The Double Dream of Spring Read online

  Or did you mean it when you stopped? And the face

  Resembles yours, the one reflected in the water.

  It Was Raining in the Capital

  It was raining in the capital

  And for many days and nights

  The one they called the Aquarian

  Had stayed alone with her delight.

  What with the winter and its business

  It had fallen to one side

  And she had only recently picked it up

  Where the other had died.

  Between the pages of the newspaper

  It smiled like a face.

  Next to the drugstore on the corner

  It looked to another place.

  Or it would just hang around

  Like sullen clouds over the sun.

  But—this was the point—it was real

  To her and to everyone.

  For spring had entered the capital

  Walking on gigantic feet.

  The smell of witch hazel indoors

  Changed to narcissus in the street.

  She thought she had seen all this before:

  Bundles of new, fresh flowers,

  All changing, pressing upward

  To the distant office towers.

  Until now nothing had been easy,

  Hemmed in by all that shit—

  Horseshit, dogshit, birdshit, manshit—

  Yes, she remembered having said it,

  Having spoken in that way, thinking

  There could be no road ahead,

  Sobbing into the intractable presence of it

  As one weeps alone in bed.

  Its chamber was narrower than a seed

  Yet when the doorbell rang

  It reduced all that living to air

  As “kyrie eleison” it sang.

  Hearing that music he had once known

  But now forgotten, the man,

  The one who had waited casually in the dark

  Turned to smile at the door’s span.

  He smiled and shrugged—a lesson

  In the newspaper no longer

  But fed by the ink and paper

  Into a sign of something stronger

  Who reads the news and takes the bus

  Going to work each day

  But who was never born of woman

  Nor formed of the earth’s clay.

  Then what unholy bridegroom

  Did the Aquarian foretell?

  Or was such lively intelligence

  Only the breath of hell?

  It scarcely mattered at the moment

  And it shall never matter at all

  Since the moment will not be replaced

  But stand, poised for its fall,

  Forever. “This is what my learning

  Teaches,” the Aquarian said,

  “To absorb life through the pores

  For the life around you is dead.”

  The sun came out in the capital

  Just before it set.

  The lovely death’s head shone in the sky

  As though these two had never met.

  Variations, Calypso and Fugue

  on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  “For the pleasures of the many

  May be ofttimes traced to one

  As the hand that plants an acorn

  Shelters armies from the sun.”

  And in places where the annual rainfall is .0071 inches

  What a pleasure to lie under the tree, to sit, stand, and get up under the tree!

  Im wunderschonen Monat Mai

  The feeling is of never wanting to leave the tree,

  Of predominantly peace and relaxation.

  Do you step out from under the shade a moment,

  It is only to return with renewed expectation, of expectation fulfilled.

  Insecurity be damned! There is something to all this, that will not elude us:

  Growing up under the shade of friendly trees, with our brothers all around.

  And truly, young adulthood was never like this:

  Such delight, such consideration, such affirmation in the way the day goes ’round together.

  Yes, the world goes ’round a good deal faster

  When there are highlights on the lips, unspoken and true words in the heart,

  And the hand keeps brushing away a strand of chestnut hair, only to have it fall back into place again.

  But all good things must come to an end, and so one must move forward

  Into the space left by one’s conclusions. Is this growing old?

  Well, it is a good experience, to divest oneself of some tested ideals, some old standbys,

  And even finding nothing to put in their place is a good experience,

  Preparing one, as it does, for the consternation that is to come.

  But—and this is the gist of it—what if I dreamed it all,

  The branches, the late afternoon sun,

  The trusting camaraderie, the love that watered all,

  Disappearing promptly down into the roots as it should?

  For later in the vast gloom of cities, only there you learn

  How the ideas were good only because they had to die,

  Leaving you alone and skinless, a drawing by Vesalius.

  This is what was meant, and toward which everything directs:

  That the tree should shrivel in 120-degree heat, the acorns

  Lie around on the worn earth like eyeballs, and the lead soldiers shrug and slink off.

  So my youth was spent, underneath the trees

  I always moved around with perfect ease

  I voyaged to Paris at the age of ten

  And met many prominent literary men

  Gazing at the Alps was quite a sight

  I felt the tears flow forth with all their might

  A climb to the Acropolis meant a lot to me

  I had read the Greek philosophers you see

  In the Colosseum I thought my heart would burst

  Thinking of all the victims who had been there first

  On Mount Ararat’s side I began to grow

  Remembering the Flood there, so long ago

  On the banks of the Ganges I stood in mud

  And watched the water light up like blood

  The Great Wall of China is really a thrill

  It cleaves through the air like a silver pill

  It was built by the hand of man for good or ill

  Showing what he can do when he decides not to kill

  But of all the sights that were seen by me

  In the East or West, on land or sea,

  The best was the place that is spelled H-O-M-E.

