Houseboat Days: Poems Read online

  Disappeared down the block and the postman shouted

  His daily rounds. The children under the trees knew it

  But all the fathers returning home

  On streetcars after a satisfying day at the office undid it:

  The climate was still floral and all the wallpaper

  In a million homes all over the land conspired to hide it.

  One day we thought of painted furniture, of how

  It just slightly changes everything in the room

  And in the yard outside, and how, if we were going

  To be able to write the history of our time, starting with today,

  It would be necessary to model all these unimportant details

  So as to be able to include them; otherwise the narrative

  Would have that flat, sandpapered look the sky gets

  Out in the middle west toward the end of summer,

  The look of wanting to back out before the argument

  Has been resolved, and at the same time to save appearances

  So that tomorrow will be pure. Therefore, since we have to do our business

  In spite of things, why not make it in spite of everything?

  That way, maybe the feeble lakes and swamps

  Of the back country will get plugged into the circuit

  And not just the major events but the whole incredible

  Mass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off,

  Channeling itself into history, will unroll

  As carefully and as casually as a conversation in the next room,

  And the purity of today will invest us like a breeze,

  Only be hard, spare, ironical: something one can

  Tip one’s hat to and still get some use out of.

  The parade is turning into our street.

  My stars, the burnished uniforms and prismatic

  Features of this instant belong here. The land

  Is pulling away from the magic, glittering coastal towns

  To an aforementioned rendezvous with August and December.

  The hunch is it will always be this way,

  The look, the way things first scared you

  In the night light, and later turned out to be,

  Yet still capable, all the same, of a narrow fidelity

  To what you and they wanted to become:

  No sighs like Russian music, only a vast unraveling

  Out toward the junctions and to the darkness beyond

  To these bare fields, built at today’s expense.

  The Gazing Grain

  The tires slowly came to a rubbery stop.

  Alliterative festoons in the sky noted

  That this branchy birthplace of presidents was also

  The big frigidaire-cum-cowbarn where mendicant

  And margrave alike waited out the results

  Of the natural elections. So any openness of song

  Was the plainer way. O take me to the banks

  Of your Mississippi over there, etc. Like a plant

  Rooted in parched earth I am

  A stranger myself in the dramatic lighting,

  The result of war. That which is given to see

  At any moment is the residue, shadowed

  In gold or emerging into the clear bluish haze

  Of uncertainty. We come back to ourselves

  Through the rubbish of cloud and tree-spattered pavement.

  These days stand like vapor under the trees.

  Unctuous Platitudes

  There is no reason for the surcharge to bother you.

  Living in a city one is nonplussed by some

  Of the inhabitants. The weather has grown gray with age.

  Poltergeists go about their business, sometimes

  Demanding a sweeping revision. The breath of the air

  Is invisible. People stay

  Next to the edges of fields, hoping that out of nothing

  Something will come, and it does, but what? Embers

  Of the rain tamp down the shitty darkness that issues

  From nowhere. A man in her room, you say.

  I like the really wonderful way you express things

  So that it might be said, that of all the ways in which to

  Emphasize a posture or a particular mental climate

  Like this gray-violet one with a thin white irregular line

  Descending the two vertical sides, these are those which

  Can also unsay an infinite number of pauses

  In the ceramic day. Every invitation

  To every stranger is met at the station.

  The Couple in the Next Room

  She liked the blue drapes. They made a star

  At the angle. A boy in leather moved in.

  Later they found names from the turn of the century

  Coming home one evening. The whole of being

  Unknown absorbed into the stalk. A free

  Bride on the rails warning to notice other

  Hers and the great graves that outwore them

  Like faces on a building, the lightning rod

  Of a name calibrated all their musing differences.

  Another day. Deliberations are recessed

  In an iron-blue chamber of that afternoon

  On which we wore things and looked well at

  A slab of business rising behind the stars.

  The Explanation

  The luxury of now is that the cancelled gala has been

  Put back in. The orchestra is starting to tune up.

  The tone-row of a dripping faucet is batted back and forth

  Among the kitchen, the confusion outside, the pale bluster

  Of the sky, the correct but insidious grass.

  The conductor, a glass of water, permits all kinds

  Of wacky analogies to glance off him, and, circling outward,

  To bring in the night. Nothing is too “unimportant”

  Or too important, for that matter. The newspaper and the garbage

  Wrapped in it, the over, the under.

  You get thrown to one side

  Into a kind of broom closet as the argument continues carolling

  Ideas from the novel of which this is the unsuccessful

  Stage adaptation. Too much, perhaps, gets lost.

  What about arriving after sunset on the beach of a

  Dank but extremely beautiful island to hear the speeches

  Of the invisible natives, whose punishment is speech?

  At the top of his teddy-bear throne, the ruler,

  Still lit by the sun, gazes blankly across at something

  Opposite. His eyes are empty rectangles, shaped

  Like slightly curved sticks of chewing gum. He witnesses.

  But we are the witnesses.

  In the increasingly convincing darkness

  The words become palpable, like a fruit

  That is too beautiful to eat. We want these

  Down here on our level. But the tedium persists

  In the form of remarks exchanged by birds

  Before the curtain. What am I doing up here?

  Pretending to resist but secretly giving in so as to reappear

  In a completely new outfit and group of colors once today’s

  Bandage has been removed, is all.

  Loving Mad Tom

  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.

  Business Personals

  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.”

  Crazy Weather

  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.

  On the Towpath

  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,

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nbsp; 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.

  Melodic Trains

  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