I had thought of all this years before
But now it was making no sense. And the song had finished:
This was the story.
- John Ashbery, “The Double Dream of Spring”
In which it is imagined that the great poet,
on a return trip north from Havana,
where he has journeyed to celebrate his success
in finding a publisher for Harmonium
and a name in American letters,
is set adrift unawares in the Bermuda
Triangle with a mysterious companion,
who was forcibly deprived of the gift
of speech in the Holy Wars and somehow became
“unstuck in time” and place, as in Vonnegut’s books.
For my brother Jeff, who explained to me
Stevens’ motives and metaphors amid the
rubbly landscape of the Badlands, South Dakota,
1991. To be read aloud,
beneath a lamp of moderate intensity.
[Andante moderato]
For as long as I may know things, there are no things…
Hoist the sun up, paladin, by its strings.
Let it shine before we cover it with our sail,
for we’ll not have it illumine our floating pail.
Ah, see how it affects a muddied grail!
Did they have such an orb as this in Palestine?
Did it shine when the god said “Shine now?” Did it shine?
Paladin, this is what our task would be:
to make it a little harder for us to see.
At the twenty-fourth wheel each day we’ll have it drowned;
thus will it punctuate our daily round,
triumphing each tomorrow as primary wheel,
intimating more than cotton but less than steel.
Let’s steer on out of this gloomy Brabant.
Unanchor us, paladin, my bloomy savant!
History’s a catastrophe well beyond shame.
We named things that we weren’t supposed to name,
and with those names they pried themselves free of their stone,
lording it over us as if we were their own.
Now you’re wondering where the owl has flown.
Forget her. She goes the way of that older sun.
She’s no more meet for the pun than meat for the bun.
Forget her, she’s an impoverished trope.
Forget her and, with her, her debauchments of hope.
And this sun is not the true sun for which we strive,
but a makeshift to keep the scene alive.
Nor the old one nor the names by which we called him.
For now we’ll make do with this paper tarpaulin.
Our search is for a sun that isn’t called.
The pathway toward that sun is most certainly walled.
And who’s to say the path’s not already been set?
We’re simply a leap to a higher fret.
This voyage is likely another next-to-last.
We were bulldozed by history out of the past –
our sun, our pail, these strings, our dirty mast.
These misgivings, paladin, are so many themes.
They spread out in an archipelago of dreams,
a patter of purposings, pile on pile,
a watery coincidence of isle and I’ll.
Let’s vary the theme: isle – I’ll – idea – ideal.
Now enters, via rhyme, the stolid real.
Further, through variations we make on the sly:
We read the “i” in “idea” as “I” and “eye.”
Thus do their edges emerge from the mist.
Go to it, paladin. Jot them down in a list.
We’ll hasp on this last one awhile as by it flows:
Our prime idea is the eye that glows.
The eye on the tarpaulin, I’m talking about –
the I that emerges each morning from its spout,
from which the dew of morning spitters out.
The question we’re after now – namely, “Who is whose?” –
curls out before us in blue and varying blues.
Is the sun our figment, our confusion?
Or are we rather sprites of its own illusion?
Viewpoints that to each other are as A to B,
not unlike the span between I and me
(that is, I as the outset of thought and its end).
From A out to B, then back, is the way we wend.
Is it a knowing or unknowing I?
Does it flow with us or are we a flowing by?
Between these two pure poles the degrees are obscure.
Our goal’s to render obscurity pure.
Could it be the sun’s a trope for what’s left behind?
The purest thought is simply our need for this rind.
(Note that I don’t speak of love, but of need.
For now it’s simply an expenditure of seed.
Thus: How I’d like, dear, to besmirch myself with you!
A million rungs down from love and virtue.)
Does it likewise rely on us as on a crutch?
If we could scale such heights, would it shrink from our clutch?
Does it follow us because it’s jealous?
Or was it part of the heaven that expelled us?
And will it accompany us to New Hellas?
Ah, paladin – let’s forsake this current.
It’s tough just listing which questions are pertinent.
Questions such as these are of the invented world
that we are fleeing because it was pearled
over with trinkets we no longer recognized
as our own, values that could no more be apprized.
