Your Name Here: Poems (9 page)

It’s our founder. He wants to know why you didn’t disconnect

his spelling. I said you were off shooting mugwumps

as each emerged, tentatively, from the booby hatch

and hustled back in. Right, but he says you’ve

let your tennis game go to hell, and he still can’t spell

the words the sky proposes to him. Your shelter

isn’t taking calls, he says. Instead a curious epiphany

pilots us back to the shoals where a lone telephone booth was last sighted

amid shark-infested eddies. Sparrows are OK,

though, no one wants to kill or eat them. Same goes for carrot tops.

Tell him we’ve a few gross of those left, too. As for ammunition,

you can’t have fuel
and
ammunition. You can have soup, or shoes.

So it was that I departed the caldera, leaving my oboe behind

as security. Its sweet voice haunts me still.

I think I brought you the bloom this time,

will let you know after the last guests have gone. The clouds vanished,

and my headache miraculously thinned,

as on the milk train to Thuringia Falls. To think we could have

once trusted each other, but it’s all the same to me. I love me,

and you anyhow.

So the great brazen hump saw us, gazed out over the landscape.

My nephew—you remember him—

tongue along a dusty fence.

And I the day’s coordinates.

That’s what an impression I am.

He was slow to back into the sea,

which ran to meet him, pushing him

on to dry land. Dry land was his place,

after all. He lives there to this day,

with all the hammocks, gramophones,

double old-fashioned glasses, macaques

and expired magazine subscriptions that constitute

a life for some. His framed diploma

from some Methodist medical school,

from which his name is mysteriously absent.

The gold seals are impressive.

By land or sea or foam

I’ll get there someday, though—

a particular slice of the past

whose perfume intoxicates, imbibes me

and nobody notices. The sled I was going to take

only it wouldn’t fit in my footlocker.

Besides, the tramp steamer was heading for Bahia

or some such.

And of course one does run on too long,

but whose fault is it? At five dollars

a blip, who’s counting? One could, I suppose,

relax one’s discourse, not enough

to frighten it, but to have something cold

in the hand, to cool the palm; the words might

then unspool in a different mode, shadow

of an intention behind the screen

before the lights go up and the generals

sidle on for another confab. “It was
you

who got us involved in this Dreyfus business.” “Liar!”

Let’s take a commercial break here,

my head is cobwebby from all the facts

that got stuffed into it this afternoon.

In no way am I the island I was yesterday.

Children and small pets rejoice around my ankles;

yellow ribbons come down from the tree trunks.

This is
my
day! Anybody doesn’t realize it

is a goddam chameleon or a yes man! Yes, sir,

we’d noticed your singular pallor, singular

even for you. Ambulances have been summoned,

are rumbling across the delta at this moment,

I’d wager. Meanwhile, if there’s anything we can do

to make you comfortable for two or three minutes ...

The heath is ablaze again. Our longest hose

won’t come to within four miles of it.

Don’t you realize what this means for us,

for our families, our ancestors? The page,

summoned, duly arrived with the wilted asters

someone had mistakenly ordered. It’s a variation

on our habitual not-being-able-lo-keep-a-straight-face withdrawal,

turning our back on the smoke and blood-red fumes

we already knew were there, plunging out of hedgerows

so dense not even a titmouse could get through.

Never were we to be invited back again, I mean

no one asked me back again. The others sinned too, each

in her different way, and I have the photographs to prove it,

faded to the ultima thule of legibility.

Next time, you write this.

Sir Joshua Lipton drank this tea

and liked it well enough to start selling it

to a few buddies, from the deck of his yacht.

It spread around the world, became a global

kind of thing. Today everybody knows its story,

and we must be careful not to offend our sponsors,

to humor their slightest whims, no matter how insane

they may seem to us at the time. Like the time one of them

wanted all the infants in the burg aged five or under

to be brought before him, wearing rose-colored sashes,

in order that he might read the Book of Job to them all day.

There were, as you may imagine, many tears shed,

flowing and flopping about, but in the end the old geezer

(the sponsor, not Job) was satisfied, and sank into a sleep more delicate

than any the world had ever known. You see what it’s like here—

it’s a madhouse, Sir, and I am planning to flee the first time

an occasion presents himself, say as a bag of laundry,

or the cargo of a muffin truck. Meanwhile, the “sands”

of time, as they call them, are slipping by with scarcely a whisper

except for the most lynx-eyed among us. We’ll make do,

another day, shopping and such, bringing the meat home at night

all roseate and gleaming, ready for the frying pan.

Our names will be read off a rollcall we won’t hear—

how could we? We’re not even born yet—the stars will perform their dance

privately, for us, and the pictures in the great black book

that opens at night will enchant us with their yellow harmonies.

We’ll manage to get back, someday, to the tie siding where the idea

of all this began, frustrated and a little hungry, but eager

to hear each others’ tales of what went on in the interim

of our long lives, what the tea leaves said

and whether it turned out that way. I’ll brush your bangs

a little, you’ll lean against my hip for comfort.

Cheerio. Nothing on the shore

today. Far out to sea, some eczema

mimicking sunlight and shadow, with but temporary success.

