Collected Poems (19 page)

No, not so, I wasn’t. Wasn’t what was wrong so slight, so patently inconsequential to the rest?

If I let her go like that, I thought, how would I ever know that what had brought us down

wasn’t merely my own dereliction or impatience? No, there had to be a way to solve this.

10.

I kept thinking: there is something which, if said in precisely the right words to her …

I kept thinking, there’s an explanation I can offer, an analysis, maybe just a way of saying,

a rhythm or a rhetoric, to fuse the strands of her ambivalence and draw her back.

I kept thinking — she may have kept me thinking — there’s something I haven’t understood about her,

something I’ve misconceived or misconstrued, something I’ve missed the message of and offended …

I’d set theories up from that, programs, and, with notes along the way toward future tries,

I’d elaborate the phrases, paragraphs, the volumes of my explication: I’d rehearse them,

offer them, and have her, out of hand, hardly noticing, reject, discard, disregard them,

until I learned myself — it didn’t take me long — out of hand, hardly noticing, to discard them.

11.

Sometimes, though, I’d imagine that something — yes — I’d said would reach her.

Her presence, suddenly, would seem to soften, there would be a flood of ease, a decontraction.

She’d be with me, silent still, but
there,
and I would realize how far she’d drifted.

I wouldn’t know then, having her, or thinking that I did, whether to be miserable or pleased.

I’d go on, even so, to try to seal it, build on it, extend, certify it somehow,

and then, suddenly again, I’d sense that she’d be gone again, or, possibly, much worse,

had never been there, or not the way I’d thought it for that thankful instant.

I’d misinterpreted, misread, I’d have to start my search again, my trial, travail.

Where did I ever find the energy for it? Just to think about it now exhausts me.

12.

Wherever I did find the strength, half of it I dedicated to absolving and forgiving her.

Somehow I came to think, and never stopped believing, I was inflicting all my anguish on myself.

She was blameless, wasn’t she? Her passivity precluded else: the issue had to be with me.

I tried to reconceive myself, to situate myself in the syntax of our crippled sentence.

I parsed myself, searching out a different flow for the tangle of amputated phrases I was by then.

Nothing, though, would sound, would scan, no matter how I carved, dissected, chopped.

I couldn’t find the form, the meter, rhythm, or, by now, the barest context for myself.

I became a modifier: my only function was to alter the conditions of this fevered predication.

I became a word one thinks about too closely: clumps of curves and serifs, the arbitrary symbol of itself.

13.

I became, I became … Finally, I think I must have simply ceased even that, becoming.

I was an image now, petrified, unmediated, with no particular association, no connotation,

certainly no meaning, certainly no hope of ever being anything that bore a meaning.

It was as though my identity had been subsumed in some enormous generalization,

one so far beyond my comprehension that all I could know was that I was incidental to it,

that with me or without me it would grind along the complex epicycles of its orbit.

It was as though the system I’d been living in had somehow suddenly evolved beyond me.

I had gills to breathe a stratosphere, and my hopeless project was to generate new organs,

new lobes to try to comprehend this emotional ecology, and my extinction in it.

14.

The hours, the labor: how I wracked my mind, how my mind revenged itself on me.

I was wild, helpless, incapable of anything at all by now but watching as I tore myself.

I huddled there at the center of myself and tried to know by some reflexive act of faith

that I’d survive all this, this thing, my self, that mauled and savaged me.

I’d behold it all, so much frenzy, so many groans and bellows; even now, watching now,

I seem to sink more deeply into some protective foliage: I tremble in here, quake,

and then I dart — even now, still, my eyes, despite me, dart: walls, floor, sky —

I dart across that field of fear, away, away from there, from here, from anywhere.

I was frightened sometimes that I might go mad. And then I did just that — go mad.

15.

It was like another mind, my madness, my blessèd, holy madness: no, it
was
another mind.

It arrives, my other mind, on another night when I’m without her, hoping, or past hope.

My new mind comes upon me with a hush, a fluttering, a silvery ado, and it has a volume,

granular and sensitive, which exactly fits the volume of the mind I already have.

Its desire seems to be to displace that other mind, and something in me — how say what?

how explain the alacrity of such a radical concurrence? — decides to let it,

and the split second of the decision and the onset of the workings of that mind are instantaneous.

In one single throb of intuition I understood what the function of my mind was,

because, in and of it now, convinced, absorbed, I was already working out its implications.

16.

I knew already that my other mind — I hardly could recall it — had had a flaw and from that flaw

had been elaborated a delusion, and that delusion in its turn was at the base of all my suffering,

all the agonies I’d been inflicting, so unnecessarily, I understood, upon myself.

I had thought, I realized, that reality of experience, data and events, were to be received,

that perception, sensory, experiential accumulation, was essentially passive,

that it accepted what was offered and moved within that given, the palpable or purely mental,

partaking of it as it could, jiggling the tenuous impressions here or there a bit,

a sentence added, or a chapter, but nothing more than that: we were almost victims,

or if not victims quite, not effective agents surely, not of anything that mattered.

17.

What my new mind made me understand, though the facts had been there all the while before my eyes,

was that reality, as I’d known it, as I knew it now, was being generated, every second,

out of me and by me: it was me, myself, and no one else, who spun it out this way.

It was my own will, unconscious until now but now with purpose and intent, which made the world.

Not made-up, which implies imagination or idea, but made, actually created, everything,

in a flow, a logic, a succession of events, I could trace now with my very blood.

Even time: looking back at the wash of time on earth, it, too, was a function of this moment.

