Houseboat Days: Poems Read online

  not realized for centuries

  meanwhile

  another way of living had come and gone

  leaving its width

  behind

  now the tall cedars

  had become locked into

  the plan

  so that everywhere

  you looked

  was burning

  inferential

  interior space

  not for colonies

  but already closed

  turned in on itself

  its back

  as beautiful as the sea

  where you go up

  and say the word

  eminence

  to yourself

  all was lived in

  had been lived in

  was coming to an end

  again

  in the featureless present

  that was expanding to

  cloister it

  this just a little too

  comic parable

  and so insure the second

  beginning

  of that day seen against the street

  of whichever way

  you walked and talked

  knowing not knowing

  the thing that was describing you

  and not knowing

  your taller

  well somehow more informed

  bearing

  as you wind down

  only a second

  it did matter

  you come back so seldom

  but it’s all right

  the way of staying

  you started comes back

  procession into the fire

  into the sky

  the dream you lost

  firm in its day

  reassured and remembered

  The Ice-Cream Wars

  Although I mean it, and project the meaning

  As hard as I can into its brushed-metal surface,

  It cannot, in this deteriorating climate, pick up

  Where I leave off. It sees the Japanese text

  (About two men making love on a foam-rubber bed)

  As among the most massive secretions of the human spirit.

  Its part is in the shade, beyond the iron spikes of the fence,

  Mixing red with blue. As the day wears on

  Those who come to seem reasonable are shouted down

  (Why you old goat! Look who’s talkin’. Let’s see you

  Climb off that tower—the waterworks architecture, both stupid and

  Grandly humorous at the same time, is a kind of mask for him,

  Like a seal’s face. Time and the weather

  Don’t always go hand in hand, as here: sometimes

  One is slanted sideways, disappears for awhile.

  Then later it’s forget-me-not time, and rapturous

  Clouds appear above the lawn, and the rose tells

  The old old story, the pearl of the orient, occluded

  And still apt to rise at times.)

  A few black smudges

  On the outer boulevards, like squashed midges

  And the truth becomes a hole, something one has always known,

  A heaviness in the trees, and no one can say

  Where it comes from, or how long it will stay—

  A randomness, a darkness of one’s own.

  Valentine

  Like a serpent among roses, like an asp

  Among withered thornapples I coil to

  And at you. The name of the castle is you,

  El Rey. It is an all-night truck-stop

  Offering the best coffee and hamburgers in Utah.

  It is most beautiful and nocturnal by daylight.

  Seven layers: moss-agate, coral, aventurine,

  Carnelian, Swiss lapis, obsidian—maybe others.

  You know now that it has the form of a string

  Quartet. The different parts are always meddling with each other,

  Pestering each other, getting in each other’s way

  So as to withdraw skillfully at the end, leaving—what?

  A new kind of emptiness, maybe bathed in freshness,

  Maybe not. Maybe just a new kind of emptiness.

  You are smart but the weather of this day startles and japes at you. You come out of it in pieces. Always pursuing you is the knowledge that I am there unable to turn around, unable to confront you with your otherness. This is another one of my houses, the one in Hampstead, the brick one in the middle of the block that you never saw though you passed along that street many times, sometimes in spring with a light drizzle blowing that made you avert your gaze, sometimes at the height of summer where the grandeur of the ideas of the trees swamped your ideas about everything, so you never saw my house. It was near where Arthur Rackham lived. I can’t quite remember the name of the street—some partly legible inscription on a Victorian urn: E and then MEL(E?), perhaps a Latin exhortation to apples or heroism, and down in the dim part a name like “Rossiter,” but that is too far down. Listen, I never meant for you not to be in my house. But you couldn’t because you were it.

  In this part I reflect on the difficulty and surprise of being you. It may never get written. Some things are simultaneously too boring and too exciting to write about. This has to be one of them. Some day, when we’re stoned … Meanwhile, write to me. I enjoy and appreciate your phone calls, but it’s nice to get cards and letters too—so keep ’em comin’!

