The Double Dream of Spring (7 page)

Each detail was startlingly clear, as though seen through a magnifying glass,

Or would have been to an ideal observer, namely yourself—

For only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar

The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption,

Sometimes disappearing into valleys, but always
on the way,

For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful

As architecture, because planned and then abandoned when completed,

To live afterwards, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years.

Who cares about what was there before? There is no going back,

For standing still means death, and life is moving on,

Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.

It was always November there. The farms

Were a kind of precinct; a certain control

Had been exercised. The little birds

Used to collect along the fence.

It was the great “as though,” the how the day went,

The excursions of the police

As I pursued my bodily functions, wanting

Neither fire nor water,

Vibrating to the distant pinch

And turning out the way I am, turning out to greet you.

You have been living now for a long time and there is nothing you do not know.

Perhaps something you read in the newspaper influenced you and that was very frequently.

They have left you to think along these lines and you have gone your own way because you guessed that

Under their hiding was the secret, casual as breath, betrayed for the asking.

Then the sky opened up, revealing much more than any of you were intended to know.

It is a strange thing how fast the growth is, almost as fast as the light from polar regions

Reflected off the arctic ice-cap in summer. When you know where it is heading

You have to follow it, though at a sadly reduced rate of speed,

Hence folly and idleness, raging at the confines of some miserable sunlit alley or court.

It is the nature of these people to embrace each other, they know no other kind but themselves.

Things pass quickly out of sight and the best is to be forgotten quickly

For it is wretchedness that endures, shedding its cancerous light on all it approaches:

Words spoken in the heat of passion, that might have been retracted in good time,

All good intentions, all that was arguable. These are stilled now, as the embrace in the hollow of its flux

And can never be revived except as perverse notations on an indisputable state of things,

As conduct in the past, vanished from the reckoning long before it was time.

Lately you’ve found the dull fevers still inflict their round, only they are unassimilable

Now that newness or importance has worn away. It is with us like day and night,

The surge upward through the grade school positioning and bursting into soft gray blooms

Like vacuum-cleaner sweepings, the opulent fuzz of our cage, or like an excited insect

In nervous scrimmage for the head, etching its none-too-complex ordinances into the matter of the day.

Presently all will go off satisfied, leaving the millpond bare, a site for new picnics,

As they came, naked, to explore all the possible grounds on which exchanges could be set up.

It is “No Fishing” in modest capital letters, and getting out from under the major weight of the thing

As it was being indoctrinated and dropped, heavy as a branch with apples,

And as it started to sigh, just before tumbling into your lap, chagrined and satisfied at the same time,

Knowing its day over and your patience only beginning, toward what marvels of speculation, auscultation, world-view,

Satisfied with the entourage. It is this blank carcass of whims and tentative afterthoughts

Which is being delivered into your hand like a letter some forty-odd years after the day it was posted.

Strange, isn’t it, that the message makes some sense, if only a relative one in the larger context of message-receiving

That you will be called to account for just as the purpose of it is becoming plain,

Being one and the same with the day it set out, though you cannot imagine this.

There was a time when the words dug in, and you laughed and joked, accomplice

Of all the possibilities of their journey through the night and the stars, creature

Who looked to the abandonment of such archaic forms as these, and meanwhile

Supported them as the tools that made you. The rut became apparent only later

And by then it was too late to check such expansive aspects as what to do while waiting

For the others to show: unfortunately no pile of tattered magazines was in evidence,

Such dramas sleeping below the surface of the everyday machinery; besides

Quality is not given to everybody, and who are you to have been supposing you had it?

So the journey grew ever slower; the battlements of the city could now be discerned from afar

But meanwhile the water was giving out and malaria had decimated their ranks and undermined their morale,

You know the story, so that if turning back was unthinkable, so was victorious conquest of the great brazen gates.

Best perhaps to fold up right here, but even that was not to be granted.

Some days later in the pulsating of orchestras someone asked for a drink:

The music stopped and those who had been confidently counting the rhythms grew pale.

This is just a footnote, though a microcosmic one perhaps, to the greater curve

Of the elaboration; it asks no place in it, only insertion
hors-texte
as the invisible notion of how that day grew

From planisphere to heaven, and what part in it all the “I” had, the insatiable researcher of learned trivia, bookworm,

And one who marched along with, “made common cause,” yet had neither the gumption nor the desire to trick the thing into happening,

Only long patience, as the star climbs and sinks, leaving illumination to the setting sun.

The last block is closed in April. You

See the intrusions clouding over her face

As in the memory given you of older

Permissiveness which dies in the

Falling back toward recondite ends,

The sympathy of yellow flowers.

Never mentioned in the signs of the oblong day

The saw-toothed flames and point of other

Space not given, and yet not withdrawn

And never yet imagined: a moment’s commandment.

These last weeks teasing into providential

Reality: that your face, the only real beginning,

Beyond the gray of overcoat, that this first

Salutation plummet also to the end of friendship

With self alone. And in doing so open out

New passages of being among the correctness

Of familiar patterns. The stance to you

Is a fiction, to me a whole. I find

New options, white feathers, in a word what

You draw in around you to the protecting bone.

