To wear a uniform and to bear arms converges
if one also wears a bandolier, which in a manner of speaking
is bearing arms also. Hear me out, bear with me.
In the parade, the constable is proud, his moustache waxed for the event.
His family he displays like trophies in a glass case,
His lovely children, his wife, fleshed out for maternity,
Obedient by nature. The burghermeister credits him for much,
For keeping the peace, not the best of men but not the worst,
And affable besides, a real sport and Rotarian.
They are riding little trains in the square,
An event the town captures on its Facebook page,
But in his dungeon, he becomes a different creature.
Whose work is dirty yet necessary. The fingernails
Of an inmate are pulled, behind a thick wall
Someone screams. No one upstairs needs to know,
Certainly no one marching in the parade, among the floats
Of wedding-cake on which a beauty queen balances.
No doubt a young spectator has the time of her life
Watching the whited spectacle on the main thoroughfare,
The excitement captured in a letter to her mum.
She’s an au pair from the provinces after all.
No end to the white t-shirts at the summer camp,
No end to the chain of supply and demand.
If the sentence is no longer parallel, there’s been a mistake,
Where is the root of the mistake that has derailed
The natural order of the sentence. Around the corner,
Improvement is fragile, culture is precarious,
While teeth can become carious at a late age,
No end to the rotten teeth-rows, to kids just out of school,
The crowds walking in different directions,
To the variety of white uniforms fashioned in a sentence
Bold, disembowel, trowel, pitchfork, mallet
The strength of the sunlight fails to grace the lawn
I passed who knows how many rows of horse-corn riding to Fairlee.
But the seed dries in the husk, the pith hardens as the husk splits, and when the rail falls, it furrows above the dried-up soil until it finds drainage, so it doesn’t soak anything, it only flows over everything it touches, hard soil, dried blades. It only passes.
Monday, March 19, 2012
From January 2 Monday
Which is the whole point, the still point
You watch the curving world vanish
Behind the weather, you watch
The slightly curved world you do not own
Nor can ever
vanish behind the weather,
your privilege to witness empty space,
the proportion between the space
and the world beneath it
compressed into a gentle curve,
a blink of lights,
the silent vehicles beads of an abacus,
farms that don’t seem to grow things anymore.
++++
Earn the view shouted the descending bicyclist
Who passed me while I peddled upward.
As the dog barked at anything that kept moving
His owner said, you don’t own the world boy,
As I was about to begin my mountain bike ride.
I am a term between these statements.
A ride uphill is work, the wages are the view.
The view is an empty sky, the world beneath it
Shrinking. The harder I pedal, the higher I go.
What else does all this work buy me?
Because I do not own the world I see
I must work for the things inside it
As they vanish beneath the weather,
A gentle curve.
No doubt behind that curve
Arrives a boat to harbor,
No doubt a vehicle, abacus-bead
Homes to its destination.
I have earned the right
Not to observe closely.
Earn the view! The downhill peddler said
As the bicycle beneath me became heavier
Until all thought about the view was out of mind.
At the foot of the hill, her hound barked madly
At whatever moved, until she told her dog
At whatever moved, until she told him,
Hand gripping leash, you do not own the world.
You have earned what is out of range
No doubt you’d earn at equal price.
You watch the curving world vanish
Behind the weather, you watch
The slightly curved world you do not own
Nor can ever
vanish behind the weather,
your privilege to witness empty space,
the proportion between the space
and the world beneath it
compressed into a gentle curve,
a blink of lights,
the silent vehicles beads of an abacus,
farms that don’t seem to grow things anymore.
++++
Earn the view shouted the descending bicyclist
Who passed me while I peddled upward.
As the dog barked at anything that kept moving
His owner said, you don’t own the world boy,
As I was about to begin my mountain bike ride.
I am a term between these statements.
A ride uphill is work, the wages are the view.
The view is an empty sky, the world beneath it
Shrinking. The harder I pedal, the higher I go.
