A Wave Read online

  For once, with writing to spare, and how many

  Times have there been words to waste,

  That you had to spend or else take big losses

  In the car after an early dinner the endless

  Light streaking out of the windshield

  A breakthrough

  I guess but don’t just now take into account,

  Don’t look at the time) and time

  Comes looking for you, out of Pennsylvania and New Jersey

  It doesn’t travel well

  Colors his hair beige

  Paints the straw walls gilds the mirror

  The thing is that this is places in the world,

  Freedom from rent,

  Sundries, food, a dictionary to keep you company

  Enviously

  But is also the day we all got together

  That the treaty was signed

  And it all eased off into the big afternoon off the coast

  Slid shoulders into the groundswell removed its boots

  That we may live now with some

  Curiosity and hope

  Like pools that soon become part of the tide

  The Ongoing Story

  I could say it’s the happiest period of my life.

  It hasn’t got much competition! Yesterday

  It seemed a flatness, hotness. As though it barely stood out

  From the rocks of all the years before. Today it sheds

  That old name, without assuming any new one. I think it’s still there.

  It was as though I’d been left with the empty street

  A few seconds after the bus pulled out. A dollop of afternoon wind.

  Others tell you to take your attention off it

  For awhile, refocus the picture. Plan to entertain,

  To get out. (Do people really talk that way?)

  We could pretend that all that isn’t there never existed anyway.

  The great ideas? What good are they if they’re misplaced,

  In the wrong order, if you can’t remember one

  At the moment you’re so to speak mounting the guillotine

  Like Sydney Carton, and can’t think of anything to say?

  Or is this precisely material covered in a course

  Called Background of the Great Ideas, and therefore it isn’t necessary

  To say anything or even know anything? The breath of the moment

  Is breathed, we fall and still feel better. The phone rings,

  It’s a wrong number, and your heart is lighter,

  Not having to be faced with the same boring choices again

  Which doesn’t undermine a feeling for people in general and

  Especially in particular: you,

  In your deliberate distinctness, whom I love and gladly

  Agree to walk blindly into the night with,

  Your realness is real to me though I would never take any of it

  Just to see how it grows. A knowledge that people live close by is,

  I think, enough. And even if only first names are ever exchanged

  The people who own them seem rock-true and marvelously self-sufficient.

  Thank You for Not Cooperating

  Down in the street there are ice-cream parlors to go to

  And the pavement is a nice, bluish slate-gray. People laugh a lot.

  Here you can see the stars. Two lovers are singing

  Separately, from the same rooftop: “Leave your change behind,

  Leave your clothes, and go. It is time now.

  It was time before too, but now it is really time.

  You will never have enjoyed storms so much

  As on these hot sticky evenings that are more like August

  Than September. Stay. A fake wind wills you to go

  And out there on the stormy river witness buses bound for Connecticut,

  And tree-business, and all that we think about when we stop thinking.

  The weather is perfect, the season unclear. Weep for your going

  But also expect to meet me in the near future, when I shall disclose

  New further adventures, and that you shall continue to think of me.”

  The wind dropped, and the lovers

  Sang no more, communicating each to each in the tedium

  Of self-expression, and the shore curled up and became liquid

  And so the celebrated lament began. And how shall we, people

  All unused to each other and to our own business, explain

  It to the shore if it is given to us

  To circulate there “in the near future” the why of our coming

  And why we were never here before? The counterproposals

  Of the guest-stranger impede our construing of ourselves as

  Person-objects, the ones we knew would get here

  Somehow, but we can remember as easily as the day we were born

  The maggots we passed on the way and how the day bled

  And the night too on hearing us, though we spoke only our childish

  Ideas and never tried to impress anybody even when somewhat older.

  But What Is the Reader to Make of This?

  A lake of pain, an absence

  Leading to a flowering sea? Give it a quarter-turn

  And watch the centuries begin to collapse

  Through each other, like floors in a burning building,

  Until we get to this afternoon:

  Those delicious few words spread around like jam

  Don’t matter, nor does the shadow.

  We have lived blasphemously in history

  And nothing has hurt us or can.

  But beware of the monstrous tenderness, for out of it

  The same blunt archives loom. Facts seize hold of the web

  And leave it ash. Still, it is the personal,

  Interior life that gives us something to think about.

  The rest is only drama.

  Meanwhile the combinations of every extendable circumstance

  In our lives continue to blow against it like new leaves

  At the edge of a forest a battle rages in and out of

  For a whole day. It’s not the background, we’re the background,

  On the outside looking out. The surprises history has

  For us are nothing compared to the shock we get

  From each other, though time still wears

  The colors of meanness and melancholy, and the general life

  Is still many sizes too big, yet

  Has style, woven of things that never happened

  With those that did, so that a mood survives

  Where life and death never could. Make it sweet again!

  Down by the Station, Early in the Morning

  It all wears out. I keep telling myself this, but

  I can never believe me, though others do. Even things do.