Of course, this is merely what we suppose –
that we leave behind us a world of fallen prose.
We can’t recall if we left of our own free will,
or if we were toppled into this swill
during some great millennial discord or chill.
Did we flee at night or were we coldly banished?
Did the orders take note that we’d vanished?
Was it as if we had no other place to go?
I’d like to think we’ve gone where there’s nothing to know –
or nothing to be known, is what I mean…
where knowledge is no more than the earliest green,
or a color unencumbered with alter-shades
that bodies forth an innocence of blades –
a verdure that awaits the approach of our pail…
at once, a barrenness and primordial hale.
Already, though, too many words to mince.
Strike from the list that remark about innocence.
It’s merely the elements – earth, sea, wind and fire –
rather than an innocence we desire.
Ah, paladin, this is precisely our trouble;
the air we breathe is still of that punctured bubble
from which we took our leave or simply fled.
Into the nuevo mundo we drag the dead,
killing off the forgotten distances we’ve sped.
Look at the pigment oozing from the tarp…
and, sloshing around in the froth – our marbled carp!
Synthetic reds, colliding with primary blue.
What nonsense is this we’ve brought to the new?
I can just about dredge up their names if I try.
This one’s Red Maple Set Beneath Mid-Autumn Sky.
And that one there, with the metallic sheen –
Parakeet Among Camels at Rest, Venting Green.
They gaze up on the pail with a hesitant grin,
importuning with whisker, tail and fin –
brocaded mementos of an abandoned sin,
confected figures and forms, improbably hued,
as if they were carefully stitched or glued.
And all present, to a fish. A genuine school.
They seem to have fared well, far from their garden pool.
They gaze upon us, unnatural spawn,
as if we remember more than we’re letting on.
“You quit a present that was never prone to last
and the future that spilled out of its past.
But aren’t we your brightest creations, true and pure,
part of a past, instead, that would flee its future?
Weren’t we your calm in the midst of all strife?
A project you turned to when bad humor was rife?
A peace you could mention only once in your life?
For peace was as if it had come just once,
a tranquility in the midst of fortune’s stunts.
Each time it happened was the first time it happened,
and earlier heights were forthwith flattened.
Mere legend was the fire that never turned to ice;
that’s why you didn’t dare to say it happened twice.
We’re the work of that unheralded pause –
tomorrow’s pastime of the now’s withheld applause.
You learned too early that you weren’t the things you had.
This non-being of having made you sad.
You had bred us up as if for a latter day.
When you learned that we were not you threw us away.
Now you’re off in search of a second clay.”
[Thus ends the soliloquy of fish number one.
I refrained from interrupting ere he was done.]
Paladin, it gives some pause, to be sure.
I do recall that the fish had lost their allure.
But I can’t think that we’d fail to make provisions
or that they’d be among our omissions.
We thought to bring with us not so much as a dish –
no more than ourselves and our pail. And now our fish.
Just us out beneath the celestial harp.
And now the pail’s enclosed by terrestrial carp.
Not-quite-terrestrial carp, I should rather say;
they’re simply what we added to the clay
in our attempt to arrive at finer pigments.
Not terrestrials, but terrestrial figments –
a confabulation of stripes and bands
that learned to accept their feed from out of our hands,
the nutrients wrapped up in commercial pellets
to foster a race of fishy helots.
And now, it would seem, our backyard entertainment
has pursued us to a watery arraignment,
crying repayment, or simply payment
for the ignorance with which they adorned our clubs,
consenting to be conveyed out of garden tubs.
With this we ourselves are paid or repaid:
that we no longer recognize the things we made.
A race of our own making, if not of our kind.
What else of ours are we likely to find?
Will we likewise forget that the sun we hallow
was fashioned from the wax of a dripping tallow?
Yellow, but metaphorical yellow –
natural yellow as subjected to a twist,
a yellow that burns a way for us through the mist.
Nakedly, or clothed, it flaps above us,
shining on as if to reflect nothing of us,
indifferently lighting the way towards which we tend,
refusing any part that we would lend.
Or is it rather that it soaks up all we are,
conveying us back to ourselves – a souped up car?