  Through bearded twilight I hear things like “Now see here, young man!” or “Henry Groggins, you old reprobate!” or “For an hour Lester has been staring at budget figures, making no progress.” I know these things are, that they are. At night there are a few things, and they slide along to make room for others. Seen through an oval frame, one of the walls of a parlor. The wallpaper is a conventionalized pattern, the sliced okra and star-anise one, held together with crudely gummed links of different colored paper, among which purple predominates, stamped over a flocked background of grisaille shepherdesses and dogs urinating against fire hydrants. To reflect on the consummate skill with which the artist has rendered the drops as they bounce off the hydrant and collect in a gleaming sun-yellow pool below the curb is a sobering experience. Only the shelf of the mantelpiece shows. At each end, seated on pedestals turned slightly away from one another, two aristocratic bisque figures, a boy in delicate cerise and a girl in cornflower blue. Their shadows join in a grotesque silhouette. In the center, an ancient clock whose tick acts as the metronome for the sound of their high voices. Presently the mouths of the figures open and shut, after the mode of ordinary conversation.

  Thought I’d

  Row across to you this afternoon,

  My Irina! Always writing your beloved articles,

  I see. Happened on one only recently in one of the more progressive journals.

  Brilliantly written, or so it seemed, but isn’t your thought a bit too

  Advanced by present-day standards? Of course, there was much truth

  In what you said, but don’t you feel the public sometimes has more truth

  Than it can cope with? I don’t mean that you should … well, “fib,”

  But perhaps, well, heh heh, temper the wind to the shorn lamb

  A bit. Eh? How about it, old boy?

  Or are you so in love with your “advanced” thinking that everything else

  Seems old hat to you, including my conversation no doubt? In that

  Case I ought to be getting on. Goodness, I’ve a four-thirty appointment and it’s

  Already five after. What have you done with my hat?

  These things I write for you and you only.

  Do not judge them too harshly. Temper the wind,

  As he was saying. They are infant things

  That may grow up to be children, perhaps—who knows?—

  Even adults some day, but now they exist only in the blindness

  Of your love for me and are the proof of it.

  You can’t think about them to
o long

  Without knocking them over. Your castle is a house of cards,

  The old-fashioned kind of playing cards, towering farther

  Than the eye can see into the clouds, and it is also built on

  Shifting sands, its base slurps out of sight too. I am the inhabitable one.

  But my back is as a door to you, now open, now shut,

  And your kisses are as dreams, or an elixir

  Of radium, or flowers of some kind.

  Remember about what I told you.

  Blue Sonata

  Long ago was the then beginning to seem like now

  As now is but the setting out on a new but still

  Undefined way. That now, the one once

  Seen from far away, is our destiny

  No matter what else may happen to us. It is

  The present past of which our features,

  Our opinions are made. We are half it and we

  Care nothing about the rest of it. We

  Can see far enough ahead for the rest of us to be

  Implicit in the surroundings that twilight is.

  We know that this part of the day comes every day

  And we feel that, as it has its rights, so

  We have our right to be ourselves in the measure

  That we are in it and not some other day, or in

  Some other place. The time suits us

  Just as it fancies itself, but just so far

  As we not give up that inch, breath

  Of becoming before becoming may be seen,

  Or come to seem all that it seems to mean now.

  The things that were coming to be talked about

  Have come and gone and are still remembered

  As being recent. There is a grain of curiosity

  At the base of some new thing, that unrolls

  Its question mark like a new wave on the shore.

  In coming to give, to give up what we had,

  We have, we understand, gained or been gained

  By what was passing through, bright with the sheen

  Of things recently forgotten and revived.

  Each image fits into place, with the calm

  Of not having too many, of having just enough.

  We live in the sigh of our present.

  If that was all there was to have

  We could re-imagine the other half, deducing it

  From the shape of what is seen, thus

  Being inserted into its idea of how we

  Ought to proceed. It would be tragic to fit

  Into the space created by our not having arrived yet,

  To utter the speech that belongs there,

  For progress occurs through re-inventing

  These words from a dim recollection of them,

  In violating that space in such a way as

  To leave it intact. Yet we do after all

  Belong here, and have moved a considerable

  Distance; our passing is a facade.

  But our understanding of it is justified.

  Spring Light

  The buildings, piled so casually

  Behind each other, are “suggestions

  Which, while only suggestions,

  We hope you will take seriously.” Off into

  The blue. Getting there is easier,

  But then we hope you will come down.

  There is a great deal on the ground today,

  Not just mud, but things of some importance,

  Too. Like, silver paint. How do you feel

  About it? And, is this a silver age?

  Yeah. I suppose so. But I keep looking at the cigarette

  Burns on the edge of the sink, left over

  From last winter. Your argument’s

  Nearly beyond any paths I’m likely to take,

  Here, or when I eventually leave here.

