Houseboat Days: Poems (7 page)

Can’t withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon

To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.

Then Apollo quietly told him: “Leave it all on earth.

Your lute, what point? Why pick at a dull pavan few care to

Follow, except a few birds of dusty feather,

Not vivid performances of the past.” But why not?

All other things must change too.

The seasons are no longer what they once were,

But it is the nature of things to be seen only once,

As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along

Somehow. That’s where Orpheus made his mistake.

Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade;

She would have even if he hadn’t turned around.

No use standing there like a gray stone toga as the whole wheel

Of recorded history flashes past, struck dumb, unable to utter an intelligent

Comment on the most thought-provoking element in its train.

Only love stays on the brain, and something these people,

These other ones, call life. Singing accurately

So that the notes mount straight up out of the well of

Dim noon and rival the tiny, sparkling yellow flowers

Growing around the brink of the quarry, encapsulates

The different weights of the things.

But it isn’t enough

To just go on singing. Orpheus realized this

And didn’t mind so much about his reward being in heaven

After the Bacchantes had torn him apart, driven

Half out of their minds by his music, what it was doing to them.

Some say it was for his treatment of Eurydice.

But probably the music had more to do with it, and

The way music passes, emblematic

Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it

And say it is good or bad. You must

Wait till it’s over. “The end crowns all,”

Meaning also that the “tableau”

Is wrong. For although memories, of a season, for example,

Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure

That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting;

It is a picture of flowing scenery, though living, mortal,

Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,

Harsh strokes. And to ask more than this

Is to become the tossing reeds of that slow,

Powerful stream, the trailing grasses

Playfully tugged at, but to participate in the action

No more than this. Then in the lowering gentian sky

Electric twitches are faintly apparent first, then burst forth

Into a shower of fixed, cream-colored flares. The horses

Have each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks,

“I’m a maverick. Nothing of this is happening to me,

Though I can understand the language of birds, and

The itinerary of the lights caught in the storm is fully apparent to me.

Their jousting ends in music much

As trees move more easily in the wind after a summer storm

And is happening in lacy shadows of shore-trees, now, day after day.”

But how late to be regretting all this, even

Bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too late!

To which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours,

Replies that these are of course not regrets at all,

Merely a careful, scholarly setting down of

Unquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way.

And no matter how all this disappeared,

Or got where it was going, it is no longer

Material for a poem. Its subject

Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly

While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad

Comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward

That the meaning, good or other, can never

Become known. The singer thinks

Constructively, builds up his chant in progressive stages

Like a skyscraper, but at the last minute turns away.

The song is engulfed in an instant in blackness

Which must in turn flood the whole continent

With blackness, for it cannot see. The singer

Must then pass out of sight, not even relieved

Of the evil burthen of the words. Stellification

Is for the few, and comes about much later

When all record of these people and their lives

Has disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm.

A few are still interested in them. “But what about

So-and-so?” is still asked on occasion. But they lie

Frozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus

Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name

In whose tale are hidden syllables

Of what happened so long before that

In some small town, one indifferent summer.

Be it right or wrong, these men among

Others in the park, all those years in the cold,

Are a plain kind of thing: bands

Of acanthus and figpeckers. At

The afternoon closing you walk out

Of the dream crowding the walls and out

Of life or whatever filled up

Those days and seemed to be life.

You borrowed its colors, the drab ones

That are so popular now, though only

For a minute, and extracted a fashion

That wasn’t really there. You are

Going, I from your thought rapidly

To the green wood go, alone, a banished man.

But now always from your plaint I

Relive, revive, springing up careless,

Dust geyser in city absentmindedness,

And all day it is writ and said:

We round women like corners. They are the friends

We are always saying goodbye to and then

Bumping into the next day. School has closed

Its doors on a few. Saddened, she rose up

And untwined the gears of that blank, blossoming day.

“So much for Paris, and the living in this world.”

But I was going to say

It differently, about the way

Time is sorting us all out, keeping you and her

Together yet apart, in a give-and-take, push-pull

Kind of environment. And then, packed like sardines,

Our wit arises, survives automatically. We imbibe it.

What was all the manner

Between them, let us discuss, the sponge

Of night pick us up with much else, carry

Some distance, so all the pain and fear

Will never be heard by anybody. Gasping

On your porch, but I look to new season

Which is exactly lost. “I am the knight,

I come by night.” We will say all these

To the other, in turn. And now impatient for

Sleep will have strayed over the

Frontier to pass the time, and it might

As well, dried baby’s breath stuck in an old

Bottle, and no man puts out to sea from these

Coves, secure or not, dwelling in persuasion.

It’s as I thought: there there is

Nothing solid, nothing one can build on. The

Force may have ebbed in the green wood.

Here is nothing, not even

Lazy slipping away, feeling of being abandoned, a

Distant curl of smoke above a car

Graveyard. Instead, the shadows stand

Straight out. Uninvited, light grabs its due;

What is eaten away becomes etched impression

Of mutability, but nothing backs it up.