On setting, will it imperil our boat –
a stick in the cataract, a bone in the throat?
But hasn’t it already set a dozen times,
marking a tempo of diurnal rhymes?
Renewing itself for tomorrow in the brine,
a horizonal poodle, shaking off the grime,
fleeing at dusk behind the western wing
and triumphing each dawn as veritable thing.
Over what expanse does it make its hundredth creep?
What mothering vastness rocks it to sleep?
Consider it, paladin, consider the deep.
Have you noticed how strictly it pervades our song,
which the carp take up in their fishy throng?
It submits our cadence to unearthly changes,
providing it with its only range, or ranges.
For all the airs that we fancy to moan,
it subjugates them to its fundamental tone.
Is it the deep, paladin, that has drawn us out?
It teems with our carp as they spawn about,
metamorphosing or evolving prawn on trout.
(While we thought they’d subject us to taunt after taunt,
they seem to no more tell us what they want,
but display themselves in the spume where the pail rides.)
A deep that draws us out, an expanse that divides –
divides us from the things we left behind:
we never conceived how all would slip from the mind;
divides us, as well, from every other present,
from the other Now that is or isn’t;
divides us, above all, perhaps, from each other,
yourself from myself, who’d feign to be your brother;
divides us from all but the tedium
of permeation in its liquid medium.
An oozing, diaphanous, universal eel –
the only God to whom we may appeal.
For this we’ve fled reality into the real –
a realer reality (or realities),
far from all trodden principalities,
and far from a manner of speech we’d long outgrown.
The only thing we may know, as it can’t be known.
A thing that eludes our speech and speeches,
within our reach through being at furthest reaches.
Or – the same – inaccessible through being close,
pervading us at fine and in the gross.
It spreads out to infinity before our pail.
Through the divisions it fosters we must prevail.
Slithery eel, upon which this pail rides,
acknowledge us as we plunge athwart your divides!
Paladin, what is it we really leave behind?
This slithery eel unravels the mind.
If I’m not mistaken, the eel so composes
us as do words our prose, our various proses.
Could it be the eel is one with the word –
with or without an intermediating third?
Our pail has taken us out to a final place
at which words are left with no things to face
apart from the winding, vanishing path we trace.
Examine the eel. You can discern in its scales
a pivot at which the illusion fails.
Affix your gaze. If you hold it for long enough,
the eel suspends its composure and sheds its slough.
See them reveal themselves to us in herds –
the letters, the lettery words and parts of words!
Precisely at the point where there are no things left
and words and things are each from each bereft,
there initiates a failure of warp and weft.
A confusion, if not precisely a failure –
a translucency in which the pail we’re
floating in momentarily becomes a sign,
and the wake it leaves on the eel, a written line.
Through silent intermissions in its flows,
universal eel turns to universal prose.
And as all things vanish in advance of the Thing,
speech disappears into a single string
of letters. Universal thing, universal
word. All words reduced to the Word through dispersal
in the material collapse of speech.
For the One prevails when each is reduced to each.
The tarp no longer tells us how much time has lapsed…
Didn’t we flee because speech had collapsed?
No, paladin – in fact it would seem it hadn’t.
It was language on which we were fed and fattened.
It’s so that our discourse might be leaner –
purer, our comportment and spoken demeanor –
that we sought the pathways of the slithery eel.
And now our speeches fall off, peel on peel,
as reality slops down the back of the real.
We’ve mistaken the very reason why we fled,
and soon we’ll mourn the things we thought to shed.
What is this? Along the coasts that the eel now combs,
the things we left behind stand as so many poems.
This transformation that we’ve undergone
reveals outlined, way across the lettery lawn,
a perspective of jagged and towering scripts –
representations of cradles and crypts
in which the things we made came to life and expired.
From speech they came forth and into script they retired.
A range in which our former dreams are mired.
They reappear in a near-forgotten writing.
Yet can it be that there are still people fighting
in peaks and flats of those lettery coasts?
Are our former brethren still defending their boasts,
resolving their disputes and distributing alms,
strifes giving way to historical calms?
Or does life there only take place in the margins,
in between the ridges where the ink now hardens
and where shift is made to unclog the spout –
a task for the few who can still read it all out?
