The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (3 page)

is largely involuntary.

March, and the capital lights one dim lamp.

Its restaurants are closed; its thoughts, inward.

The fat of its heart has been spent on winter.

In the National Gallery all the seeds of colour

are preserved. Lit like a mountain

laboratory, its concrete architectural prologue

aspires to stone in the floodlights.

Chambers, anterooms, great halls, rotunda, dome,

restaurant, theatre, gift shop, inside is a landscape

of the unconscious mind.

I can't find the elevator with the map

I've been given. Around the corner of every era,

every great advancement in perspective, the same

security guard and the twentieth century

is being rehung.

Joshua Reynolds, show me the way,

you whose career, all due respect, never

peaked, but who painted until your eyes

gave out. Your Colonel Charles Churchill,

visual allegories to hand, stares wanly

and imperfectly past the elements

of composition, like a ghost after the fugitive

carmine of his living complexion, another victim

of the experiment. Though the experiment

continues as he fades and is a kind of life.

Our eyes meet in the frame.

Back at the hotel, a message waits,

received through the crowded air's invisible

wires. The message is a liquid crystal display.

Distance's droning lecture on policy is interrupted.

Doors of the long grey hall fly open.

ROTHKO VIA MUNCIE, INDIANA

The 1980s. Beginning of the long decade, the century's

late works. Snow on the grid, field bisected

by a new-model John Deere's progress in low gear

with a front-end load of straw bales. Its operator's daughter

dons her brace, thinks her scoliosis the devil's work

on her, a not-good-enough Christian. Her mother talks

scripture on the phone in the kitchen and the kitchen

smells of coffee and it smells of dog. Christmas lights

strung along the eaves of bungalows, vehicles moored

to bungalows by their block heater cords. Rumours

of drunkenness and corruption sunk the Democrat's bid

for mayor.
For we favour the simple expression of the complex

thought. The large shape's impact of the unequivocal. Flat forms

that destroy illusion and reveal truth.
Now the union's eye

has twilight in it, and the city dump will stay where it is.

Evening falls, or rises, or emanates from the figures.

The SportsPlex and Model Aviation Museum, the Muncie

Mall and both quadrangles of Ball State University

shed their associations, perform an unknown adventure

in unknown space. Halogens illuminate an anecdote

of the spirit. You won't see his face around here again.

The violet quarry hosts a greater darkness further in,

the White River sleeps in its cabin of pack ice.

Among the graduating class an abstract feeling develops,

an inclination to symbolism born of the fatal car wreck on

New Year's, a spike in requests for Bob Seger

to the call-ins from a quasi-religious experience of limitless

immensity. To achieve this clarity is inevitably

to be misunderstood. Their lives take on the dimensions

of the fields, the city, its facades and its plan, whose happiness

will be their own. Rent, food budget, sweaters

indoors. Basketball, basketball, and a second marriage.

INTERIOR

after Jack Chambers

Neither question nor assertion makes sense

when truth is a tone of voice. As if I were a wall,

              a former life

                            walks through me, each

              modest architectural feature

                            an anthology of meanings to which paint

has been applied. They don't retain

traces, that's in thinking.

One would do well to adopt

a chemically pure standpoint

              of appraisal, to lay down the repairs

                            and cleaning cloths, to set aside the plan—

              there is no plan.

As object of exchange and economic indicator,

              it entertains no hopes for us, is escorted

by its infestations back to ground.

Wind plays through its failings. Basement

cells divide toward the water table. The roof

              maintains no argument

              with rain, with shortcuts in

                            construction, the storm's many elements

as the one true storm.

              Evergreens, off-street parking, clouds at dusk

              like clouds in western art.

The gardener, after a time,

feels the garden belongs to him,

              familiar objects extend

his spirit:
a malady expressed by drowsiness.

              
Wind moves likewise the feather and the ash.

              
You are the spirits, you are the dust.

                            
Take them with you into the astonishing

              
night alien to us both.

MOLE

Those new flagstones need undermining,

the concrete sundial could use a tilt and while he's at it

he'll make a disaster of the borders. His order

is not our order. He prays to his own ingenuity. His desires

feature a plump worm larder and gathering

the tender beechnuts while ducking horrors the surface

churns out: cat-things, dog-things, pellet guns, poison,

trowels to flip him over the fence into the neighbour's

as though that doesn't hurt. It doesn't work for us,

his gross body plan, eyes skinned shut and his front feet

hands, polydactylic and psychoanalytically proportioned

in that they are oversized and hairless. He does not require

an afterlife. When the consequence whose birth

we've outsourced, reared
extra-muros
on the output

of our comfort zone, comes of age, he'll rejoin

his live/work situation as manager and sole proprietor

of our old estates. He'll raise each molehill like a flag.

In the morning the lawn will be a field of victory.

VIA

Only through the train window is the idle backhoe

figurative, do electrical transformers astride

the fine and dwindling farmland pause

spellbound in their march toward the lakeshore.

