Houseboat Days: Poems (3 page)

Bandage has been removed, is all.

You thought it was wrong. And afterwards

When everyone had gone out, their lying persisted in your ears,

Across the water. You didn’t see the miserable dawns piled up,

One after the other, stretching away. Their word only

Waited for you like the truth, and sometimes

Out of a pure, unintentional song, the meaning

Stammered nonetheless, and your zeal could see

To the opposite shore, where it was all coming true.

Then to lay it down like a load

And take up the dream stitching again, as though

It were still old, as on a bright, unseasonably cold

Afternoon, is a dream past living. Best to leave it there

And quickly tiptoe out. The music ended anyway. The occasions

In your arms went along with it and seemed

To supply the necessary sense. But like

A farmhouse in the city, on some busy, deserted metropolitan avenue,

It was all too much in the way it fell silent,

Forewarned, as though an invisible face looked out

From hooded windows, as the rain suddenly starts to fall

And the lightning goes crazy, and the thunder faints dead away.

That was a way of getting here,

He thought. A spear of fire, a horse of air,

And the rest is done for you, to go with the rest,

To match up with everything accomplished until now.

And always one stream is pointing north

To reeds and leaves, and the stunned land

Flowers in dejection. This station in the woods,

How was it built? This place

Of communicating back along the way, all the way back?

And in an orgy of minutes the waiting

Seeks to continue, to begin again,

Amid bugs, the harking of dogs, all the

Maddening irregularities of trees, and night falls anyway.

The disquieting muses again: what are “leftovers”?

Perhaps they have names for it all, who come bearing

Worn signs of privilege whose authority

Speaks out of the accumulation of age and faded colors

To the center of today. Floating heart, why

Wander on senselessly? The tall guardians

Of yesterday are steep as cliff shadows;

Whatever path you take abounds in their sense.

All presently lead downward, to the harbor view.

Therefore do your knees need to be made strong, by running.

We have places for the training and a special on equipment:

Knee-pads, balancing poles and the rest. It works

In the sense of aging: you come out always a little ahead

And not so far as to lose a sense of the crowd

Of disciples. That were tyranny,

Outrage, hubris. Meanwhile this tent is silence

Itself. Its walls are opaque, so as not to see

The road; a pleasant, half-heard melody climbs to its ceiling—

Not peace, but rest the doctor ordered. Tomorrow …

And songs climb out of the flames of the near campfires,

Pale, pastel things exquisite in their frailness

With a note or two to indicate it isn’t lost,

On them at least. The songs decorate our notion of the world

And mark its limits, like a frieze of soap-bubbles.

What caused us to start caring?

In the beginning was only sedge, a field of water

Wrinkled by the wind. Slowly

The trees increased the novelty of always being alone,

The rest began to be sketched in, and then … silence,

Or blankness, for a number of years. Could one return

To the idea of nature summed up in these pastoral images?

Yet the present has done its work of building

A rampart against the past, not a rampart,

A barbed-wire fence. So now we know

What occupations to stick to (scrimshaw, spinning tall tales)

By the way the songs deepen the color of the shadow

Impregnating your hobby as you bend over it,

Squinting. I could make a list

Of each one of my possessions and the direction it

Pointed in, how much each thing cost, how much for wood, string, colored ink, etc.

The song makes no mention of directions.

At most it twists the longitude lines overhead

Like twigs to form a crude shelter. (The ship

Hasn’t arrived, it was only a dream. It’s somewhere near

Cape Horn, despite all the efforts of Boreas to puff out

Those drooping sails.) The idea of great distance

Is permitted, even implicit in the slow dripping

Of a lute. How to get out?

This giant will never let us out unless we blind him.

And that’s how, one day, I got home.

Don’t be shocked that the old walls

Hang in rags now, that the rainbow has hardened

Into a permanent late afternoon that elicits too-long

Shadows and indiscretions from the bottom

Of the soul. Such simple things,

And we make of them something so complex it defeats us,

Almost. Why can’t everything be simple again,

Like the first words of the first song as they occurred

To one who, rapt, wrote them down and later sang them:

“Only danger deflects

The arrow from the center of the persimmon disc,

Its final resting place. And should you be addressing yourself

To danger? When it takes the form of bleachers

Sparsely occupied by an audience which has

Already witnessed the events of which you write,

Tellingly, in your log? Properly acknowledged

It will dissipate like the pale pink and blue handkerchiefs

That vanished centuries ago into the blue dome

That surrounds us, but which are, some maintain, still here.”

It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having:

Falling forward one minute, lying down the next

Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers.

People have been making a garment out of it,

Stitching the white of lilacs together with lightning

At some anonymous crossroads. The sky calls

To the deaf earth. The proverbial disarray

Of morning corrects itself as you stand up.

You are wearing a text. The lines

Droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need

Any other literature than this poetry of mud

And ambitious reminiscences of times when it came easily

Through the then woods and ploughed fields and had

A simple unconscious dignity we can never hope to

Approximate now except in narrow ravines nobody

Will inspect where some late sample of the rare,

Uninteresting specimen might still be putting out shoots, for all we know.

