Poemunity — your poem community

You can shuffle and scuffle and scold, You can rattle the knockers and knobs, Or batter the doorsteps with buckets of gold Till the Deputy-Governor sobs. You can sneak up a suitable plank In a frantic endeavor to see— But what do they do in the Commonwealth Bank When the Big Door bangs at Three? Listen in the cellars, listen in the vaults, Can’t you hear the tellers turning somersaults? Can’t you hear the spectres of inspectors and directors Dancing with the phantoms in a Dead Man’s Waltz? Some are ghosts of nabobs, poverty and stray bobs, Midas and his mistress, Mammon and his wife; Other ones are sentries, guarding double entries, Long-forgotten, double-dealing, troubled double-life. Down among the pass-books, money lent and spent, Down among the forests of the Four Per Cent., Where the ledgers meet and moulder, and the overdrafts grow older, And the phantoms shrug a shoulder when you ask ’em for the rent. They are bogies of Grandfather’s cheques, They are spectres of buried accounts, They are crinoline sweethearts with pearls on their necks, Demanding enormous amounts. They are payment for suppers and flowers, For diamonds to banish a tear, For sweet, pretty ladies in opulent hours . . . And tombstones . . . and bailiffs . . . and beer . . . Down in the bowels of the bank, the ledgers lie rank upon rank, The debts of the ages come out of their pages, The bones of old loans creak and clank— Oh, if you could peep through the door To day at a Quarter Past Four, You’d find all the ghosts at their usual posts, And you wouldn’t sign cheques any more!

In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood— A lord of nature weeping to a tree. I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. What’s madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. That place among the rocks—is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have. A steady storm of correspondences! A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon, And in broad day the midnight come again! A man goes far to find out what he is— Death of the self in a long, tearless night, All natural shapes blazing unnatural light. Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I? A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Three days later, Suljic was finally given a drink of water and marched with a dozen other men onto a small livery truck, one of two, fenced along each side by wooden planks, the back left open to give a clear shot to the automatic weapon poking out the window of the red sedan that followed, the squat nose trained on them, ridiculously, as if they'd any thought of hopping off a moving truck. Suljic peered vacantly through the slats. He'd missed the yellow flowers of Spring and by now saw a landscape taken over by Summer, the grasses closing behind them as they veered from the road and lurched across cow paths. They drove to the center of a wide field and stopped. Old sweat, without the breeze of movement, prickled in the heat. A metal smell drifted, an untended apple grove baked on a hill, and the weeds droned, motory with bees. But Suljic noticed none of these, fixed instead on the gaps in the field where bodies, all dead, matted down the wild carrot and chicory, their khakis splotched darkly, like a fawn's dappled haunches obscuring them. The men clambered down into the tall grass and lined up at gunpoint. Suljic was sure the last good thing he'd ever see would be the apple branches drooping with fruit, but the man beside him grabbed his hand, and looked him in the face, as if Suljic, just a bricklayer, had any assurances to give. He squeezed the hand back, hard, and felt a scab crossing the man's knuckles. He saw, too, a thin scar worrying the arch of his left eyebrow, much older, perhaps from a fall as a child from a ladder picking fruit. His hand was like a clump of mortar, and three nights without sleep had webbed his eyes red. And Suljic suddenly stuttered to ask his name, what town was he from, his job—anything—but there came the crackle, like sometimes thunder, undecided whether to begin, that starts, stalls, then trips over itself, the sound crinkling from one end of the sky to the other. The sound took possession of his face until it, too, crinkled, his grip pulsed, and he fell forward. Suljic winced in the tackle of bodies, and splayed down in the dirt flattening himself like a beetle, not hurt in any new way, not yet convinced he wasn't dead and didn't feel it. He heard the click of fresh clips sliding into place, and shut his eyes lightly, sure someone had seen he wasn't shot and would come finish it. But no one came. Another truck rolled up. The men climbed down, and lined up, docilely. He recognized, solely by rhythm, a prayer, cut off by the crackle, the hush of crickets, the soft whump of bodies folding at the knees and knocked by bullets shoulder first into the grass. No one yelled. No one tried to run. Another truck, another group, falling like a succession of bricks sliding off a hod. Suljic finally pissed where he lay, and blended in all the better with the others. The noise stopped, and he cracked his eyes enough to see, across the backs like bleeding hills, a man strolling along the scatter of bodies with a pistol, putting a slug into the skull of anyone that still twitched or mumbled. Then came the snort and low-pitched rumble of diesel engines as two backhoes dug a trench along the margin of all the collapsed bodies. Impossibly, the crackling started anew, and when darkness finally settled, the squads continued in what light the backhoes' headlights threw. Perhaps the shooting was over long before the sound left him, the crackle to his eardrums was like the rolling of a boat to his limbs echoing long after he'd reached dry ground. The soldiers left. Still he didn't move, but eased his eyes full open. The moon above the orchard was shrinking higher, its light glossing the awkward pale forms that stubbled the dry weeds, glinting off teeth and eyes. He scuttled from beneath the arms and legs flopped sleepingly over his own, as though by drunkards or lovers, and rose like a foal to his numb feet, seeing throughout the field no man not touched by three dead others. He stood for a moment, trying to guess, even roughly, their number, multiplying bodies per square yard, but the math was too much, the count too huge. He stared at the faces beside him in the grass, like a man leaving something he knew he would someday have to return to, looking for the landmarks that would guide him— the crooked teeth, the welted cheek, the pale eyes eclipsed by half-shut lids, lolling upward, inward, swollen as though with weeping, blood from an unseen hole glistering down a chin line, crusting on lips. How could he explain his life, what could he say to those who weren't here to see, to the mothers and wives who'd swear for years their men were still alive, somewhere, the bodies never found, bulldozed into clay— would he tell them how he tiptoed, unable to avoid stepping on hands and ankles, or how the tears like a secret he'd harbored through three years of siege shook loose, and how he let them, no longer afraid of being found out and cut down by gunfire, or how he ran anyway, when he reached the open, quick as his bum leg would let him, without a look back at the faces turned like gourds in the dark mire.