At Oakville's irritable limits, hills of scrap aluminum glitter

like a picnic ground in heaven. No one gets on or off

at Ingersoll. Aldershot, Woodstock, Glencoe, Chatham

came of age in the corridor. It remembers where cars

and appliances came from when they came

from there, witnesses the fate of plastics

and obsolete electronics purchased

at big-box developments pinning the new grids down.

Whose architectures are illiterate, but whose lots

are full. Some good jobs have returned,

though diminished, untrustworthy in their refusal to commit,

and withholding benefits. They must be lived with

or left. Descendants of these unions construct

rumours, tributes, territorial admonishments

in fatcap and wildstyle on overpass and soundfence,

life-sized, largely unreadable at speed, though a sense

of form lingers. Of colour. Old service roads

partnered with criminal opportunism end

in abandoned lots, tears, and assurances

to the contrary. I never meant to hurt anyone.

No parties in formal wear await us at the stations,

no family vacations. Here are creosote and allergies,

energy drinks, your fellow passengers:

young mothers, elderly couples, gamers talking shop,

business travellers stuck in the minors, students

clothed in battlefields of competing logos, totally in love

from the neck down. You are a type, too.

Bereft, content, bored witless, anticipatory, according

to your natures, to the capabilities of your remote

devices, deflecting ministrations of a seatmate

with a theory. Or asleep in the mind's room decorated

in the cathode ray's flickering blue, maturing perfume

of boiled potatoes and 1970s optimism. By now

you're far from home. You've found out

who your friends are. A passing freight

throws a bag over your head, pushes your thoughts over,

roars and clatters at a forearm's distance like the exposed

mechanics of a parallel universe and for a moment

you belong to the ages, without affiliation.

Until the snack trolley arrives to restore you to yourself,

to managers and clerks smoking in solidarity

on loading docks of light industrial areas, to mid-morning

in October, pools of remaindered night on leesides

seeding winter in the vacancies. As you coast

into the original neighbourhoods, ruins imply not

failure, but a lesson in patience. Memorial

to all that will neither be remade nor fall apart

completely. In trackside yards roam brightly

coloured polymers of contemporary

playtime, rainsoaked furnitures of early marriage

left with the question of material integrity.

Playing fields, the Park & Ride, nursing homes

like ghost ships. Wholesale Monuments. Everywhere,

motives on display, arguments with the ideal,

though it makes no sense to say we've always

played this wrong. One doubt hides another.

A record of our conduct. Standing water. Off-world

junkspace with mysterious distributive protocols,

peevish piles of refuse under a “No Dumping” sign.

For a bit of certainty, you would do anything.

It's no use to look within. These towns,

like your own, lived in or yet to be, are forever inadequate

to the secret self who forges ahead, calls

from beyond any given incorporation, from the fog

into which the railbed steals, with your own,

better voice. It will catch you living somewhere

nearly by accident, but fluently, to all appearances

the station you were born to.

I LET LOVE IN

When they were together she thought it God's punishment.

When he left she thought it God's punishment.

When vermin overrun the city's boardinghouses

and highrises it's God sticking a hose

into the Devil's hole to flood him out.

And when the floodwaters rose,

where was everyone?

When fog risen from the lake assimilates varietals

of exhaust, evolves through the financial district, renders toxic

the neighbourhoods, swells over suburbs, the Devil

has forsaken another project, saying sometimes

I can't fucking concentrate on anything.

He says he does what he does sometimes because

the Devil gets in like water through his weak places.

When it rains like now the Devil yells at God

I've told you not to call me that. When it rains like now.

And every time God laughs at this

roofs lift off along the Eastern Seaboard. The Eastern Seaboard

will never understand.

When we are broken, to whom are we opened?

God's taken all the fish home to live with him, honey.

And when the earth shakes that's God rearranging furniture

not a bomb in the subway like we thought.

If you feel the Devil with you, he is there.

If you think God has abandoned you,

you are abandoned, his attention

on the World Series, more important than any one man,

smiting the hell out of the Rangers' big bats as the Giants

lift fingers to the sky in praise and the ordnance

deployed in his name, in making straight the way,

would fill the oceans.

And each foreclosure is a failure of belief,

each immortal jellyfish a failure of belief.

When those who will ruin us are elected,

where is everyone?

And when I return from the desert it's with the Devil

cast out. With God cast out. Because it wasn't really me

who did those things before, that wasn't me.

LIFT UP YOUR EYES

It's dark by five. The time of year

we cleave to lightboxes, their travel

versions, and dawn simulators ordered online

from the SADLight Super-Store. West, there is some

daylight left, and later, by the north's lantern, its plains

read in black, white, grey, and lighter

grey, a beauty acknowledged in the animal way

with the whole mind, in a strategy. Distance

lies heavily on that municipality, its roads,

as will the snow, more so now the school has

gone, and the store, closure of which inaugurated

the season and its proprietors' bankruptcy. Neighbours

rallied to keep their electricity on, but when even this

could no longer be done, they moved in

with family in some other town. He'd been back to gather

a few last things—people had seen him there—

and in his daughter's home died of heart attack