Was it for wandering that I have been punished?

Or was it another plot of the siblings,

always anxious to torment, to twist my hair

into witches’ brooms, with no inherent power?

Remember they love you like powder

in the air, and it wouldn’t take them long at all.

Twenty-five years ago it was different. Please

be patient. Your term too will arrive.

See, he’s a very good friend for you, you know that.

You just don’t want to sit in a pile of ashes all day long,

licking the milk from your chin. Do you? Then get up

off your ass, stride into the melting twilight,

see the sights of the city. More grass

there than you’d expected, you can bet.

I don’t really understand why you object

to any of this. Personally I am above suspicion.

I live in a crawlup where the mice are rotted,

where midnight tunes absolve the bricklayers

and the ceiling abounds in God’s sense.

Something more three-dimensional must be breathed

into action. But go slow, the falling threads

speak to life only as through a haze of difficulty.

The porch is loaded, a question-mark

swings like an earring at the base of your cheek:

stubborn, anxious plain. Air and ice,

those unrelenting fatheads, seem always to be saying,

“This is where we will be living from now on.”

In the courtyard a plane tree glistens.

The ship is already far from here, like a ghost ship.

The core of the sermon is always distance, landscape

waiting to be considered, maybe loved a little

eventually. And I do, I do.

In truth there is room for disquiet

in the wake of the admonitory hiss that accompanies

me wherever I go, to the dentist and back

or sometimes a squeak of approval

will eavesdrop on what I just said,

or even a tiny quiver of applause

will blur in the middle distance, causing

even more distant dogs to bark.

I like to watch the stars giggle and nibble

my hand as I hold it out in a trusting gesture,

like Goethe indicating some Italian hills his companions

might otherwise have overlooked. “I tell you,

it’s all in the seasons, or the seasoning, Wolfgang—

otherwise all your inventions might as well have

washed up on a distant strand.” That’s right,

blame
me
for the ethics issue. Meanwhile can’t you

see that children, young adolescents really, are waking

under apple trees, picking up their bookbags listlessly

and traipsing down the road that presumably leads to school?

There they’ll read about what we—you and I—have

said to each other on important occasions.

No one will be any wiser. Twenty scarlet nuns

came in and led them off in the direction

of the forest, whence issues a medley of big-band

tunes by forgotten composers from the turn of the century.

Now another century is turning. Will it be pretty or depressed?

What have you to say for that jacket you’re wearing, those baggy

pants the color of scarlet elm-leaves?

It will turn out to be a popular color in the new century.

They will call it “white.”

Bug-eyed at the possibilities

she slumbers.

I mean there were more of us on anthrax

than not.

Out of the coal bin

lumbers

our governor. He hasn’t been getting too much sleep of late.

Something puzzles him. I know—it’s the seepage

of ink in the dairy trough. It bothers him, I now know.

Our way,

that way and in.

Besides, it’s elsewhere.

Adventurous.

Wind your way to

the floor.

Noggins were getting a workout,

and all we wanted was the way to the zoo.

We wanted to free the flamingos

but they took off and flew right over our heads,

almost grazing them.

I thought I was going to get knocked down.

Then a kind zoo attendant came over. “It’s natural,”

he explained, “at your age (cough, cough), to want to do something

for these pests, or pets, but it’s really better to do nothing

for them or anybody. See, they’re used to a certain profundity

and get all riled when it’s disturbed

even by a well-intentioned impulse such as yours,
especially

if it’s well intentioned. Such, I fear,

is the essence of the tragi-comic. But who could live without it?”

You may well ask, you

who have never done a lick of work save clang metal gates in people’s pusses.

Point taken, though. We live in an old soup of the tragi-comic.

Werewolves circle us, wishing they were us.

We, on the other hand, wish only that we were somewhere else.

Now are you going to let us into the cage, or what?

Swiftly it was done. A swarm of passenger pigeons whooshed past,

some of them dropping like mayflies, for they were after all extinct,

only some of them hadn’t heard about it yet. Other rarae aves

were nowhere to be seen, though the label on the cage

indicated otherwise. But it was old and rusted,

like the cage itself. Hey, does anybody take care of this place?

It’s like a ghost-zoo.

Aye, and so it is, my son.

You’ve only just noticed? Well, we come up with some pretty

extraordinary things down this way—smouldering peat-bog golf courses

with skeleton golfers, hoping for that hole in one

that comes all too regularly.

We have academies for the undistinguished

with long waiting lists, and subscriptions to the opera,

only you wouldn’t want to hear any of ’em, not if I was you.

Our pre-schoolers are famished, and the grade school is full of microbes.

I could carry you on my back,

I suppose, across the smouldering turf to the nineteenth hole

where we could wet whistles with some sake and dim sum,

only I wouldn’t advise you to stay around much after sunset.

Oh, not that anything funny goes on. Nothing ever does,

in fact. It’s just a wide, loose kind of feeling

that refocuses you on yourself like a truant lens

in some aged Kodak, and you see all you can or ever wanted to be,

laid out on the gravel littoral, drying in the sun,

as if there wasn’t enough to stink up the place as it is.