Kurosawa was a moralist. It is said he took and gently bent Akutagawa’s grove. Akutagawa was trying to show us something. It is said he wore cold wet gloves when he wrote.

“Are you happy?” That’s a good place to start, or maybe, “Do you think you’re happy?” with its more negative tone. Sometimes you’re walking, sometimes falling. That’s part of the problem too, but not all of the problem. Flowers out the window or on the windowsill, and so someone brought flowers. We spend a long time interested in which way the car would best go in the driveway. Is that the beginning of an answer? Some way to say who we are? Well, it brings us up to now, at any rate, as the limitations of structure, which is the way we need for it to be. Invent some muses and invoke them, or save them for the yard, some animus to get us going. And what was it Michael said yesterday? That the committee to do all these good things has an agenda to do all these other things as well, that we decide are less good in our estimation, so then we have this difficulty. It just gets to you sometimes. We have a table of red apples and a table of green apples, and someone asks you about apples, but that’s too general, you think, as you’ve made several distinctions to get to this place of two tables, two colors. How can that be an answer to anything? Or we can play the forgetting game, how, for twenty years, my mother would answer for her forgetfulness by saying it was Old-Timer’s Disease, until she forgot that too. On the television, a truck passes left to right, in stereo. Outside, a garbage truck passes right to left. They intersect. And so the world continues around two corners. The table gets turned over, with several people standing around seemingly not sure of what comes next. Look at them politely as you can, they’re beginners too. And they say the right question is far more difficult to get to than the right answer. It sounds good, anyway, in the way other people’s lives are a form of distance, something you can look at, like landscape, until your own starts to look that way as well. Looking back at the alternatives, we never had children or we had more children. And what were their names? As the living room parts into halls and ridges, where we spend the afternoon imagining a plant, a filing cabinet or two...because some of these questions you have with others, and some you have only with yourself.

