Bin Ramke

Sonnet 29 Is there a sound? There is a forest. What is the world? The word is wilderness. What is the answer? The answer is the world. What is the beginning? A beginning is happiness. What is the end? No one lives there now. What is a beginning? The beginning is light. What makes happiness? Nothing. What makes an ending? What does not. What is her skin?Her skin is composed of strange clothing and clouds of butterflies, of events and odors, of the rose fingers of dawn, transparent suns of full daylight, blue loves of dusk and night fish with huge eyes.

“Who are you to tell us how to live or why, et cetera?”   No Man, of course, and not so tall as is the current fashion, nor smart enough in the acceptable modern way, to enthrall the crowd with stories of my life among the savages where I was home and growing baffled day by day, raging through the night as if it were new music I made, groaing. It came to me today at lunch, the sound of women in the next booth, a voice like Aunt Odile’s—whom I never knew well nor did I like her, but not her spite but her voice like home-grown fame, a touch gravelly, a considerable groan itself, it seemed. They spoke outmoded French around me, never to me, except to taunt, I thought.   She leaned above me, on those visits, speaking to Mother in their private French, laughing.   A boy surrounded by the sound of foreign tongues knowing what wasn’t meant for him:   toy temptations, suggestive coils of syllables. I learned Latin, for Mass, and did love its terrific laddered randomness: The Blessed hovering Virgin above every station of a boy’s new path, hormonal disharmonies, her praises sung into hundreds the first Tuesday of every month: and yet Latin could not expose such shreds of glittering flesh as I found in French, not like the living tongue whose tip twined into an Uncle’s mustache as he leered at the wrong Aunt and winked and a fine distance crystallized loud there, then gone. Crashing like German. Father’s family spoke clear English among the bayous, boys and girls of immigrants accentless happily German through two wars, not counting Civil.   I had the tongue for arithmetic and spoke it beautifully.   I loved to count: precision’s a tempting career, clicking into a future like an abacus ignoring all those accents around. I never learned the luck of any but English, bland and bound. But only yesterday I heard a word the mechanic said in Czech to his cousin—shop rag—clearly centered in a welter of incomprehension, the wreck of my car at their wretched mercies:   shop rag.   And he wiped his hands and cried for me, shrugging like a cousin would. I wrote a check. I drove home, or tried. So does it count?   Am I a man of passion or child of comprehension?   “Father of little lusts driving myself home who thinks:   Buy some sentiment, a little like love and she must speak French this time. She longs for you, you know; it isn’t just the money. America loves you for yourself alone” and so I go for professional help, honey- blond hair and a disposition like a happy banker, whose French for dear sounds like dog; the cost of living is going up, loving her here.

So much I thought was only personal, like poetry, like caring nothing for Caillebotte the man, like arriving in Chicago by bus one gray morning and having no place to go, going to the Art Institute and the rain outside became nothing next to the glorious gray of Paris, life-size. The artist dead and all my life, I thought, I've liked right things for wrong reasons. My sojourn among meticulous dreams continued. One summer I spent among smart children taking lessons and abuse from the famous mathematician who taught old words new:point, line, between. And the long nights of teaching each other other words, our fortunate failures. And the furious wind blew down from time to time among us, hurricanes which turned live oaks inside out like little minds, mine, for instance, finding its fervent mode. Remember that you, too, could live where men spit while watching you and your mother pass. That you want her for yourself alone. Remember that those men are tall as God at such moments, more mean. So walk among them, the afternoon cooling within its limits, the mosquitoes taking equally from black and white, true and false. But there was a peninsula of time I lived on when our family poverty left me the couch to sleep on, the great clock ticking terror through the night. Who can love through his childhood insomnia? Only rain could save me–those blessed gray nights of noise, when sleep, like Ali Baba's quartered brother, was sewn back together.