* * *
The poet and his companion continue on,
riding the eel and its lettery spawn
past hills concluding winters and evolving springs.
And they recollect themselves in their former things,
aware of time only as to its fact,
stuck in a prolonged intermission of its pact,
a moment frozen in the shift from act to act.
They find that much they see they’ve always known
and wrest it from the pervasiveness of that tone.
The recommencement of knowledge is translucent,
words and things helixed in one attunement.
When he attempts to grab one, he clasps its other,
engendered in a common, slithery mother.
Often the poet anguishes and grunts,
for it’s never possible to have both at once.
Try as he might, they can’t be made to copulate;
for word and thing are not as mate to mate.
Say that he knows the one – he hasn’t its brother;
possessing the latter, he forsakes the other.
Knowing in each case falls short of having,
and having is not so much owning as grabbing.
Shouldn’t ownership, however, encompass both?
So twinned, should they not lead to growth on growth?
That is, may not they be planted as one and grow?
Cannot the poet in his poem both have and know?
You see how the poet attained his end.
Indeed, he found the helix, but it wouldn’t bend.
It would give, that is, of neither hammer nor prong
to work his way into that helixed throng.
Yet he conceived another way, and that was song!
But first he encounters something entirely strange,
dragged up from that bottommost floor in chains.
Seeming eons are spent in its contemplation,
in a figmented lapse of its own creation –
a thing that digs out temporal hollows,
the contours of which are described in what follows.
* * *
So many thousand hours have already gone past.
It’s quite a cache of relics we’ve amassed.
This one in particular makes me curious.
It bears my signature. Perhaps it’s spurious.
I’ve a right not to acknowledge its claim
if it beckons with a forgery of my name.
It curls up in its own enigma like a snail,
both enervating and crowding the pail.
No vacuum can exhaust its excessive foment.
A just appraisal can’t be made of its moment.
It expands to a dozen heights or more.
Perhaps ‘twere better had we left it on the floor.
I’ve traversed its full length, and frankly I’m perplexed.
I have no idea what to do with it next.
It manifests an artful avoidance of dread,
though it could be merely what someone said.
But it’s also a thing that transpires, an event –
at the same time, a lapse or lisp of something meant.
Now and then it’s a riddle told in rhymes –
an Easter mass upstaged by mimes. At other times,
it’s like a tube with no terminus (a torus).
What sort of entity lies before us?
Paladin, we are lost in confusion’s throes now.
The Germans have a word – Tatsache – that shows how
certain things in thought, in the world, are stacked.
Tat, Sache und Tatsache. Deed, object and fact.
But of all we’ve found, it’s this one that’s most intact.
A closer look will tell what it’s about.
Sit down, paladin. Rest your bones. I’ll read it out.
The Poet and the Steeple on Her Rock
It is hard accommodating ourselves to fate.
Though we learn to do so, we learn it late.
The stars keep their distance to console, to placate.
They bring unearthly silences to the hearer,
so rendering her estrangement dearer.
And they acknowledge her in her PM mirror,
into which she gazes as into the weather,
straining after her pleadings flown thither
and pouring forth their addenda on a zither.
And now and then they come to sip at the spillage,
restraining themselves from starry pillage,
peering down on her steeple, into her village,
never minding the burghers – their merits, their faults –
yet keen on their clockwork, which never halts,
setting divisions for their serenade, their waltz.
On Sundays the steeple informs that “God is one!”
Its herald reverberates in thought’s drum.
August defers to September. Now autumn’s come
with attendants that lead it forth into her room.
She wonders if death isn’t like the womb,
substituting “t” for “w” (“t” in tomb).
With words, she knows, it’s easy to be cynical,
hairsplitting, overly rabbinical.
If words don’t match with things, can we be finical?
For things are to words as ears of corn to their shucks;
you pull them apart at their folds and tucks.
Without words to name them, our things are sitting ducks.
We mind the point where one with the other collides;
they come at each other in waves or tides.
Notes on hopeful matches, we record in asides.
And the rift between them causes uneasiness;
their coincidence merely appeases.
To prolong this appeasement, her task is ceaseless.