“Ghosts are people who think they’re ghosts,” my daughter Natalie said, starting off the period we will refer to later as A Little Bit Further Along. Since then (which was last night, November 3rd, 2009), I’ve been thinking about where I am more, as a kind of goal, and somewhat less about where I’m not. It’s a pleasure to be where one is, given that someone isn’t somewhere lethal. This is Pleasure One. And now this is Pleasure Two, thinking about it, so that this place, which was Place One, and a pleasure, as we were there where we were and it was not a lethal place, but a place where we were, is now this place again as we’re here thinking about it, like America or a popsicle. “Open the house and the house is empty,” Natalie also said, meaning her dollhouse, as she’s seven, but when she said it, I had this vision of all of us suddenly disappearing, maybe thinking ourselves ghosts, even, or getting somewhere, out and around her bedroom and then down the hall and stairs. I’ll tell you how it happened. Natalie and I were looking out the window at the backyard, and she asked me if I liked our house. It’s a theme with her. The other night she asked me if I liked life. I said, “Yeah, a lot.” And she looked at me a second and then said, “Me too.” You don’t hear that every day, I think, until the accumulations begin to remind me of every day: Carla, who donated a kidney to her brother-in-law (Robin’s uncle), has just been diagnosed with cancer, two months later. She sends hopeful updates from the hospital, on Facebook. Like fountains, the footnotes go on. My footnote or yours. The big questions can’t be decided in this way. They demand coins or laws. And this is much too important to be a big question.

It appears that we’re living (which isn’t always the case), depending on how one defines such things, in a “now you see it / now you see it” kind of way. We can say we’re working on our age, as well, listening to Bob Dylan songs where people can age in whatever direction supports the theme. “Too bad life doesn’t get themes,” Robin says, and yes, that’s right, and then we can all go do whatever it was we were going to do anyway. “It’s either that, or pay off the kidnapper,” as Neil Young had it, back in the mid-70s. There’s always an analogue, and someone to tell us about it, how, no matter how fast you run, you can’t run fast enough to get away from yourself. You could even call it a theme. For instance, I was the first one to an eighteen-wheeler accident on the highway once, in the early 90s. I didn’t know what I was going to find. It was just tossed there on its side, across both lanes. So I got out of the car and walked around to the front, only to see the driver standing inside the cab that was resting on the driver-side door. He was simply standing there behind the glass, parallel with the dashboard, a little blood on his forehead, looking as lost as I felt, looking back at him. All his things (magazines and maps and cigarettes and pens and snacks) in a little pile at his feet. When I left, a guy was hitting the windshield with a baseball bat. You go to the room, and the place you like to sit is missing. This is an opportunity to trust, I suppose, or perhaps for blind panic, if one were to consider this a metaphor for something. But say it’s not, say there are no such things as metaphors for a moment, and where does that get you? Presently, it gets me to a row of green and yellow plastic chairs, those 1950s-looking ones I imagine Kenton would like to collect. They’re joined together by shiny metal clasps, chrome, and the whole thing is full of sunlight through the plate glass window. It’s the kind of scene I think of as lickable, how everything looks like cheerful candy, and I wonder if there might be a way to be there or here without a beginning, or without an ending, or if perhaps there might be a concept for no middle.

In a landscape of having to repeat. Noticing that she does, that he does and so on. The underlying cause is as absent as rain. Yet one remembers rain even in its absence and an attendant quiet. If illusion descends or the very word you’ve been looking for. He remembers looking at the photograph, green and gray squares, undefined. How perfectly ordinary someone says looking at the same thing or I’d like to get to the bottom of that one. When it is raining it is raining for all time and then it isn’t and when she looked at him, as he remembers it, the landscape moved closer than ever and she did and now he can hardly remember what it was like.

The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke. For view there are the houses opposite Cutting the sky with one long line of wall Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch Monotony of surface & of form Without a break to hang a guess upon. No bird can make a shadow as it flies, For all is shadow, as in ways o'erhung By thickest canvass, where the golden rays Are clothed in hemp. No figure lingering Pauses to feed the hunger of the eye Or rest a little on the lap of life. All hurry on & look upon the ground, Or glance unmarking at the passers by The wheels are hurrying too, cabs, carriages All closed, in multiplied identity. The world seems one huge prison-house & court Where men are punished at the slightest cost, With lowest rate of colour, warmth & joy.

I realize there is simply no way to stay up in the air with a sustained flapping motion. Sucks! But that doesn't mean I can't try. How odd to eat only white bread for levity. In spite of its limitations, you must consider the possibilities of leaping, daily. Whatever monster ails you, leap into the cool wind. I hope you consider me an authority. You don't know what this means. Yet. I have the necessary education for this type of work. I will imitate the sound of your father laughing into a microphone through a public address system in your place of work. How did that idea get into these instructions? I'm going to put stickers on the back of your shirt that will instruct people how to behave around you. Then, I'll leap through the air above you when you exit the subway. I just wanted to give you these instructions in a nutshell.