What else does all this work buy me?
Because I do not own the world I see
I must work for the things inside it
As they vanish beneath the weather,
A gentle curve.
No doubt behind that curve
Arrives a boat to harbor,
No doubt a vehicle, abacus-bead
Homes to its destination.
I have earned the right
Not to observe closely.
Earn the view! The downhill peddler said
As the bicycle beneath me became heavier
Until all thought about the view was out of mind.
At the foot of the hill, her hound barked madly
At whatever moved, until she told her dog
At whatever moved, until she told him,
Hand gripping leash, you do not own the world.
You have earned what is out of range
No doubt you’d earn at equal price.
4/12/11 Sat.
I don’t know if a doting mother made me what I am, an embarrassment to the rest of the family who refuse to speak to me so far. I flinched and joined with one woman who was made ill by my preferences. I tried to drink myself into happiness. To an early grave I go. My deformities made me stronger. The bloodline is polluted from the start. That’s politically incorrect of course to say. My doting mother tanned herself the texture of a saddle-bag. She’d been a shop-girl when she made the wrong choice by wedding into it. You can’t shed the bloodline like a skin. The civil charges I escaped by running to the city, my new life before the eyes of my children’s’ mother. But there was no time to cry above the spilled milk. Only a dog eats affection. A dog also returns to its own vomit. But I am not a dog. I smelled like the barn I entered with him, anonymous. Anonymous, with two children and a half, was never caught with pants down, nor was he moved to blush.
I am walking with a cane on a Florida beach with my escort holding me up for my final days. I spend most of them expectorating, spitting out the past in blood. I wear my mother’s tan like a glove, which belies my rotten metastasized internal organs. My sins I insist stem from that first pollution, the commingling of attributes never meant to mix in one man, who would be a girl, a girl who enjoyed being held down, who enjoyed the roughness of the sport in a barn off the beaten track, a track of Burma Shave signs. Yet the Japs melted those cans into Zero planes that flew above the Philippines when the traveling salesman escorted me to my happy undoing.
To his silent accusers he would deny his queerness. He was the first, but I have no thought of him, or his postwar nuclear family the novelty of the television in his living room. Half-crippled on this dismal beach with its arcades and rotting piers and drunken fishermen visited him with boils and goiters, as if booze or pestilence had swelled them, no picture of Dorian Gray for me to consult these late hours. There’s no bringing together the polar bear and alligator to copulate. What was I thinking?
That was a good storm, and though we are experiencing setbacks against the onslaught of the spring, when the lie of the land seems to lose its admirable rectilineality and the mud puddles reflect the blue as much as a thawed lake, we can still roll back the world to an ice age, we can cover the world in snow only if we redouble our efforts. Not all is lost. When you think about what you are trying to do, close your eyes and see the glaciers and caves of ice you’ve become. Think when you descend slowly, eyes closed.
When every sentence seems an ending anew, until another sentence replaces the sentence that came before. When every sentence that comes is the last step, until what follows becomes what precedes it, as if each step were a brick or a fieldstone in a wall, but a wall that is unfinished, spiraling to a chimney without smoke or a parapet mortared with the broken helixes of the sea-shell, the Fibunaccian mathematics crushed into shards that the foe cannot clutch without bleeding very badly, invisible fortress wall that cannot be scaled or knocked apart by means of the true bucket or cannot, the coil spring never tight enough to hurl a projectile of pitch into the enclosure with its familiar and comforting odors of hearths and bed sheets, no matter how foreign or repellent they might be to another. This half a page feels like years condensed into minutes if not seconds, but once you look up you will disabuse yourself of any distortions of scale, no magnum opus regarding you, just a paragraph.
But what does the paragraph see? Someone makes me or unmakes me, each line another limb or prosthetic. The themes of the day: insomnia, sunrises, hillsides, outcasts, family closet skeletons, cripples, final days, conclusions. But beginning with observations of weather, bird behavior, the budding of tulips in the snow, the bills paid, the errands and chores done.