  Syringa

  Orpheus liked the glad personal quality

  Of the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part

  Of this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends

  Rocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks

  Can’t withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon

  To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.

  Then Apollo quietly told him: “Leave it all on earth.

  Your lute, what point? Why pick at a dull pavan few care to

  Follow, except a few birds of dusty feather,

  Not vivid performances of the past.” But why not?

  All other things must change too.

  The seasons are no longer what they once were,

  But it is the nature of things to be seen only once,

  As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along

  Somehow. That’s where Orpheus made his mistake.

  Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade;

  She would have even if he hadn’t turned around.

  No use standing there like a gray stone toga as the whole wheel

  Of recorded history flashes past, struck dumb, unable to utter an intelligent

  Comment on the most thought-provoking element in its train.

  Only love stays on the brain, and something these people,

  These other ones, call life. Singing accurately

  So that the notes mount straight up out of the well of

  Dim noon and rival the tiny, sparkling yellow flowers

  Growing around the brink of the quarry, encapsulates

  The different weights of the things.

  But it isn’t enough

  To just go on singing. Orpheus realized this

  And didn’t mind so much about his reward being in heaven

  After the Bacchantes had torn him apart, driven

  Half out of their minds by his music, what it was doing to them.

  Some say it was for his treatment of Eurydice.

  But probably the music had more to do with it, and

  The way music passes, emblematic

  Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it

  And say it is good or bad. You must

  Wait till it’s over. “The end crowns all,”

  Meaning also that the “tableau”

  Is wrong. For although memories, of a season, for example,

  Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure

  That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting;

  It is a picture of flowing scenery, though living, mortal,

  Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,

  Harsh strokes. And to ask more than this

  Is to become the tossing reeds of that slow,

  Powerful stream, the trailing grasses

  Playfully tugged at, but to participate in the action

  No more than this. Then in the lowering gentian sky

  Electric twitches are faintly apparent first, then burst forth

  Into a shower of fixed, cream-colored flares. The horses

  Have each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks,

  “I’m a maverick. Nothing of this is happening to me,

  Though I can understand the language of birds, and

  The itinerary of the lights caught in the storm is fully apparent to me.

  Their jousting ends in music much

  As trees move more easily in the wind after a summer storm

  And is happening in lacy shadows of shore-trees, now, day after day.”

  But how late to be regretting all this, even

  Bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too late!

  To which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours,

  Replies that these are of course not regrets at all,

  Merely a careful, scholarly setting down of

  Unquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way.

  And no matter how all this disappeared,

  Or got where it was going, it is no longer

  Material for a poem. Its subject

  Mat
ters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly

  While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad

  Comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward

  That the meaning, good or other, can never

  Become known. The singer thinks

  Constructively, builds up his chant in progressive stages

  Like a skyscraper, but at the last minute turns away.

  The song is engulfed in an instant in blackness

  Which must in turn flood the whole continent

  With blackness, for it cannot see. The singer

  Must then pass out of sight, not even relieved

  Of the evil burthen of the words. Stellification

  Is for the few, and comes about much later

  When all record of these people and their lives

  Has disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm.

  A few are still interested in them. “But what about

  So-and-so?” is still asked on occasion. But they lie

  Frozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus

  Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name

  In whose tale are hidden syllables

  Of what happened so long before that

  In some small town, one indifferent summer.

  Fantasia on “The Nut-Brown Maid”

  HE

  Be it right or wrong, these men among

  Others in the park, all those years in the cold,

  Are a plain kind of thing: bands

  Of acanthus and figpeckers. At

  The afternoon closing you walk out

  Of the dream crowding the walls and out

  Of life or whatever filled up

  Those days and seemed to be life.

  You borrowed its colors, the drab ones

  That are so popular now, though only

  For a minute, and extracted a fashion

  That wasn’t really there. You are

  Going, I from your thought rapidly

  To the green wood go, alone, a banished man.

  SHE

  But now always from your plaint I

  Relive, revive, springing up careless,

  Dust geyser in city absentmindedness,

  And all day it is writ and said:

  We round women like corners. They are the friends

  We are always saying goodbye to and then

  Bumping into the next day. School has closed

  Its doors on a few. Saddened, she rose up

  And untwined the gears of that blank, blossoming day.

  “So much for Paris, and the living in this world.”