Finally, this task becomes her home, her Heimat,
and her home is her Word. Can she rhyme it?
She answers in evocations of her climate,
weaving them into an elaborate brocade,
which bristles with the doubts of which it’s made –
both doubts that she’d defy, and the doubts she’d evade.
When its threadings grow over long, she has them cropped.
She has the pigments thinned, the pipings stopped.
For the excesses must be stanched where thought is slopped.
Her search is perpetual for what she would find.
Her search is this storehouse; this room, her mind.
She empties it out, leaving nothing but the rind.
Her poem is a cipher, a sign of the weather.
Rain is alright; though fine weather, better.
She inscribes it in the matter of her letter.
Her poem is a record of her study, her whim –
a mind that fills and empties at the brim,
a scripture of her experience and its hymn.
Her poem is a bulwark against finitude’s brunt,
which enters via the weather her haunt,
gracing the mensuration of evening’s savant.
All things begin and end before they are over;
for Time is a gracious interloper.
She resigns to its leisure her tended covert,
etching on its rind a list of her fading stock.
The stars acknowledge her steeple, her clock,
and the village in which she lived upon this rock.
* * *
It’s lovely, paladin. Lovely. By God, it’s fine.
But I do not recognize it as mine.
I seem, though, to recall the buttons on the joints –
the ones, that’s to say, that were drawn with finer points.
Perhaps they were put to some special use.
Note that the stitching around them is somewhat loose,
as if the designer took particular care
against harming the finest in his snare.
Consider: they are so singular in themselves,
one might often wish to remove them from their shelves.
Such trouble involved in taking just one,
though – of letting it air for a bit in the sun…
If its brethren surmised it was out having fun,
you’d have to grant them all a moment’s leave,
and they’d quit an arrangement you’d never retrieve.
They rest in an ease I could never intuit.
It’s not mine, my friend. I didn’t do it.
And though there’s a certain familiarity,
my recollection of it has no clarity.
I must be thinking of another thing –
some clay I had wanted to mold, or song to sing.
Anyway, it’s entirely unserviceable,
its sense both too fixed and too unstable.
Paladin, let’s tear it apart along its seams.
We’ll put to good use its stitchwork, its rusty beams,
its queer components of forgotten dreams.
For paladin, it’s time for us to quit the pail.
The ink has seeped out from the orb that spied our sail.
These parts of our old world comprise our hope.
Someday on a banner they’ll overpeer our slope.
But now they’ll convey us out to yon rocky pile
and float us from isle to watery isle.
We’ve confined ourselves to our pail for long enough;
the tarpaulin tells us the sea will soon turn rough.
These things were ours, and now we’ve regained them –
parts of a world, or the names by which we named them,
indicating, with this and that, this’s and that’s.
We’ll stitch them up and toss them out like mats.
All things we might have thought to save but never saved.
They survived our negligence and, like us, they’ve braved
vicissitudes of water and weather.
Parts of our former world. Let’s put ‘em together.
Yes, paladin! Let’s put them to the test,
in advance of the clouds rolling in from the west!
[These ten haiku should be read slowly and tentatively, as if with great suspicion.]
Sunday is tipped for
a bravura of bubbles
in rumpled weather.
The zither dangles,
though now and then it placates.
Finical asides.
If the spume is prinked
when the mirror unrumples,
the climate will blare.
Waltz through the village
and waltz ceaselessly. Thus will
we evade autumn.
The tomb breathes clearer
and the ducks do as well in
Octubre’s muzzle.
When the rock bristles,
orations bristle in the
rock’s oratory.
The lacquers anoint,
anointing aggrieved savants
in their aggrievements.
Paltry cock, enough!
Your credence is most gaudy,
as are your coverts.
Plunge, unfubbed and free.
Clasp the rind where the fronds drip
and clasp it in sleights.
Bronze dithers. Each hymn
ends at letter C. In this
way is bounty slopped.
[With a sudden feeling of acceptance, and in a stately tempo.]
The weather that plunged on the village made the gaudy that much clearer.
Octubre waltzed in and, thus placated, unrumpled in her mirror.
Did you clasp, my savant, the credences that prinked the cock in the fronds?