We may as well begin the litany here:

How all that forgotten past seasons us, prepares

Us for each other, now that the mathematics

Of winter is starting to point it out.

It is true, a truer story.

Self-knowledge frosts each action, each step taken

Freely. Life is a living picture.

Alone, I can bind you like a pleated scarf

But beyond that is much that might be

Examined for the purpose of examining it.

The ends stream back in the wind, it is too dark

To see them but I can feel them.

As Naming-of-Cares you precede the objection

To each, implying a Land of Cockaigne

Syndrome. You get around this as though

The eternally revised geography of spring meant

Something beyond its own sense of exaltation,

And love were cause for self-congratulation.

I might hide somewhere. I want to fly but keep

My morality, motley as it is, just by

Encouraging these branching diversions around an axis.

So when suddenly a cloud blackens the whole

Day just before noon, this is merely

Timing. So even when darkness swings further

Back, it indicates, must indicate, an order,

Albeit a restricted one, which tends to prove that idle

Civilizations once existed under a loose heading like

“The living and the dead.” To learn more

Isn’t my way, and anyway the dark green

Ring around the basin postulates

More than the final chapter of this intriguing

Unfinished last chapter. It’s in the public domain.

But you will take comfort in it again.

Others, patient murderers, cultivated,

Sympathetic, in time will have subtly

Switched the background from parallel rain-lines

To the ambiguities of “the deep,” and in

Doing so will have wheeled an equestrian statue up

Against the sky’s facade, the eye of God, cantering

So as not to fall back nor yet trample the cold

Pourings of sunlight. You will have the look

Reflected on your face. The great squash domes seem

To vindicate us all, yet belong to no one.

Meanwhile others will grow up and fuck and

Get older, beating like weeds against the door,

But this wasn’t anticipated. You caught them off guard.

What I hear scraping at the door

Is palaver of multitudes who decided to come back,

Having set out too soon, and something must be

Done about them, names must be written down,

Or simply by being hoarse one whole side

Of the world won’t count any more,

The side with the story of our lives

And our relatives’ on it, the memory

Of the day you bicycled over.

But the reason for the even, tawny flow

Of the morning as it turned was the thought of riding

Back down all those hills that were so hard

To get up, and climbing the ones you had

Coasted down before, like mirror-writing.

And when the flourish under the signature,

A miniature beehive with a large bee on it, was

Finished, you chose a view of distant factories,

Tall smokestacks, anything. It didn’t matter

So long as it was emptied of all but a drop

At the bottom like the medicine bottle that is thrown away.

The catch in the voice goes out of style then,

The period of civilities is long past.

Strange we should be continually waking up

To a barbaric calm that has probably

Always supported us, while still

Apologizing to the off-white walls we saw through

Years ago. But it stays this way.

What happened was you had finished

Nine-tenths of it before the great explosion,

The meteorite or whatever it was that tore out the

Huge crater eight miles in diameter.

Then somehow you spliced the bleeding wires,

Made it presentable long enough for

Inspection, then collapsed and slept until

The part where she takes the bus. And all

Because someone in a department store made some

Cryptic allusion, or so you thought as that person

Passed by, reducing the architecture of a life

To a minus quantity. There was no way

Back out of this because it wasn’t a departure.

I once stole a pencil, but now the list with my name in it

Disgusts me. It is the horizon, tilted like the deck

Of a ship. And beyond, what must be the real

Horizon congeals into a blue roebuck whose shadow

Hardens every upturned face it trails across

And sets a blister there. If there was still time

To turn back, you must not follow me, but rather

Stay in your living, in your time,

Sizing up the future as accurately as the woman

In the old photograph, and, like her, turn away,

Your hand barely grazing the top of the little doric column.

Anything outside what the sheaf of rays delineates

For the moment is pain and at least illusion,

A piece of not very good news.

Then we must be like each other, because this afternoon’s

Ballast barely holds back the rising landscape

Of premonitions against that now distant (yet all too

Contemporaneous) magnesium flare in which

The habits of a moment, like wrinkles in a piece of backcloth,

Plummeted into the space under the stage

Through a trapdoor carelessly left open,

Joining other manifestations of human stick-to-itiveness

In a “semi-retirement” which has its own rewards

Except the solution only comes about much later, and then

Won’t entirely fit all the clues of the atmosphere

(Books, dishes and bathrooms), but is

Empty and vigilant, but too late to make the train,

And at night stands like tall buildings, disembodied,

Vaporous, rhapsodic, going on and on about something

That happened in the past, at the point where the recent

Past ends and the darker one begins.

But since “we know what we are, but know not

What we may be,” and it’s later now, the romance

Of moderation takes over again. Something has to be

Living, not everyone can afford the luxury of

Just being, not alive but being, at the center,

The perfumed, patterned center. Perhaps it’s all fun