  Now that once again I have achieved home

  I shall forbear all further urge to roam

  There is a hole of truth in the green earth’s rug

  Once you find it you are as snug as a bug

  Maybe some do not like it quite as much as you

  That isn’t all you’re going to do.

  You must remember that it is yours

  Which is why nobody is sending you flowers

  This age-old truth I to thee impart

  Act according to the dictates of your art

  Because if you don’t no one else is going to

  And that person isn’t likely to be you.

  It is the wind that comes from afar

  It is the truth of the farthest star

  In all likelihood you will not need these

  So take it easy and learn your ABC’s

  And trust in the dream that will never come true

  ’Cause that is the scheme that is best for you

  And the gleam that is the most suitable too.

  “MAKE MY DREAM COME TRUE.” This message, set in 84-point Hobo type, startled in the morning editions of the paper: the old, half-won security troubles the new pause. And with the approach of the holidays, the present is clearly here to stay: the big brass band of its particular moment’s consciousness in
vades the plazas and the narrow alleys. Three-fourths of the houses in this city are on narrow stilts, finer than a girl’s wrists: it is largely a question of keeping one’s feet dry, and of privacy. In the morning you forget what the punishment was. Probably it was something like eating a pretzel or going into the back yard. Still, you can’t tell. These things could be a lot clearer without hurting anybody. But it does not follow that such issues will produce the most dynamic capital gains for you.

  Friday. We are really missing you.

  “The most suitable,” however, was not the one specially asked for nor the one hanging around the lobby. It was just the one asked after, day after day—what spilled over, claimed by the spillway. The distinction of a dog, of how a dog walks. The thought of a dog walking. No one ever referred to the incident again. The case was officially closed. Maybe there were choruses of silent gratitude, welling up in the spring night like a column of cloud, reaching to the very rafters of the sky—but this was their own business. The point is no ear ever heard them. Thus, the incident, to call it by one of its names—choice, conduct, absent-minded frown might be others—came to be not only as though it had never happened, but as though it never could have happened. Sealed into the wall of all that season’s coming on. And thus, for a mere handful of people—roustabouts and degenerates, most of them—it became the only true version. Nothing else mattered. It was bread by morning and night, the dates falling listlessly from the trees—man, woman, child, festering glistering in a single orb. The reply to “hello.”

  Pink purple and blue

  The way you used to do

  The next two days passed oddly for Peter and Christine, and were among the most absorbing they had ever known. On the one hand, a vast open basin—or sea; on the other a narrow spit of land, terminating in a copse, with a few broken-down out-buildings lying here and there. It made no difference that the bey—b-e-y this time, oriental potentate—had ordained their release, there was this funny feeling that they should always be there, sustained by looks out over the ether, missing Mother and Alan and the others but really quiet, in a kind of activity that offers its own way of life, sunflower chained to the sun. Can it ever be resolved? Or are the forms of a person’s thoughts controlled by inexorable laws, as in Dürer’s Adam and Eve? So mutually exclusive, and so steep—Himalayas jammed side by side like New York apartment buildings. Oh the blame of it, the de-crescendo. My vice is worry. Forget it. The continual splitting up, the ear-shattering volumes of a polar ice-cap breaking up are just what you wanted. You’ve got it, so shut up.

  The crystal haze

  For days and days

  Lots of sleep is an important factor, and rubbing the eyes. Getting off the subway he suddenly felt hungry. He went into one place, a place he knew, and ordered a hamburger and a cup of coffee. He hadn’t been in this neighborhood in a long time—not since he was a kid. He used to play stickball in the vacant lot across the street. Sometimes his bunch would get into a fight with some of the older boys, and he’d go home tired and bleeding. Most days were the same though. He’d say “Hi” to the other kids and they’d say “Hi” to him. Nice bunch of guys. Finally he decided to take a turn past the old grade school he’d attended as a kid. It was a rambling structure of yellow brick, now gone in seediness and shabbiness which the late-afternoon shadows mercifully softened. The gravel playground in front was choked with weeds. Large trees and shrubbery would do no harm flanking the main entrance. Time farted.

  The first shock rattles the cruets in their stand,

  The second rips the door from its hinges.

  “My dear friend,” he said gently, “you said you were Professor Hertz. You must pardon me if I say that the information startles and mystifies me. When you are stronger I have some questions to ask you, if you will be kind enough to answer them.”

  No one was prepared for the man’s answer to that apparently harmless statement.

  Weak as he was, Gustavus Hertz raised himself on his elbow. He stared wildly about him, peering fearfully into the shadowy corners of the room.