Did they bubble or were they lacquered atop that rock of bristling bronze?
The orations of the ducks, who evade us in coverts of the mind,
are hymns of paltry bravurae dripping ceaselessly from Sunday’s rind.
The spume is muzzled and bounties are rumpled where once they would be free.
For finical savants have put an end to their sleights at letter C.
We will dangle, much aggrieved, and await anointment from autumn’s bloom.
Blare them for us, or slop them, o zither: asides on an unfubbed tomb.
[In a faux English stage accent, as if in a bad attempt to emulate the late Sir John Gielgud. Either that or an early 20th-century Ivy League accent - Orson Welles, FDR, the late Madame Chiang Kai-shek, or Stevens himself.
Andante grandioso]
And the zither slopped. We dangled off the bubble.
The coverts made to prink at letter C.
The ducks unfubbed in bravurae of bristling hymns
the bounty to which they plunged when Sundays were free.
The village was but a dithered muzzle
and Octubre’s savant, placated now, was bronzed,
weathered on the asides of a finical mind.
But the waltzes ended that clasped that rind!
The spume dripped ceaselessly, the climate tipped the fronds.
For who were we to blare that the cock was aggrieved?
You anoint me now in your gaudy bloom
with a credence of autumns evading the tomb,
a sleight of lacquered orations and rocks that breathed.
Thus we made the paltry that much clearer.
Let it rumple, then unrumple, in your mirror.
[Somewhat faster.]
Then bravurae dithered in bristling asides the
villages that autumn prinked upon us,
weathering the paltry’s orational letter.
A bounty of waltzes, would it not tip the spume
and blare the fronds off its dangling mirror?
Yet the finical cock unrumples the climate
and the gaudy credences with which it is slopped.
No, don’t ask this savant to evade it,
only to be anointed in a lacquered tomb.
These ducks are best rumpled in Octubre’s coverts;
thus will you mind the unfubbed muzzle.
You, who make sleights on freer Sundays
that – in the clear placatings of letter and rind,
clasped upon the bronze of a bubbled bloom –
will end them, ceaselessly, down to the dripping C.
[Mournfully, in a prose Adagio.]
So evade it all, Octubre. Evade the ceaseless placatings and the autumns in which they have been anointed. And blare the waltzes – much aggrieved where they rumple in the credences of this unprinked rock. Their villages are paltrier this Sunday, bristling with C’s where they tipped their muzzle. Bounty never dangled so freely as on the lacquers into which their tombs have plunged. If the bubbles are fubbed in orations of the climate, the cock will dither in coverts, weathering its rinds, and prinking its fictive letter. Clasp a gaudier zither upon that mirror, my finical savant; for it’s your mind to unrumple, your hymn to breathe, and your sleight for asides that drip most in their own bravurae.
[Note to the reader: The following is a series of tongue-twisters and should be read as quickly as possible, with a shifting tempo so as not to stumble over the more difficult sound combinations. Begin slowly, as a transition out of the preceding prose paragraph, then quickly accelerate into a Presto ma non troppo. And drop the accent. Think of Groucho Marx, Kerouac reading from On the Road, or Jim Carrey from Dr. Seuss.]
Savant,
unrumple your mind.
Remind
it not to vaunt
its rumpled rind.
Mirror
of a gaudy
letter,
let the tawdry
leerer
get the getter
when he leers
through the gears.
The weathers
are fictive as feathers,
yet thicker thither.
They dither
in a cocky climate.
Clocks climb it
in bounties
of orations,
while unrelated counties
count their rations.
[Suddenly slower, as if in a half-cadence.]
Sunday C’s
are paltry;
its teas –
sundry, salty.
[Resuming.]
Bravura,
you’re the
rave. Drip
asides,
dip
your braids, sip
your brides.
Ride
the pied
pavement where it’s pried,
where Davy died,
where Davy
bravely
vied,
though he didn’t save his side.
In the village, rocks
bristle locks
and blocks
and bocks,
an aggrieved
waltz grieves,
weaves
bereaved
waltzes, and the breeze
will tease
tubas
more ceaselessly this Octubre…
Finical lacquers
lack furs
through autumn,
but fub the lot of them,
fub the curs
and those who caught ‘em.
