All things seem mention of themselves
And the names which stem from them branch out to other referents.
Hugely, spring exists again. The weigila does its dusty thing
In fire-hammered air. And garbage cans are heaved against
The railing as the tulips yawn and crack open and fall apart.
And today is Monday. Today’s lunch is: Spanish omelet, lettuce and tomato salad,
Jello, milk and cookies. Tomorrow’s: sloppy joe on bun,
Scalloped corn, stewed tomatoes, rice pudding and milk.
The names we stole don’t remove us:
We have moved on a little ahead of them
And now it is time to wait again.
Only waiting, the waiting: what fills up the time between?
It is another kind of wait, waiting for the wait to be ended.
Nothing takes up its fair share of time,
The wait is built into the things just coming into their own.
Nothing is partially incomplete, but the wait
Invests everything like a climate.
What time of day is it?
Does anything matter?
Yes, for you must wait to see what it is really like,
This event rounding the corner
Which will be unlike anything else and really
Cause no surprise: it’s too ample.
Water
Drops from an air conditioner
On those who pass underneath. It’s one of the sights of our town.
Puaagh. Vomit. Puaaaaagh. More vomit. One who comes
Walking dog on leash is distant to say how all this
Changes the minute to an hour, the hour
To the times of day, days to months, those easy-to-grasp entities,
And the months to seasons, which are far other, foreign
To our concept of time. Better the months
They are almost persons—than these abstractions
That sift like marble dust across the unfinished works of the studio
Aging everything into a characterization of itself.
Better the cleanup committee concern itself with
Some item that is now little more than a feature
Of some obsolete style—cornice or spandrel
Out of the dimly remembered whole
Which probably lacks true distinction. But if one may pick it up,
Carry it over there, set it down,
Then the work is redeemed at the end
Under the smiling expanse of the sky
That plays no favorites but in the same way
Is honor only to those who have sought it.
The dog barks, the caravan passes on.
The words had a sort of bloom on them
But were weightless, carrying past what was being said.
“A nice time,” you think, “to go out:
The early night is cool, but not
Too anything. People parading with their pets
Past lawns and vacant lots, as though these too were somehow imponderables
Before going home to the decency of one’s private life
Shut up behind doors, which is nobody’s business.
It does matter a little to the others
But only because it makes them realize how far their respect
Has brought them. No one would dare to intrude.
It is a night like many another
With the sky now a bit impatient for today to be over
Like a bored salesgirl shifting from foot to stockinged foot.”
These khaki undershorts hung out on lines,
The wind billowing among them, are we never to make a statement?
And certain buildings we always pass which are never mentioned—
It’s getting out of hand.
As long as one has some sense that each thing knows its place
All is well, but with the arrival and departure
Of each new one overlapping so intensely in the semi-darkness
It’s a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know
each just for a fleeting second
Must be replaced by imperfect knowledge of the featureless whole,
Like some pocket history of the world, so general
As to constitute a sob or wail unrelated
To any attempt at definition. And the minor eras
Take on an importance out of all proportion to the story
For it can no longer unwind, but must be kept on hand
Indefinitely, like a first-aid kit no one ever uses
Or a word in the dictionary that no one will ever look up.
The custard is setting; meanwhile
I not only have my own history to worry about
But am forced to fret over insufficient details related to large
Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point
Of being, with or without my help, if any were forth-coming.
It is just the movement of the caravan away
Into an abstract night, with no
Precise goal in view, and indeed not caring,
That distributes this pause. Why be in a hurry
To speed away in the opposite direction, toward the other end of infinity?
For things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision.
I cannot decide in which direction to walk
But this doesn’t matter to me, and I might as well
Decide to climb a mountain (it looks almost flat)
As decide to go home
Or to a bar or restaurant or to the home
Of some friend as charming and ineffectual as I am
Because these pauses are supposed to be life
And they sink steel needles deep into the pores, as though to say
There is no use trying to escape
And it is all here anyway. And their steep, slippery sides defy
Any notion of continuity. It is this
That takes us back into what really is, it seems, history
The lackluster, disorganized kind without dates
That speaks out of the hollow trunk of a tree
To warn away the merely polite, or those whose destiny
Leaves them no time to quibble about the means,
Which are not ends, and yet … What precisely is it
About the time of day it is, the weather, that causes
people to note it painstakingly in their diaries
For them to read who shall come after?
Surely it is because the ray of light
Or gloom striking you this moment is hope
In all its mature, matronly form, taking all things into account
And reapportioning them according to size
So that if one can’t say that this is the natural way
It should have happened, at least one can have no cause for complaint
Which is the same as having reached the end, wise
In that expectation and enhanced by its fulfillment, or the absence of it.
But we say, it cannot come to any such end
As long as we are left around with no place to go.