Heraldry and all its lovely language; I chose my time there learning elsewhere, where else than land, Landscape, and how to live, in it is not like, nothing is like, the colors or the snow, it is not like pearl and it is not like the glitter of rainwater that darkens the bark against which the occasional bloom-laden branch might be seen shedding petals. No. Here is the past: One was once a boy and read books and could not pronounce the most engaging words and read in silence under blankets. Here one was not like oneself or was quiet and wrong and did not know the words nor how to ask, who to ask. Nor why. Boy’s books with flags. Everyone’s born to the language; anyone can say something. For instance, knight banneret, that’s what she called him, having no use for him after history, she thrust him into the operatic night: A woman’s hand rose above the surface of the lake and caught the glistering sword, and slowly descended into the boy’s refuge, his astonishment, so foreign, so little like home Knights Baronets— inferior barons formed by James I in 1611, the titles were sold and the funds went toward the plantation of Ulster. For this one would receive the right to a Field argent, a sinister hand couped the wrist gules. How foreign she was when God still cared. This is like a life, like a history built fluently, as if on the innocent, Boy-books and children’s crusades: The Reading (al-Korân) versus The Writing (Scripture). Isn’t it interesting, east / west, us / them? Everyone’s born to something. You should have feared the flick of my uncle’s thick wrist and the boat rides when he took me in those days, salt water in the bay and hard slaps against the hull, back from a day of horizons, of shrimp nets, I would lie on the bow feeling anger against my whole boy’s body as the engines uttered their single syllable for twenty miles back to land, a whine more terrible than laughter. The oral tradition, a voice hard and horrifying. One might have been a chevalier. Like someone from the books, was she beautiful? Was your mother lovely and a kind of landscape herself, like snow in dark woods, not like anything else?

Pei designed the building with views, smooth masonry, and the mountains aligned for a photo opportunity; inside are files sufficient for forever, for fine tuning weather. Great Spangled Fritillary, the watcher vaguely recalls from Teach Yourself Lepidoptery, a book. He wanted to live in a land of appropriate weather with views of mountains and with music constant. He wants to tell a story but no one would listen, like opera: Black women clean the floors and shine the walls like silver nightly. Computers whir Platonic as nuns. Nothing escapes naming; storms arranged in teacups like anyone’s collection, like rows of butterflies pinned and satisfactory: this is the new landscape. Or there is a lewd father among the shrubbery watching daughters in weather; he breathes heavily and the wet wisdom begins, the storm gathering to spill across the ridge, longed for. Daughters must be warned against sincerity of frantic violins: “He was a man of sympathetic tendencies,” read the official report. “He was smaller than he looked and tended to lick chocolate from his fingers in a lascivious manner.” He tried his wife’s patience, it is true, and lived alone through the marriage, kept his own counsel. With such petty symbols as weather, he kept his own counsel. A butterfly like weather; the climate like laughter, the movement of small air. Clouds, too, have names. Clouds leave home to find themselves. Good money after bad, the fathers say, and close the door called Nature against their coming back. The funny little ways children have of making the world the color they always wanted. Sunset. Birds. The mathematics of memory begin to swirl like cookie dough, like chocolate with egg and sugar and vanilla and butter. A bowl to lick, dangerous with delight, as ultraviolet. Home again! begs the mother and soon the sorry child walks that long allée as rain begins to pour.   Past such petty symbols the boy returns through architecture, a silly gauntlet: the butterfly, the mother, the fit signatures of loveliness. His parents at the door, the little cottage in the woods, Hansel home again at last, the shining path. A little like a dream. Ours is not a simple age, and things are what they seem happily ever after in the malicious tiny rain.

I was young once, at least, if not beautiful. And what is beauty anyway? The light off snow is pretty. I was young once, as young as any.

The Pontalba Apartments in the View-Master and the cardboard cathedral as if trapped in the dream twenty years early, the whole a furious search as if for a reason. Still, it's sex that spoils it, isn't it? Jackson Square was the smallest sufficient landscape, but that was before, and now the gates are locked at sundown, and the smell of the river fails, falls ever backward. Some of us lived there, though: What shall we say who have knowledge carried to the heart?