  “I will tell you nothing! Nothing, do you hear?” he shrieked. “Go away! Go away!”

  Song

  The song tells us of our old way of living,

  Of life in former times. Fragrance of florals,

  How things merely ended when they ended,

  Of beginning again into a sigh. Later

  Some movement is reversed and the urgent masks

  Speed toward a totally unexpected end

  Like clocks out of control. Is this the gesture

  That was meant, long ago, the curving in

  Of frustrated denials, like jungle foliage

  And the simplicity of the ending all to be let go

  In quick, suffocating sweetness? The day

  Puts toward a nothingness of sky

  Its face of rusticated brick. Sooner or later,

  The cars lament, the whole business will be hurled down.

  Meanwhile we sit, scarcely daring to speak,

  To breathe, as though this closeness cost us life.

  The pretensions of a past will some day

  Make it over into progress, a growing up,

  As beautiful as a new history book

  With uncut pages, unseen illustrations,

  And the purpose of the many stops and starts will be made clear:

  Backing into the old affair of not wanting to grow

  Into the night, which becomes a house, a parting of the ways

  Taking us far into sleep. A dumb love.

  Decoy

  We hold these truths to be self-evident:

  That ostracism, both political and moral, has

  Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things;

  That urban chaos is the problem we have been seeing into and seeing into,

  For the factory, deadpanned by its very existence into a

  Descending code of values, has moved right across the road from total financial upheaval

  And caught regression head-on. The descending scale does not imply

  A corresponding deterioration of moral values, punctuated

  By acts of corporate vandalism every five years,

  Like a bunch of violets pinned to a dress, that knows and ignores its own standing.

  There is every reason to rejoice with those self-styled prophets of commercial disaster, those harbingers of gloom,

  Over the imminent lateness of the denouement that, advancing slowly, never arrives,

  At the same time keeping the door open to a tongue-and-cheek attitude on the part of the perpetrators,

  The men who sit down to their vast desks on Monday to begin planning the week’s notations, jotting memoranda that take

  Invisible form in the air, like flocks of sparrows

  Above the city pavements, turning and wheeling aimlessly

  But on the average directed by discernible motives.

  To sum up: We are fond of plotting itineraries

  And our pyramiding memories, alert as dandelion fuzz, dart from one pretext to the next

  Seeking in occasions new sources of memories, for memory is profit

  Until the day it spreads out all its accumulation, delta-like, on the plain

  For that day no good can come of remembering, and the anomalies cancel each other out.

  But until then foreshortened memories will keep us going, alive, one to the other.

  There was never any excuse for this and perhaps there need be none,

  For kicking out into the morning, on the wide bed,

  Waking far apart on the bed, the two of them:

  Husband and wife

  Man and wife

  Evening in the Country

  I am still completely happy.

  My resolve to win further I have

  Thrown out, and am charged by the thrill

  Of the sun coming up. Birds and trees, houses,

  These are but the stations for the new sign of being

 
; In me that is to close late, long

  After the sun has set and darkness come

  To the surrounding fields and hills.

  But if breath could kill, then there would not be

  Such an easy time of it, with men locked back there

  In the smokestacks and corruption of the city.

  Now as my questioning but admiring gaze expands

  To magnificent outposts, I am not so much at home

  With these memorabilia of vision as on a tour

  Of my remotest properties, and the eidolon

  Sinks into the effective “being” of each thing,

  Stump or shrub, and they carry me inside

  On motionless explorations of how dense a thing can be,

  How light, and these are finished before they have begun

  Leaving me refreshed and somehow younger.

  Night has deployed rather awesome forces

  Against this state of affairs: ten thousand helmeted footsoldiers,

  A Spanish armada stretching to the horizon, all

  Absolutely motionless until the hour to strike

  But I think there is not too much to be said or be done

  And that these things eventually take care of themselves

  With rest and fresh air and the outdoors, and a good view of things.

  So we might pass over this to the real

  Subject of our concern, and that is

  Have you begun to be in the context you feel

  Now that the danger has been removed?

  Light falls on your shoulders, as is its way,

  And the process of purification continues happily,

  Unimpeded, but has the motion started

  That is to quiver your head, send anxious beams

  Into the dusty corners of the rooms

  Eventually shoot out over the landscape

  In stars and bursts? For other than this we know nothing

  And space is a coffin, and the sky will put out the light.

  I see you eager in your wishing it the way

  We may join it, if it passes close enough:

  This sets the seal of distinction on the success or failure of your attempt.

  There is growing in that knowledge

  We may perhaps remain here, cautious yet free

  On the edge, as it rolls its unblinking chariot

  Into the vast open, the incredible violence and yielding

  Turmoil that is to be our route.

  For John Clare