  And the things they do. Like the rasp of silk, or a certain

  Glottal stop in your voice as you are telling me how you

  Didn’t have time to brush your teeth but gargled with Listerine

  Instead. Each is a base one might wish to touch once more

  Before dying. There’s the moment years ago in the station in Venice,

  The dark rainy afternoon in fourth grade, and the shoes then,

  Made of a dull crinkled brown leather that no longer exists.

  And nothing does, until you name it, remembering, and even then

  It may not have existed, or existed only as a result

  Of the perceptual dysfunction you’ve been carrying around for years.

  The result is magic, then terror, then pity at the emptiness,

  Then air gradually bathing and filling the emptiness as it leaks,

  Emoting all over something that is probably mere reportage

  But nevertheless likes being emoted on. And so each day

  Culminates in merriment as well as a deep shock like an electric one,

  As the wrecking ball bursts through the wa
ll with the bookshelves

  Scattering the works of famous authors as well as those

  Of more obscure ones, and books with no author, letting in

  Space, and an extraneous babble from the street

  Confirming the new value the hollow core has again, the light

  From the lighthouse that protects as it pushes us away.

  Around the Rough and Rugged Rocks the Ragged Rascal Rudely Ran

  I think a lot about it,

  Think quite a lot about it—

  The omnipresent possibility of being interrupted

  While what I stand for is still almost a bare canvas:

  A few traceries, that may be fibers, perhaps

  Not even these but shadows, hallucinations….

  And it is well then to recall

  That this track is the outer rim of a flat crust,

  Dimensionless, except for its poor, parched surface,

  The face one raises to God,

  Not the rich dark composite

  We keep to ourselves,

  Carpentered together any old way,

  Coffee from an old tin can, a belch of daylight,

  People leaving the beach.

  If I could write it

  And also write about it—

  The interruption—

  Rudeness on the face of it, but who

  Knows anything about our behavior?

  Forget what it is you’re coming out of,

  Always into something like a landscape

  Where no one has ever walked

  Because they’re too busy.

  Excitedly you open your rhyming dictionary.

  It has begun to snow.

  More Pleasant Adventures

  The first year was like icing.

  Then the cake started to show through.

  Which was fine, too, except you forget the direction you’re taking.

  Suddenly you are interested in some new thing

  And can’t tell how you got here. Then there is confusion

  Even out of happiness, like a smoke—

  The words get heavy, some topple over, you break others.

  And outlines disappear once again.

  Heck, it’s anybody’s story,

  A sentimental journey—“gonna take a sentimental journey,”

  And we do, but you wake up under the table of a dream:

  You are that dream, and it is the seventh layer of you.

  We haven’t moved an inch, and everything has changed.

  We are somewhere near a tennis court at night.

  We get lost in life, but life knows where we are.

  We can always be found with our associates.

  Haven’t you always wanted to curl up like a dog and go to sleep like a dog?

  In the rash of partings and dyings (the new twist),

  There’s also room for breaking out of living.

  Whatever happens will be quite ingenious.

  No acre but will resume being disputed now,

  And paintings are one thing we never seem to run out of.

  Purists Will Object

  We have the looks you want:

  The gonzo (musculature seemingly wired to the stars);

  Colors like lead, khaki and pomegranate; things you

  Put in your hair, with the whole panoply of the past:

  Landscape embroidery, complete sets of this and that.

  It’s bankruptcy, the human haul,

  The shining, bulging nets lifted out of the sea, and always a few refugees

  Dropping back into the no-longer-mirthful kingdom

  On the day someone sells an old house

  And someone else begins to add on to his: all

  In the interests of this pornographic masterpiece,

  Variegated, polluted skyscraper to which all gazes are drawn,

  Pleasure we cannot and will not escape.

  It seems we were going home.

  The smell of blossoming privet blanketed the narrow avenue.

  The traffic lights were green and aqueous.

  So this is the subterranean life.

  If it can’t be conjugated onto us, what good is it?

  What need for purists when the demotic is built to last,

  To outlast us, and no dialect hears us?

  Description of a Masque

  The persimmon velvet curtain rose swiftly to reveal a space of uncertain dimensions and perspective. At the lower left was a grotto, the cave of Mania, goddess of confusion. Larches, alders and Douglas fir were planted so thickly around the entrance that one could scarcely make it out. In the dooryard a hyena chained to a pole slunk back and forth, back and forth, continually measuring the length of its chain, emitting the well-known laughing sound all the while, except at intervals when what appeared to be fragments of speech would issue from its maw. It was difficult to hear the words, let alone understand them, though now and then a phrase like “Up your arse!” or “Turn the rascals out!” could be distinguished for a moment, before subsiding into a confused chatter. Close by the entrance to the grotto was a metal shoescraper in the form of a hyena, and very like this particular one, whose fur was a grayish-white faintly tinged with pink, and scattered over with foul, liver-colored spots. On the other side of the dooryard opposite the hyena’s pole was a graceful statue of Mercury on a low, gilded pedestal, facing out toward the audience with an expression of delighted surprise on his face. The statue seemed to be made of lead or some other dull metal, painted an off-white which had begun to flake in places, revealing the metal beneath which was of almost the same color. As yet there was no sign of the invisible proprietress of the grotto.

