You spill the sugar when you lift the spoon. My father had filled an
old apothecary jar with what he called "sea glass," bits of old bottles
rounded and textured by the sea, so abundant on beaches. There is no
solitude. It buries itself in veracity. It is as if one splashed in
the water lost by one's tears. My mother had climbed into the garbage
can in order to stamp down the accumulated trash, but the can was knocked
off balance, and when she fell she broke her arm. She could only give
a little shrug. The family had little money but plenty of food. At the
circus only the elephants were greater than anything I could have imagined.
The egg of Columbus, landscape and grammar. She wanted one where the
playground was dirt, with grass, shaded by a tree, from which would
hang a rubber tire as a swing, and when she found it she sent me. These
creatures are compound and nothing they do should surprise us. I don't
mind, or I won't mind, where the verb "to care" might multiply. The
pilot of the little airplane had forgotten to notify the airport of
his approach, so that when the lights of the plane in the night were
first spotted, the air raid sirens went off, and the entire city on
that coast went dark. He was taking a drink of water and the light was
growing dim. My mother stood at the window watching the only lights
that were visible, circling over the darkened city in search of the
hidden airport. Unhappily, time seems more normative than place. Whether
breathing or holding the breath, it was the same thing, driving through
the tunnel from one sun to the next under a hot brown hill. She sunned
the baby for sixty seconds, leaving him naked except for a blue cotton
sunbonnet. At night, to close off the windows from view of the street,
my grandmother pulled down the window shades, never loosening the curtains,
a gauze starched too stiff to hang properly down. I sat on the windowsill
singing sunny lunny teena, ding-dang-dong. Out there is an aging magician
who needs a tray of ice in order to turn his bristling breath into steam.
He broke the radio silence. Why would anyone find astrology interesting
when it is possible to learn about astronomy. What one passes in the
Plymouth. It is the wind slamming the doors. All that is nearly incommunicable
to my friends. Velocity and throat verisimilitude. Were we seeing a
pattern or merely an appearance of small white sailboats on the bay,
floating at such a distance from the hill that they appeared to be making
no progress. And for once to a country that did not speak another language.
To follow the progress of ideas, or that particular line of reasoning,
so full of surprises and unexpected correlations, was somehow to take
a vacation. Still, you had to wonder where they had gone, since you
could speak of reappearance. A blue room is always dark. Everything
on the boardwalk was shooting toward the sky. It was not specific to
any year, but very early. A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal
with cloth in the 14th century and gave mankind its first button. It
was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of
one person, but nothing is isolated in history--certain humans are situations.
Are your fingers in the margin. Their random procedures make monuments
to fate. There is something still surprising when the green emerges.
The blue fox has ducked its head. The front rhyme of harmless with harmony.
Where is my honey running. You cannot linger "on the lamb." You cannot
determine the nature of progress until you assemble all of the relatives.
The windows were open and the morning air was, by the smell of lilac
and some darker flowering shrub, filled with the brown and chirping
trills of birds. As they are if you could have nothing but quiet and
shouting. Arts, also, are links. I picture an idea at the moment I come
to it, our collision. Once for a time, anyone might have been luck's
child. Even rain didn't spoil the barbecue, in the backyard behind a
polished traffic, through a landscape, along a shore. Freedom then,
liberation later. She came to babysit for us in those troubled years
directly from the riots, and she said that she dreamed of the day when
she would gun down everyone in the financial district. That single telephone
is only one hair on the brontosaurus. The coffee drinkers answered ecstatically.
If your dog stays out of the room, you get the fleas. In the lull, activity
drops. I'm seldom in my dreams without my children. My daughter told
me that at some time in school she had learned to think of a poet as
a person seated on an iceberg and melting through it. It is a poetry
of certainty. In the distance, down the street, the practicing soprano
belts the breeze. As for we who "love to be astonished," money makes
money, luck makes luck. Moves forward, drives on. Class background not
landscape--still here and there in 1969 I could feel the scope of collectivity.
It was the present time for a little while, and not so new as we thought
then, the present always after war. Ever since it has been hard for
me to share my time. yellow of that sad room was again the yellow of
naps, where she waited, restless, faithless, for more days. They say
that the alternative for the bourgeoisie was gullibility. Call it water
and dogs. Reason looks for two, then arranges it from there. But can
one imagine a madman in love. Goodbye; enough that was good. There was
a pause, a rose, something on paper. I may balk but I won't recede.
Because desire is always embarrassing. At the beach, with a fresh flush.
The child looks out. The berries are kept in the brambles, on wires
on reserve for the birds. At a distance, the sun is small. There was
no proper Christmas after he died. That triumphant blizzard had brought
the city to its knees. I am a stranger to the little girl I was, and
more--more strange. But many facts about a life should be left out,
they are easily replaced. One sits in a cloven space. Patterns promote
an outward likeness, between little white silences. The big trees catch
all the moisture from what seems like a dry night. Reflections don't
make shade, but shadows are, and do. In order to understand the nature
of the collision, one must know something of the nature of the motions
involved--that is, a history. He looked at me and smiled and did not
look away, and thus a friendship became erotic. Luck was rid of its
clover.
Back and backward, why, wide and wider. Such that art is inseparable
from the search for reality. The continent is greater than the content.
A river nets the peninsula. The garden rooster goes through the goldenrod.
I watched a robin worming its way on the ridge, time on the uneven light
ledge. There as in that's their truck there. Where it rested in the
weather there it rusted. As one would say, my friends, meaning no possession,
and don't harm my trees. Marigolds, nasturtiums, snapdragons, sweet
William, forget-me-nots, replaced by chard, tomatoes, lettuce, garlic,
peas, beans, carrots, radishes--but marigolds. The hum hurts. Still,
I felt intuitively that this which was incomprehensible was expectant,
increasing, was good. The greatest thrill was to be the one to "tell."
All rivers' left banks remind me of Paris, not to see or sit upon but
to hear spoken of. Cheese makes one thirsty but onions make a worse
thirst. The Spanish make a little question frame. In the case, propped
on a stand so as to beckon, was the hairy finger of St. Cecilia, covered
with rings. The old dress is worn out, torn up, dumped. Erasures could
not serve better authenticity. The years pass, years in which, I take
it, events were not lacking. There are more colors in the great rose
window of Chartres than in the rose. Beside a body, not a piece, of
water. Serpentine is fool's jade. It is on a dressed stone. The previousness
of plants in prior color--no dream can come up to the original, which
in the common daylight is voluminous. Yet he insisted that his life
had been full of happy chance, that he was luck's child. As a matter-of
fact, quite the obverse. After a 9-to-5 job he got to just go home.
Do you have a compulsion to work and then did you have a good time.
Now it is one o'clock on the dot, but that is only a coincidence and
it has a bad name. Patriots drive larger cars. At the time the perpetual
Latin of love kept things hidden. We might be late to the movies but
always early for the kids. The women at the parents' meeting must wear
rings, for continuity. More sheep than sleep. Paul was telling me a
plot which involved time travel, I asked, "How do they go into the future?"
and he answered, "What do you mean?--they wait and the future comes
to them--of course!" so the problem was going into the past. I think
my interests are much broader than those of people who have been saying
the same thing for eight years, or so he said. Has the baby enough teeth
for an apple. Juggle, jungle, chuckle. The hummingbird, for all we know,
may be singing all day long. We had been in France where every word
really was a bird, a thing singing. I laugh as if my pots were clean.
The apple in the pie is the pie. An extremely pleasant and often comic
satisfaction comes from conjunction, the fit, say, of comprehension
in a reader's mind to content in a writer's work. But not bitter.
