Your Name Here: Poems (7 page)

the diamond slot in fishnet pumps and a shadow,

the shadow of the lunge on the bridge,

of monsters congealing above the town,

and of a lost slip with my name on it in the cradle of the ages.

If I were a tree you’d say

I was lost by a highway.

Death overflows the ditches

in which life confined it

and will be that way for some time.

I saw the alchemist drown

in his turquoise at seven

and elsewhere saw the less spiritual side.

God, how it gets me down.

Then furtively a bailiff came

as though to take my measurements

for a new suit. “Here, I don’t need this ...

brine.” I was cluttered for the day.

A Mrs. came out of her house

being as I was on the road to say

look for the heather that is father

to the salt hay down the road.

I guess I only confused

my eager willingness to understand

just about anything that was offered.

Alas, it wasn’t much.

There were few requests for employment

and those seemed old and pallid

as though faxed by a squid one day last March.

Now, a year has gone by. Not quite

a year though, as I

was going to say.

They offered me Bluebeard.

So much that was unacceptable

that day and all the forests to come.

Though bathed in sleep and aromatic

persons, other stimuli come to the aid

of the hairs of one’s neck:

a lad on a bicycle, once,

beautiful as the crescent moon;

enjoyable as a book in a long set of books

who asks you this secret again.

Hell no, the creators weren’t anguished,

just determined to keep you dangling

above the maelstrom a few more seconds.

Then it was as if everything that was going to happen

had. Here, walk into my living room,

put on these sandals, you must be tired.

You’ve come a long way since the evening news

put a half-nelson on both of us. Here,

drink this sugared tea.

It was as though my childhood were beginning again,

with bills to pay, defective homework to be done,

and the rain getting in, wanting to play, it seemed,

like a cat. A great big cat loves me, I guess.

I was down in the swamp tuning my viola,

and naturally everybody comes by then to ask you for a favor,

or, more rarely, to offer to do one for you.

I guess they think nobody ever goes outdoors.

Me, I can’t understand it. It’s the dicey ones

can’t, the car waxers, the dictators. Then say hello to him

by all means, though I guarantee he won’t know what you’re saying.

Then I walked on a ways.

It became apparent that the journey (for

such it was) was far from unavoidable.

A twig skewered my sock

and I looked up at the oak tree’s strapless trunk,

hoping to escape from what seemed a parable,

from which escape is never possible.

I know
that.
But there is still time for surprises

like the time you looked at me and smiled

just as the sledge was dragging us past a bunker

scented with antique urine. In short

it is here that I shall found a colony

and call it God.

The wasps that night had never been loonier,

making reading impossible. I put down my volume

of
Little Dorrit,
and gnats flung themselves even closer

with propositions. “Hey, how’d you like to be rid of that guy

and us too? All you need do is push a button

and a mandarin somewhere on the other side of the world

will stagger for a moment, seeing his life transpire

before him: that first bowl of gruel, graduation day

at mandarin school, and later on doubts and remorse,

a flummoxed present that seeps into the past,

making a whole life seem regrettable.” No,

I cannot condone your offer, the thick answer is for later.

Meanwhile I shall try to pacify my eyeballs

with the mist leaking from the ceiling.

That proved sufficient, caressing the knocker,

a goblin’s face, that drew us back a hundred years

even as it gazed at us in surprise, speechless

as a field of daisies, to a time when we too were out of step

and the whole sentient world offered to bathe us—

pale bluster, flubbing today again and again.

Quietly as if it could be

otherwise, the ocean turns

and slinks back into her panties.

Reefs must know something of this,

and all the incurious red fish

that float ditsily in schools,

wondering which school is best.

I’d take you for a drive

in my flivver, Miss Ocean, honest, if I could.

Just how I feel

I feel today.

The witch stirred the soup

with a magic spoon.

She said, “We can make this happen.

We can never make this happen?”

Excuse me? I was waking up

at the Maison Duck you see.

People are walking past me,

faster and faster—it seems they are running toward something.

Call me old-fashioned. No, don’t,

on second thought. We’ll call an ambulance

instead. I was waking up with this humming in my ears—

sound of the sea, of a basket of nettles.

It’s O.K. to ride, to not go along. I’m not sure

where Pontevedra is. If I was I’d have to ask myself

so many other questions, ones you never

taste in the brightness of your day,

though they answer me

like the risen sea.

Maybe it only looks bedraggled.

Let’s take it up to the fifth floor and see.

One can look quite far in that light, into the corners

of experiences we never knew we had, that is to say most of them.

But the city is new. The new apartment building, now vacant,

circles like a moth that as yet has no idea

it’s trapped in a spider’s web, that the indelible

will soon come to pass. For a few moments now

we can drink tea and talk of the famous doll collection

in the museum of a small European spa.

Shadows on the tent alert us: Breathing isn’t going to be as easy

as we’d thought once. Mr. Cheeseworth is always so right

in his calculations, yet when one comes to believe him, where is he?

It has been a life of qualification and delay.

Yet we knew we were on the right track; something surged in us,

telling us otherwise, that we’d arrive too early at the airport

or something about the drips on the taxi in the dusk.

We doctored it all up,

and I think I have an explanation for the manna

that falls softly as pollen, and tastes like coconut or some other

unaccountable sherbet. It seems clothes never do fit.

Yes, I could have told you that some time ago.

That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes,

but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction.

“That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction?

‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do

when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.”

I tell you, something went wrong there a while back.

Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject.

No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know

exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could

seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong?

I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone

with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel

with the other. And then something like braids will stand out,

on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious.

We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house,

talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know

that’s probably what’s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean.

I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some

sometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater

had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards

drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves

sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly

crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully

know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly

amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.

The walls are whitish. Is it cold enough in here? No,

it’s the statuary I came to see. And the gizzards, you wanted the gizzards

too? No, it was buzzards

I’d mentioned in my letter of introduction, which you seem to have lost,

but I was reminded too of ancient blizzards

that used to infest these parts. Ah, but gizzards

breed sapience, there can be no other way.

Allow me to pass in front of you

while I keep you waiting in the draft that is colder

than the room it besmirches.

Now we can see eye to eye, and it is a good thing.

I would not have thought it easy to set off the smoke alarms

had we been closer together.

“
Now
is the time for escape, you fool.”

Don’t you see it another way

back in the ridges that bore you, that nature knitted for you?

I don’t know, but something keeps getting in the way

of our orderly patrolling of these rooms.

I suppose it’s that I want to go back, really ...

And so you shall, on the 7:19. Meanwhile examine this bronze.

I’ll get Biddy to set out the tea-things

and that will save us some time.

I lost my notes, or they were useless. Luckily

I had scribbled down this number on the baggage claim.

The countess remarked, and with reason, that they

only hold you up if you appear to have been dipped

in aspic. Alas, such was my case. Two hedgerows

further and I’d have made it. Now a rag chairperson gives me the runaround,

thinks we met once on a breakwater—

I say, a glass of tea would clash with the silence

of the conundrums, keeping your clatter from me,

safe from me, that is. Would you—er—mind?