Then cosmic time was flowing, too, from the truth I was living now, not for myself now,

for my salvation or survival, but for the infinitely vulnerable fact of existence itself.

18.

Does it matter very much what the rest was, the odd conclusions I kept coming to?

What really seems important was that even as it happened, even as I let it happen,

even as I held it in a sort of mental gale — it wasn’t necessary then to work it out like this,

all of it was there at once, in a single block, entire, a kind of geometric bliss —

I understood that it was all hallucination and delusion, that these insights or illuminations

were wretched figments of emotion all, but I didn’t care, I let them take me further,

past proposition, syllogism, sense: I was just a premise mechanism now, an epistemology machine;

I let my field of vision widen — everything was mine now, coal and comet, root and moon,

all found their footing, fulfilled at last, in my felicity, and then, rendingly, it ended.

19.

Why it stopped was as much a mystery to me as why it should have happened in the first place,

but when it did, something else took its place, a sort of vision, or a partial vision,

or at least a knowledge, as instantly accessible and urgent as the other, and, I’d find, as fleeting.

Somehow, I knew, I’d touched into the very ground of self, its axioms and assumptions,

and what was there wasn’t what I’d thought — I hadn’t
known
what I’d thought but knew it now —

not violence, not conflagration, sexual turbulence, a philosophic or emotive storm,

but a sort of spiritual erasure, a nothingness of motive and intention, and I understood, too,

in another bolt, that all that keeps us from that void, paradoxically perhaps, is trust …

Trust in what? Too late: that perception, too, was gone; I had to watch another revelation end.

20.

But not badly, even so … I came back, to myself, feeling not contrite, not embarrassed,

certainly not frightened … awkward, maybe, toward myself, shy, abashed: I couldn’t, as it were,

meet the gaze of this stranger I was in a body with, but I couldn’t, either, take my eyes away.

Something had altered,
I
had: there was something unfamiliar, incongruous about me.

I couldn’t specify exactly, not at first, what I felt; it wasn’t, though, unpleasant.

I probed myself as though I’d had an accident; nothing broken, I was all right, more:

a sense of lightness, somehow, a change in my specific gravity, a relief, unburdening,

and then I knew, with no fuss or flourish, what it was: she, she wasn’t with me now,

she was gone from me, from either of my minds, all my minds, my selves — she simply wasn’t there.

21.

I could say it feels as though I’m taking breaths: she is gone and gone, he, shriven of her,

leaps into his life, but as I went about the work of understanding what had happened to me,

who I was now, it was clear at once that my having torn myself from her was unimportant.

She was gone, why she’d been there to begin with, what I’d seen in her, thought she’d meant,

why I’d let that suffering come to me, became immediately the most theoretical of questions.

That I’d have to be without her now meant only that: without her, not forlorn, bereft.

I even tested cases: if she went on to someone else, touched someone else, would I envy them,

her touch, her fire? Not even that: her essence for me was her being with me for that time,

with someone else, she, too, was other than herself: a wraith, a formula or intellection.

22.

I felt no regret — indifference, rather, a flare of disbelief, then an unexpected moment of concern.

Had she suffered, too? Had she even sensed, in her empyrean distance, that this,

any of it, was going on at all? I didn’t answer then, if I had to now, I’d have to doubt it.

I think that, after those first moments, she was gone already from me: perhaps, though,

it’s not my task to try to answer, perhaps all I really have the right to do is ask

what the person I am now might have to do with her, wraith or not, memory of a memory or not?

Was I enhanced by her? Diminished by her? All that’s really sure is that if I was changed,

it wasn’t the embrace, the touch, that would have done it, but what came after, her withdrawal,

her painful non-responses, her absence and the ever more incorporeal innuendos in that absence.

23.

And my “madness,” that business of the other mind, that “trust”: have I taken anything from that?

Perhaps. I think I’d always realized the possibility was there for us to do that to ourselves,

undo ourselves that way, not in suicide, but in something much more dire, complete, denying.

I think that I’d suspected, too, that with the means to do it, I would someday have to do it.

And now, what I’d been afraid I’d do, I’d done: that she’d had to drive me to it didn’t matter,

although probably without her, without what she’d inflicted on me, I’d have never come to it.

Perhaps, with her abrasive offerings and takings-back, I’d been ground down like a lens:

I’d had, to my horror, really to look within myself, into the greater sea of chaos there,

and I’d survived it, shaken but intact, with auras, even, of a kind of gratitude.

24.

What I’m left with after all this time is still the certainty that something was attained,

though all that remain now are flickers, more and more occasional, more disjointed —

pale remnants of the harsh collaborations those intermediary silences symbolized so well.

And this … I mean
this,
these lines, constructions, études: these small histories,

where did this come from? As I said, there was no desire to go over all of it again,

but, after all, whatever ambivalence I felt about it, it demanded care, even labor.

The need for doing it never quite defined itself: it, like her, came uncalled for.

A tone took me, an impulse toward a structure: I found it interesting, a question of aesthetics.

If that were so, might there be another way, another mode in which to come to it?

25.

The proposition now could be that this
is
she, this, itself, wholly “she.”

Not an artifact, not a net in which some wingèd thing protests or pines, but her,

completely fused now, inspiration, outcome: she would be, now, what she herself effected,

the tones themselves, the systems she wrought from the conflicting musics of my conscience.

This time it would be that all she meant to me were these attempts, these uncertain colorations,

that took so long to get here, from so far, and from which she would be departing now at last,

not into another hesitation, pause, another looking back reluctantly on either of our parts —

no turnings, no farewells — but a final sundering, a seeing-off, a last, definitely indicated,