An hour and a half of piano music, first Bach suites, then short pieces by Satie in which the composer deploys counterpoint along with the rhythms of ragtime among more pensive sections. Imagining incidents, that changed the course of more than one life unfamiliar with the initial violation or surrender to inclinations later hushed up and repressed. Is this merely an exercise in subjectivity when committed to paper? An event that was the undoing in other words of more than one beginning with the wife who learns of it first, but too late to break up the family or avoid the misery that followed. When reflecting upon such incidents and the misery that followed, who can inhabit the absolute present, incidents for which no therapy is possible. No therapist can run to the bedside with a cure. Confession of sins, then life-long penance?
I am walking with a cane on a Florida beach with my escort holding me up for my final days. I spend most of them expectorating, spitting out the past in blood. I wear my mother’s tan like a glove, which belies my rotten metastasized internal organs. My sins I insist stem from that first pollution, the commingling of attributes never meant to mix in one man, who would be a girl, a girl who enjoyed being held down, who enjoyed the roughness of the sport in a barn off the beaten track, a track of Burma Shave signs. Yet the Japs melted those cans into Zero planes that flew above the Philippines when the traveling salesman escorted me to my happy undoing.
To his silent accusers he would deny his queerness. He was the first, but I have no thought of him, or his postwar nuclear family the novelty of the television in his living room. Half-crippled on this dismal beach with its arcades and rotting piers and drunken fishermen visited him with boils and goiters, as if booze or pestilence had swelled them, no picture of Dorian Gray for me to consult these late hours. There’s no bringing together the polar bear and alligator to copulate. What was I thinking?
That was a good storm, and though we are experiencing setbacks against the onslaught of the spring, when the lie of the land seems to lose its admirable rectilineality and the mud puddles reflect the blue as much as a thawed lake, we can still roll back the world to an ice age, we can cover the world in snow only if we redouble our efforts. Not all is lost. When you think about what you are trying to do, close your eyes and see the glaciers and caves of ice you’ve become. Think when you descend slowly, eyes closed.
When every sentence seems an ending anew, until another sentence replaces the sentence that came before. When every sentence that comes is the last step, until what follows becomes what precedes it, as if each step were a brick or a fieldstone in a wall, but a wall that is unfinished, spiraling to a chimney without smoke or a parapet mortared with the broken helixes of the sea-shell, the Fibunaccian mathematics crushed into shards that the foe cannot clutch without bleeding very badly, invisible fortress wall that cannot be scaled or knocked apart by means of the true bucket or cannot, the coil spring never tight enough to hurl a projectile of pitch into the enclosure with its familiar and comforting odors of hearths and bed sheets, no matter how foreign or repellent they might be to another. This half a page feels like years condensed into minutes if not seconds, but once you look up you will disabuse yourself of any distortions of scale, no magnum opus regarding you, just a paragraph.
But what does the paragraph see? Someone makes me or unmakes me, each line another limb or prosthetic. The themes of the day: insomnia, sunrises, hillsides, outcasts, family closet skeletons, cripples, final days, conclusions. But beginning with observations of weather, bird behavior, the budding of tulips in the snow, the bills paid, the errands and chores done.
An hour and a half of piano music, first Bach suites, then short pieces by Satie in which the composer deploys counterpoint along with the rhythms of ragtime among more pensive sections. Imagining incidents, that changed the course of more than one life unfamiliar with the initial violation or surrender to inclinations later hushed up and repressed. Is this merely an exercise in subjectivity when committed to paper? An event that was the undoing in other words of more than one beginning with the wife who learns of it first, but too late to break up the family or avoid the misery that followed. When reflecting upon such incidents and the misery that followed, who can inhabit the absolute present, incidents for which no therapy is possible. No therapist can run to the bedside with a cure. Confession of sins, then life-long penance?
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