the chrome angle

of one’s glasses inaccurately suggested the thirties to legions half-ignorant of their own

birthplaces, let alone metal screening. One has done so much for others; must it be?

No hint of lavender, of cirrus, of citrus? No but the lemmings trot back, you can see for yourself

how much potential was invested there, and what came of it.

It’s time to swing out on one’s own and, if perennial pathos isn’t your dish,

make a stew of something else—nimbus, or limbo. Anything so long as it’s not caused by neighbors

whose potential for wrecking your life is greater now than at any point in the future

provided you let them get away with it and are not angry to relinquish

the paws that go on escaping. Talk it over with your gardener, see

the bright shoots, forget that you will live long, that all thrives, apace and at the same rate.

Or bright facets could interrupt, reflectors

left out on lawns not live to see the dawning of new, earthen flowers

and yet be called to resume again, for dull

is not dull enough and we wish these stones to have duration even as fatigue palls

on the island in the sunset,

and flamingos fall over each other in the luxury of getting away.

I would assemble

landscapes from insect-tunneled wood and go live in a hole somewhere

lest pleasant anomalies impose bumptious charades promoting peace to others and to all comers,

seal it in a chest, rip it open, scatter the powder of life on the dead sawdust

to watch it blink, and then pound with my fists as hard as I can on the saga of

the sheepgirl and her friend the pelican merchant: how they became friends long after

ceasing to know each other, when both were blind and living in unfatally dingy

circumstances somewhere near Clapham Common: when autumn flickers, curves in

on the unfinished lunch, may it rest established early. To graduate

from sultry “other woman” parts to hell itself, which is infinitely more far-reaching

and beautiful than you might ever imagine, isn’t the first step,

but something more like the emerging at the top of the monument, that lets you see

in the vastest if not the least clotted vistas and places

no value-judgment on your being there, on the fact of your being there, though

it might if you weren’t alone, innocent

as a lintel. Back into the past, they sob, the others; it’s necessary in order to

flush out the present as it were, yet one can’t envy them the pained, coming-apart-in-high-velocity-winds feeling

or be surprised that one’s reassurances are ignored. That would belong to an earlier

grand idea of the importance of one’s actions, while now

almost any input is suspect, even the most cost-efficient, so that it seems other men’s

gardens get all the moisture and sunlight. We on the other hand have

only sterile notions of staying included to ruffle through, and one never tires

of this retrograde motion, even as one fears the consequences of standing still

and becoming like an old chromo on a wall.

And yet, dozens

of others experience it, no stigma is attached, only rolling over and over like a marble

that can never stop rolling and here we are, still doing it only advised of our interlocutor’s

growing lack of patience, and permanently eager for the end of the run,

dog bite dog, it doesn’t so much say it on the advertisement as

what do you think, where do you come from; more doses of advice

from shaggy-haired strangers.

And all lock themselves in at night,

desperately vamping where a half-turn to see who’s behind in that tree might

have been deemed more appropriate, if equally ineffective. What brio in your chat, how

do you keep going next time?

And I told him for half a dime I’d quit and screw

you too, only that’s not done, the very

pillars of our civilization would crumble and Osiris would again have to punish

the unwary who danced jigs in our shadow, we the keepers of the trust who have to

somehow find the missing key that at this moment is within the grasp of a leper

who plays with it, not knowing.

And flies still tax us with their lessons: when will we give up? In order to land on that shred

of inhospitable strand one is forced to jettison certain

much-beloved possessions, including, I’m afraid, that key. O if only one belonged to something,

life would be harder perhaps but we’d have the strength to go along with whatever they

wanted us to say and we’d have rivalry at the end, sure, but cunning as well in the abstract

clockface of accusations from the various points of the compass, and who knows, if one got

away, how much sicker the other would get? Perhaps not much. Perhaps if you had

a little compassion in your yard things would grow staler and the calm

of the original compact wouldn’t capsize it, leading to distant benefits and premises.

I told you his name was Max you were the one who thought otherwise and well

it’s just as well as the gunwale unkisses faster the tires nailed to the dock

of departure and all our plans and ammo were scuttled, at the threshold

of this adamantine resort where two