Free cures
for a prinked
muzzle
and a pinked
hymn if you hustle.
Fub fronds
rom the muzzle.
It’ll guzzle
on a whim
the bronzed
hymn
when exhumed
from the tomb.
[Careful on this one.]
A boom
on fumed
brooms
bloomed
in blooms
in autumn’s womb.
Autumn
caught ‘em
in finical
rooms
where rabbinical
brooms
were fumed.
Rabbis
lack
alibis.
Their rabid
allies
fly
rapid
sallies
into back
alleys
where a jack
rabbit
rallies.
It prinks
on the sly
and fubs
on the brinks
of sinks
and on the hubs
of tubs.
Rabbi, the bloomy
tomb
makes room
for you. Its muzzle
would guzzle
you in its roomy
sink.
[An abrupt decelerando.]
You’ll drink
as you sink.
Rabbi, you’re sinking.
Get drinking.
[Accelerating into a Prestissimo.]
rabbi rabbi
rabbity rabbi
drinking rabbi
sinking rabbi
rabbinical rabbi
rabbity rabbi
brave bravura
drip aside
bravely drip aside
drip a broom
BOOM! BOOM!
broomy bloom
bloomy gloom
gloomy guzzle
guzzle bloom
guzzle BOOM!
BOOM! BOOM!
bloomy breeze
breezy groom
greasy broom
BOOM! BOOM!
[Careful. Slow down a bit.] rocks and bocks
locks blocks
rocks and bocks
locks blocks
[As fast as possible, autumn caught ‘em
and in a harried crescendo.] autumn caught ‘em
autumn caught ‘em
finical finical
finical finical
Ocatuca
Ocatuca
OcatucaBRAY!
Ocatuca
BRAY! BRAY! BRAY!
letter C
letter C
letter letter
C! C!
weather
in the mirror
weather in the
mirror mirror
aggrieved
savant
aggrieved
savant
savant
savant
SAVANT!
SAVANT!
[Abruptly halting into everyday speech.]
No, no, no, no. Not like that, dammit. Look. It’s all ground to a halt. What just happened, paladin? They didn’t hold our weight. Just when it was beginning to feel right, too. Damn. Where’s the original fifty? Let’s see – ceaseless, bounty, covert…Hold on a minute. Covert. Let’s consult Webster’s. Yeah, that’s right, it can be a noun – a hiding place. From the Latin for cover up or hide. What else – credence, fub, prink, savant, dither…Dither? As a verb, it means “to act irresolutely”…
What the hell?…Where’s the sun flying off to? And the horizon suddenly seems lower. Yikes! When we left the poem, we left the pail! We’re goners. Look at all of them, drifting off like lily-pads. Paladin, weren’t you in charge of the life-vests?
[Resuming. Andante moderato]
We’re done.
The sea puts an end to our confusion,
foregoing us as its bad conclusion.
We perish in one of its intermittent throes.
The rubbish of English prepares a sudden close,
a period to prove we’re of its prose,
in which our selves and our self-relations are clipped…
…and all the words with which we were equipped.
Is what we know the same as what we learned?
From prose we set out, to prose we’re returned.
All we’d lost emerged as if from a spout.
We spoke it out and then we sailed it out.
The carp recede into a final blue,
while you and I and all we thought we knew,
vanish in the deep as our pail flows on…
…but listen, paladin – the song goes on!
"Of the things that I know, some are short, some are long…"
* * *
And the poet became the singer of that song!
For they sank to the bottom in funneling rings,
down to the rocks tipped out with flowing greens.
But see his loved one arrive on extended wings!
See her lute him up and lay him upon her strings,
his semblable lost in the wavy screens.
The muse returns the poet renewed to his things,
back to his porch in Connecticut and its swings,
to which a brown moon lends its sheen in sheens.
After several months he lays aside his slings.
His autumns evolve his winters; his winters, springs –
while high atop a tree that brown friend preens.
Time’s tenor at times relaxes and then it sings
as the goddess of fictive music flaps her wings,
fanning words that mean and the Word that means
and fanning a world she remakes of words and things.
[Previous: Underway]
[Next: Blooming and Withering]