Your Name Here: Poems (8 page)

So each gets immobilized with a diamond stickpin

under the barrel vault that was invented at just about that time—

notice its groin—and there’ll be capers with rabbit for supper

again. I don’t know how much longer I can stand August,

though September was always his favorite month, and here

it comes with a packet of unscented breeze.

Yet it always seems that salt should be savory,

the embers more at ease. The moving picture lights, and having lit

perfects a new way out of the shimmering maze. Pity we can’t

lingo here forever, but no one lives forever,

or so I’ve been told.

Preposterous. That was the word she used,

one much admired for its overtones of thrift and conviction.

I let her go where she wanted with it.

After all,
I
wasn’t there to hear it,

looking somewhat dazed amid the regatta

and its ships—or are they one and the same?

Every restful person pauses here

to ask me a question. I have a few ideas

but they wouldn’t interest you by a country mile,

not by a million of ’em. Some day I’ll have to release my antidote

for disappearing ink (hint: it contains mummy)

and a few other of the brilliant ideas

I’ve managed to put aside in this old life of mine,

but until that day comes I see no reason to get excited—

hey, wait,
you
were the one who was asking
me
!

That’s antenna-dust sparkling on the shoulder

of your silk patchwork bolero. I wasn’t even going

to be part of this, remember? I never signed on.

All I remember is press gangs working the bars in Bristol

and waking up on a heap of moldy straw

with a lump the size of a duck’s egg on my cranium

and a taste of iodine in my mouth.

But it wasn’t me we were going to discuss, remember?

As far as I’m concerned there have been no arguments;

ergo, I have never lost or won any.

Now give me my pants and money and let me go

back and join the others. They’re crying, you know.

I had a voice once,

braid falling over the front

of my forehead-house and down the sides.

No need for cream separators here

someone said. My guide took it as a compliment.

Anyway, we got here. Somehow. Now the question

is losing relevance since water is everywhere,

like a transparent mine. I lost my voice a long time ago.

Voices of children ripple endlessly,

endorsing new products. The lizard-god explodes.

The lady on the next bar-stool

but one didn’t seem to understand

you when you spoke of “old dark house” movies—

she thought there must be an old dark house somewhere

and you wanted to take her there.

Still, my arrival flabbergasted her,

since it suggested you had no such thing in mind,

at least for the present.

And today I am a mad Chinese monk

chasing after his temple. Which way did it go?

Around that corner of bushes? Or was there ever

a temple? It seemed more and more likely

that it was a figment of your imagination, a figment

perhaps like many another, only a little more underripe.

Undeterred, I chase it in the madness of the gathering dusk

that crashes into ponds, trees, scared bridges.

It had to have been back here somewhere—

As if the air were pure lightning

and the earth, its consort, benevolent thunder,

I can stand and finally breathe.

Light shrinks from the edges of my fingernails

and armpits. This is a page that got bound in the diary

by mistake. It seems we were so happy once, just for a minute.

Then the sky got clouded, no one was happy or unhappy

forever, and the dream of the oppressor had come true.

Like a summer kangaroo, each of us is a part

of the sun in its tumbling commotion. Like us

it made no move to right things, basking where the spent stream

trickled into the painted grotto.

Yes, and the snow-covered steppe, part of the same opera,

stretched into dimness, awaiting the tenor’s aria

of hopelessness. Yet no shadow fell across any of it.

It might have been real. Perhaps it was. Stranger tales

have been spun by travelers in unreassuring inns

while the last embers collapse one into the other, waking

no riposte. “It was at a garrison in central Tadzhikistan.”

And then sort of get used to it, and then not be there.

Each noted with pleasure that the other had aged,

realizing as well that new scenery would have to be sent for

and transported thousands of miles over narrow-gauge railroads—

a fountain in a park, a comforting school interior,

a happy hospital—and that, yes, it would be worth waiting for.

Various flavors recite us.

Meanwhile the inevitable Casper David Friedrich painting

of a ship pointing somehow upward has slipped in like fog,

surrounding us with vowels of regret

for the things we did not do

rising like a great shout above the barrel.

I was going to say I kissed you once

when you were asleep, and that you took no notice.

Since that day I have been as a traveler

who scurries to and fro among nettles, never sure

of where he wants to end up, a Wandering Jew

with attitude.

All this time the sun had its eye on us

as it was going down. Finally, when it hit the horizon,

it had something to say. Something like pick up your two weeks’ salary

on your way out

and don’t ever let me catch you on
this
planet again.

Fine, but on what token shore

are we to be misted? We all have to end up somewhere together.