  A little to the right and about eight feet above this scene, another seemed to hover in mid-air. It suggested the interior of an English pub, as it might be imitated in Paris. Behind the bar, opposite the spectators in the audience, was a mural adapted from a Tenniel illustration for Through the Looking Glass—the famous one in which a fish in a footman’s livery holds out a large envelope to a frog footman who has just emerged onto the front stoop of a small house, while in the background, partially concealed by the trunk of a tree, Alice lurks, an expression of amusement on her face. Time and the fumes of a public house had darkened the colors almost to a rich mahogany glow, and if one had not known the illustration it would have been difficult to make out some of the details.

  Seven actors and actresses, representing seven nursery-rhyme characters, populated the scene. Behind the bar the bald barman, Georgie Porgie, stood motionless, gazing out at the audience. In front and a little to his left, lounging on a tall stool, was Little Jack Horner, in fact quite a tall and roguish-looking young man wearing a trench coat and expensive blue jeans; he had placed his camera on the bar near him. He too faced out toward the audience. In front of him, his back to the audience, Little Boy Blue partially knelt before him, apparently performing an act of fellatio on him. Boy Blue was entirely clothed in blue denim, of an ordinary kind.

  To their left, Simple Simon and the Pie Man stood facing each other in profile. The Pie Man’s gaze was directed toward the male couple at the center of the bar; at the same time he continually offered and withdrew a pie coveted by Simon, whose attention was divided between the pie and the scene behind him, at which he kept glancing over his shoulder, immediately turning back toward the pie as the Pie Man withdrew it, Simon all the time pretending to fumble in his pocket for a penny. The Pie Man was dressed like a French baker’s apprentice, in a white blouse and blue-and-white checked pants; he appeared to be about twenty-eight years of age. Simon was about the same age, but he was wearing a Buster Brown outfit, with a wide-brimmed hat, dark blue blazer and short pants, and a large red bow tie.

  At the opposite end of the bar sat two young women, their backs to the audience, apparently engaged in conversation. The first, Polly Flinders, was wearing a strapless dress of ash-colored chiffon with a narrow silver belt. She sat closest to Jack Horner and Boy Blue, but paid no attention to them and tu
rned frequently toward her companion, at the same time puffing on a cigarette in a shiny black cigarette holder and sipping a martini straight up with an olive. Daffy Down Dilly, the other young woman, had long straight blond hair which had obviously been brushed excessively so that it gleamed when it caught the light; it was several shades of blond in easily distinguishable streaks. She wore a long emerald-green velvet gown cut very low in back, and held up by glittering rhinestone straps; her yellow lace-edged petticoat hung down about an inch and a half below the hem of her gown. She did not smoke but from time to time sipped through a straw on a whiskey sour, also straight up. Although she frequently faced in the direction of the other characters when she turned toward Polly, she too paid them no mind.

  After a few moments Jack seemed to grow weary of Boy Blue’s attentions and gave him a brisk shove which sent him sprawling on the floor, where he walked about on all fours barking like a dog for several minutes, causing the hyena in the bottom left tableau to stop its own prowling and fall silent except for an occasional whimper, as though wondering where the barking was coming from. Soon Boy Blue curled up in front of the bar and pretended to fall asleep, resting his head on the brass rail, and the hyena continued as before. Jack rearranged his clothing and turned toward the barman, who handed him another drink. At this point the statue of Mercury stepped from its pedestal and seemed to float upward into the bar scene, landing on tiptoe between Jack and Simple Simon. After a deep bow in the direction of the ladies, who ignored him, he turned to face the audience and delivered the following short speech.

  “My fellow prisoners, we have no idea how long each of us has been in this town and how long each of us intends to stay, although I have reason to believe that the lady in green over there is a fairly recent arrival. My point, however, is this. Instead of loitering this way, we should all become part of a collective movement, get involved with each other and with our contemporaries on as many levels as possible. No one will disagree that there is much to be gained from contact with one another, and I, as a god, feel it even more keenly than you do. My understanding, though universal, lacks the personal touch and the local color which would make it meaningful to me.”

  These words seemed to produce an uneasiness among the other patrons of the bar. Even Little Boy Blue stopped pretending to be asleep and glanced warily at the newcomer. The two girls had left off conversing. After a few moments Daffy got down off her bar stool and walked over to Mercury. Opening a green brocade pocketbook, she pulled out a small revolver and shot him in the chest. The bullet passed through him without harming him and imbedded itself in the fish in the mural behind the bar, causing it to lurch forward regurgitating blood and drop the envelope, which produced a loud report and a flash like a magnesium flare that illuminated an expression of anger and fear on Alice’s face, as she hastily clapped her hands over her ears. Then the whole stage was plunged in darkness, the last thing remaining visible being the apparently permanent smile on Mercury’s face—still astonished and delighted, and bearing no trace of malice.