At the sign “Fred Muffin’s Antiques” they turned off the road into a narrow lane lined with shabby houses.

If the thirst would subside just for awhile

It would be a little bit, enough.

This has happened.

The insipid chiming of the seconds

Has given way to an arc of silence

So old it had never ceased to exist

On the roofs, of buildings, in the sky.

The ground is tentative.

The pygmies and jacaranda that were here yesterday

Are back today, only less so.

It is a barrier of fact

Shielding the sky from the earth.

On the earth a many-colored tower of longing rises.

There are many ads (to help pay for all this).

Something interesting is happening on every landing.

Ladies of the Second Empire gotten up as characters from Perrault:

Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, the Sleeping Beauty,

Are silhouetted against the stained-glass windows.

A white figure runs to the edge of some rampart

In a hurry only to observe the distance,

And having done so, drops back into the mass

Of clock-faces, spires, stalactite machicolations.

It was the walking sideways, visible from far away,

That told what it was to be known

And kept, as a secret is known and kept.

The sun fades like the spreading

Of a peacock’s tail, as though twilight

Might be read as a warning to those desperate

For easy solutions. This scalp of night

Doesn’t continue or break off the vacuous chatter

That went on, off and on, all day:

That there could be rain, and

That it could be like lines, ruled lines scored

Across the garden of violet cabbages,

That these and other things could stay on

Longer, though not forever of course;

That other commensals might replace them

And leave in their turn. No,

We aren’t meaning that any more.

The question has been asked

As though an immense natural bridge had been

Strung across the landscape to any point you wanted.

The ellipse is as aimless as that,

Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear

In our present. Its flexing is its account,

The return to the point of no return.

A little girl with scarlet enameled fingernails

Asks me what time it is—evidently that’s a toy wristwatch

She’s wearing, for fun. And it is fun to wear other

Odd things, like this briar pipe and tweed coat

Like date-colored sierras with the lines of seams

Sketched in and plunging now and then into unfathomable

Valleys that can’t be deduced by the shape of the person

Sitting inside it—me, and just as our way is flat across

Dales and gulches, as though our train were a pencil

Guided by a ruler held against a photomural of the Alps

We both come to see distance as something unofficial

And impersonal yet not without its curious justification

Like the time of a stopped watch—right twice a day.

Only the wait in stations is vague and

Dimensionless, like oneself. How do they decide how much

Time to spend in each? One begins to suspect there’s no

Rule or that it’s applied haphazardly.

Sadness of the faces of children on the platform,

Concern of the grownups for connections, for the chances

Of getting a taxi, since these have no timetable.

You get one if you can find one though in principle

You can always find one, but the segment of chance

In the circle of certainty is what gives these leaning

Tower of Pisa figures their aspect of dogged

Impatience, banking forward into the wind.

In short any stop before the final one creates

Clouds of anxiety, of sad, regretful impatience

With ourselves, our lives, the way we have been dealing

With other people up until now. Why couldn’t

We have been more considerate? These figures leaving

The platform or waiting to board the train are my brothers

In a way that really wants to tell me why there is so little

Panic and disorder in the world, and so much unhappiness.

If I were to get down now to stretch, take a few steps

In the wearying and world-weary clouds of steam like great

White apples, might I just through proximity and aping

Of postures and attitudes communicate this concern of mine

To them? That their jagged attitudes correspond to mine,

That their beefing strikes answering silver bells within

My own chest, and that I know, as they do, how the last

Stop is the most anxious one of all, though it means

Getting home at last, to the pleasures and dissatisfactions of home?

It’s as though a visible chorus called up the different

Stages of the journey, singing about them and being them:

Not the people in the station, not the child opposite me

With currant fingernails, but the windows, seen through,

Reflecting imperfectly, ruthlessly splitting open the bluish

Vague landscape like a zipper. Each voice has its own

Descending scale to put one in one’s place at every stage;

One need never not know where one is

Unless one give up listening, sleeping, approaching a small

Western town that is nothing but a windmill. Then

The great fury of the end can drop as the solo

Voices tell about it, wreathing it somehow with an aura

Of good fortune and colossal welcomes from the mayor and

Citizens’ committees tossing their hats into the air.

To hear them singing you’d think it had already happened

And we had focused back on the furniture of the air.

For a long time I used to get up early.

20-30 vision, hemorrhoids intact, he checks into the

Enclosure of time familiarizing dreams

For better or worse. The edges rub off,

The slant gets lost. Whatever the villagers

Are celebrating with less conviction is

The less you. Index of own organ-music playing,

Machinations over the architecture (too

Light to make much of a dent) against meditated

Gang-wars, ice cream, loss, palm terrain.

Under and around the quick background,

Surface is improvisation. The force of

Living hopelessly backward into a past of striped

Conversations. As long as none of them ends this side

Of the mirrored desert in terrorist chorales.

The finest car is as the simplest home off the coast

Of all small cliffs too short to be haze. You turn

To speak to someone beside the dock and the lighthouse

Shines like garnets. It has become a stricture.

When Eduard Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the open doorway, he saw that it was raining. It was not raining much.

K
AFKA,
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