And yet it has ended, and the thing we have fulfilled we have become.
Now it is the impulse of morning that makes
My watch tick. As one who pokes his head
Out from under a pile of blankets, the good and bad together,
So this tangle of impossible resolutions and irresolutions:
The desire to have fun, to make noise, and so to
Add to the already all-but-illegible scrub-forest of
graffiti on the shithouse wall.
Someone is coming to get you:
The mailman, or a butler enters with a letter on a tray
Whose message is to change everything, but in the meantime
One is to worry about one’s smell or dandruff or lost glasses—
If only the curtain-raiser would end, but it is interminable.
But there is this consolation:
If it turns out to be not worth doing, I haven’t done it;
If the sight appalls me, I have seen nothing;
If the victory is pyrrhic, I haven’t won it.
And so from a day replete with rumors
Of things being done on the other side of the mountains
A nucleus remains, a still-perfect possibility
That can be kept indefinitely. And yet
The groans of labor pains are deafening; one must
Get up, get out and be on with it. Morning is for sissies like you
But the real trials, the ones that separate the men from
the boys, come later.
Oregon was kinder to us. The streets
Offered a variety of directions to the foot
And bookstores where pornography is sold. But then
One whiffs just a slight odor of madness in the air.
They all got into their cars and drove away
As in the end of a movie. So that it finally made no difference
Whether this were the end or it was somewhere else:
If it had to be somewhere it might as well be
Here, on top of one. Here, as elsewhere,
April advances new suggestions, and one may as well
Move along with them, especially in view of
The midnight-blue light that in turning itself inside out
Offers something strange to the attention, a thing
That is not itself, gnat whirling before my eyes
At an incredible, tame velocity. Too pronounced after all
To be that meaningless. And so on to afternoon
On the desert, with oneself cleaned up, and the location
Almost brand new what with the removal of gum wrappers, etc.
But I was trying to tell you about a strange thing
That happened to me, but this is no way to tell about it,
By making it truly happen. It drifts away in fragments.
And one is left sitting in the yard
To try to write poetry
Using what Wyatt and Surrey left around,
Took up and put down again
Like so much gorgeous raw material,
As though it would always happen in some way
And meanwhile since we are all advancing
It is sure to come about in spite of everything
On a Sunday, where you are left sitting
In the shade that, as always, is just a little too cool.
So there is whirling out at you from the not deep
Emptiness the word “cock” or some other, brother and sister words
With not much to be expected from them, though these
Are the ones that waited so long for you and finally left, having given up hope.
There is a note of desperation in one’s voice, pleading for them,
And meanwhile the intensity thins and sharpens
Its point, that is the thing it was going to ask.
One has been waiting around all evening for it
Before sleep had stopped definitively the eyes and ears
Of all those who came as an audience.
Still, that poetry does sometimes occur
If only in creases in forgotten letters
Packed away in trunks in the attic—things you forgot you had
And what would it matter anyway,
That recompense so precisely dosed
As to seem the falling true of a perverse judgment.
You forget how there could be a gasp of a new air
Hidden in that jumble. And of course your forgetting
Is a sign of just how much it matters to you:
“It must have been important.”
The lies fall like flaxen threads from the skies
All over America, and the fact that some of them are true of course
Doesn’t so much not matter as serve to justify
The whole mad organizing force under the billows of correct delight.
Surrey, your lute is getting an attack of nervous paralysis
But there are, again, things to be sung of
And this is one of them, only I would not dream of intruding on
The frantic completeness, the all-purpose benevolence
Of that still-moist garden where the tooting originates:
Between intervals of clenched teeth, your venomous rondelay.
Ask a hog what is happening. Go on. Ask him.
The road just seems to vanish
And not that far in the distance, either. The horizon must have been moved up.
So it is that by limping carefully
From one day to the next, one approaches a worn, round stone tower
Crouching low in the hollow of a gulley
With no door or window but a lot of old license plates
Tacked up over a slit too narrow for a wrist to pass through
And a sign:
“Van Camp’s Pork and Beans,”
From then on in: angst-colored skies, emotional withdrawals
As the whole business starts to frighten even you,
Its originator and promoter. The horizon returns
As a smile of recognition this time, polite, unquestioning.
How long ago high school graduation seems
Yet it cannot have been so very long:
One has traveled such a short distance.
The styles haven’t changed much,
And I still have a sweater and one or two other things I had then.
It seems only yesterday that we saw
The movie with the cows in it
And turned to one at your side, who burped
As morning saw a new garnet-and-pea-green order propose
Itself out of the endless bathos, like science-fiction lumps.
Impossible not to be moved by the tiny number
Those people wore, indicating they should be raised to this or that power.
But now we are at Cape Fear and the overland trail
Is impassible, and a dense curtain of mist hangs over the sea.