This page only is the end of nothing

To the top of that other. The purity

Of how hard it is to choose between others where

The event takes place and the outside setting.

Day covers all this with leaves, with laughter and tears.

But at night other sounds are heard

Propositions hitherto omitted in the heat

Of smoke. You can look at it all

Inside out for the emblem to become the statue

Of discipline that rode in out of the past.

Not forgetting either the chance that you

Might want to revise this version of what is

The only real one, it might be that

No real relation exists between my wish for you

To return and the movements of your arms and legs.

But my inability to accept this fact

Annihilates it. Thus

My power over you is absolute.

You exist only in me and on account of me

And my features reflect this proved compactness.

That coming together of masses coincides

With that stable emptiness, detaining

Where this energy, not yet or only partially

Distributed to the imagination creates

A claim to the sides of early autumn.

Suffocating, with remorse, and winking with it

To tablelands of disadumbrated feeling

Treetops whose mysterious hegemony concerns

Merely, by opening around factors of accident

So as to install miscellaneous control.

The part in which you read about yourself

Grew out of this. Your interpretation is

Extremely bitter and can serve no profitable end

Except continual development. Best to break off

All further choice. In

This way new symptoms of interest having a

Common source could produce their own ingenious

Way of watering into the past with its religious

Messages and burials. Out of this cold collapse

A warm and near unpolished entity could begin.

Although beyond more reacting

To this cut-and-dried symposium way of seeing things

To outflank next mediocre condition

Of storms. The hollow thus produced

A kind of cave of the winds; distribution center

Of subordinate notions to which the stag

Returns to die: the suppressed lovers.

Then ghosts of the streets

Crowding, propagating the feeling into furious

Waves from the perfunctory and debilitated sunset.

Yet no one has time for its preoccupation.

Our daily imaginings are swiftly tilted down to

Death in its various forms. We cannot keep the peace

At home, and at the same time be winning wars abroad.

And the great flower of what we have been twists

On its stem of earth, for not being

What we are to become, fated to live in

Intimidated solitude and isolation. No brother

Bearing the notion of responsibility of self

To the surrounding neighborhood lost out of being.

Slowly as from the center of some diamond

You begin to take in the world as it moves

In toward you, part of its own burden of thought, rather

Idle musing, afternoons listing toward some sullen

Unexpected end. Seen from inside all is

Abruptness. As though to get out your eye

Sharpens and sharpens these particulars; no

Longer visible, they breathe in multicolored

Parentheses, the way love in short periods

Puts everything out of focus, coming and going.

Thus your only world is an inside one

Ironically fashioned out of external phenomena

Having no rhyme or reason, and yet neither

An existence independent of foreboding and sly grief.

Nothing anybody says can make a difference; inversely

You are a victim of their lack of consequence

Buffeted by invisible winds, or yet a flame yourself

Without meaning, yet drawing satisfaction

From the crevices of that wind, living

In that flame’s idealized shape and duration.

Whereas through an act of bunching this black kite

Webs all around you with coal light: wall and reef

Imbibe and the impossible saturation,

New kinds of fun, is an earnest

Of the certain future. Yet the spores of the

Difference as it’s imagined flower

In complicated chains for the eyebrow, and pre-delineate

Phantom satisfaction as it would happen. This time

You get over the threshold of so much unmeaning, so much

Being, prepared for its event, the active memorial.

And more swiftly continually in evening, limpid

Storm winds, commas are dropped, the convention gapes,

Prostrated before a monument disappearing into the dark.

It would not be good to examine these ages

Except for sun flecks, little, on the golden sand

And coming to reappraisal of the distance.

The welcoming stuns the heart, iron bells

Crash through the transparent metal of the sky

Each day slowing the method of thought a little

Until oozing sap of touchable mortality, time lost and won.

Like the blood orange we have a single

Vocabulary all heart and all skin and can see

Through the dust of incisions the central perimeter

Our imaginations’ orbit. Other words,

Old ways are but the trappings and appurtenances

Meant to install change around us like a grotto.

There is nothing laughable

In this. To isolate the kernel of

Our imbalance and at the same time back up carefully;

Its tulip head whole, an imagined good.

The sense of that day toward its center

Is perforated or crisscrossed with rewards

As though the stumbling that stranded me here were

The means of some spontaneity. But upper pressures

Lifted the direction of the prevailing winds

Allowing an awaited entrance down below.

Yet all is different metric system

Flapping from grace to intense surprise.

As in a tub. No candle is lit. No theory

Straps it to the maturity of surroundings.

Its landscape puts toward a pointed roof

Continuing inquiry and reappraisal of always new

Facts pushing past into bright cold

As from general spindles a waterfall of data

Is absorbed above by command. Whether construed

As lead or gold it leaves a ring

On the embellished, attendant time. The farms

Knew it, that is why they stood so still.

The gold might reverse them to fields

Of flowering sand or black, ancient and intimate.

The volcanic entrance to an antechamber

Was not what either of us meant.

More outside than before, but what is worse, outside

Within the periphery, we are confronted