Might as well be in last week’s parish newsletter

or in the elbows of a nubian concubine.

I mean, we
are
right, somehow right, which is the same

thing only more so. Sticks and tokens

are my hymn to the sun that has gone,

never to return, it seems,

though.

The fear was that they would not come.

The sea is getting rougher.

There is a different language singing from the wall.

No singing from the wall.

The fear was that they would come.

Here, have one of these.

Have this one. No, have this one.

To have followed an adage

almost from the beginning of life, through

suburban pleats and undergrowth shrugged

off like underwear on a dinner plate.

Then to emerge fast

into where it’s taken you:

no more figs, pretzels. Breakfast’s

run out of steam.

And the last car has left.

Let those who never denatured another’s remark

swim in wit now. Let the curtains fall

where they may. They are only in distress today.

We have further inversions, like father

and his children sewed up for a day.

Like the feathers you enjoy, the mail

you enjoy receiving.

You have successfully undermined the mountain that threatens us.

Now, panthers prowl the streets.

I took a streetcar that turned into a bus toward the end.

God rewarded me with chirping yellow fuzzballs.

I intended a sonnet that turned out a letter

when Rose crossed the road with her nose

and her father is doing better.

I always like it when somebody explodes out of a bush

to congratulate me on my recent success

for which I’m only partly responsible:

The siblings helped, they prevented it from melting

so high among the Alps you’d have thought it stayed frozen

always. Apparently not. Now we might have a riot

if everybody would calm down for a second.

A shadow-person conducted me along a road

to a little house where I was fed and absconded

with the clock on the wall. I told them I was mortal

and they seemed to let me go. Yet no one heard me.

I was as dust one takes a glove to,

a white one, then tosses in disgust, leaving it lie

in all the trickling creases you absorbed

in childhood, loving it. Two doors went away.

We were alone at last, as they say.

These winters can button you up.

They say Canada geese mate for life, or

till one of them dies, whichever is shorter.

Job on the hills ...

Is that wrong too?

To tell the truth I hardly heard her

what with the wind whistling through the pinecone.

Tell us more about your experience.

That’s what really interests our readers.

You know, times when you were down and out

and depressed, like everybody.

When you got up from the table hungry

and didn’t eat for a week after that.

Or places with names to which you’ve fastened a special resonance:

Florence, Florida. Women (and I’m sure there were many)

with whom you spent the night in silken sheets,

or guys (the ones with dicks), I’ll wager

there were a few of those too.

Now add salt to the cauldron

of lies and wishes—oversalt,

in fact, or the end result will be downright bland.

I can picture this happening in a kitchen

below some stairs ...

Darn, I can’t help it if there was no room

for my girlfriend’s shoes, her vast collection

of pocketbooks with scotties on them.

There never were enough closets,

you see, to go around. We kept things spread out

all over the house. If someone wanted something

he knew where to look for it

and it would probably be there

just as in our time the moon is probably there

where you last looked for it, in one of its phases.

The sun was glorious too

and the marigolds.

Hand me my pickaxe. I think I just overstayed my welcome.

An alarm just went off, some place deep inside.

The wallpaper of my bedroom has been destroyed.

No more angelfish for a while, at least. Too bad.

Accept these nice things we have no use for:

polished twilight, mix of clouds and sun,

minnows in a stream. There may come a time

we’ll need them. They’re yours forever,

or another dream leaves you thirsty,

waking. You can’t see the table

or the bread. How about a clean, unopened letter

and the smell of toast?

School is closed today—it’s thundering.

The calendar has backed up or been reversed

so the days have no least common denominator.

Anyway, it was fun, trying to figure out

who you were, what it was that led you to us.

Was it the smell of camphor? Or an ad

in an out-of-state newspaper, seeking news

of someone who disappeared long ago?

He was in uniform, and leaned against a car,

smiling at a girl who seemed to shade her eyes from him.

Can it be? Candace, was it you? There’s no way

she’ll look our way again.

What can I tell you? Everything’s been locked up

for the night, I couldn’t get it for you

if I wanted to. But there must be some way—

it’s drizzling, the lamps along the path are weeping,

wanting to show you this tremendous thing,

boxed in forever, always getting closer.

Up there our leader is dreaming again.

Down here, timid streets unfold their agendas;

propose, gingerly, a walk out into the night

to view the night sky. What else

is there, you might say, and you’d be right.

Still, someone must be calling the shots. I can hear them

from afar, tapping out some name

in Morse code, making pigeons blink.

Today is still open. I think I’ll take some time off,

try to smash this losing streak, until—