John Koethe

On a backwards-running clock in Lisbon, By the marble statue of Pessoa; On an antique astrolabe in London Tracing out the sky above Samoa, Thousands of miles away—in time, in place, Each night conspires to create a myth That stands for nothing real, yet leaves you with The vague impression of a human face. The fragments fly apart and shift, trembling On the threshold of a kind of fullness: The minor wonder of remembering; The greater wonders of forgetfulness. For one looks back as someone else might yearn For a new life, and set his course upon The polestar, bid his adieus, and move on. The journey takes a solipsistic turn, Forsaking starlight for an inner glow, And reducing all human history, All human culture—highbrow, middle-, low-— To one reflecting surface, one story. What fills the heaven of a single mind? The things that used to fill Kant’s mind with awe —“The starry heavens and the moral law”— Seem distant now, and difficult to find Amid the message of satiety Issuing from the corners of the sky, Filled with monotonous variety: Game shows, an interview with Princess Di, And happy talk, and sitcoms and the news, The shit that floats across your living room Each weekday evening. Waiting in the pews, Out in the desert where the cacti bloom, Something else was forming, something stranger Gathering in the gulf below the stairs— As though the mystery of the manger Were written in the day-to-day affairs Of a world consecrated to Mammon, Yet governed by those sacred absences That make the spirit soar, and presences At one remove, like the sound of Cuban Drumbeats issuing from the Ricardos’ Love nest on the television station Like distant thunder; or Leonardo’s “Wave that flees the site of its creation.” In the desert far beyond the city, One hears the cadences for which one longs, The lyrics of those half-forgotten songs, —Some of them poignant, some of them witty— Brimming with the melody of passage; One feels the wind that blows the soul about, Repeating its inscrutable message; And as night falls, one sees the stars come out. I found myself beneath a canopy Of scenes left out of someone else’s life —The dog that didn’t bark, Rosebud, Cain’s wife— Arrayed above me in a panoply Of glittering debris, gigantic swirls Of stars, and slowly moving caravans Of stars like tiny Christmas lights or pearls Of tapioca, floating in a danse macabre across the heavens as I stood, Watching the pageant in the sky unfold. I felt the chill of something much too old To comprehend—not the Form of the Good, But something inchoate and violent, A Form of Darkness. Suddenly the songs Floating through the revelry fell silent, As in The Masque of the Red Death, as throngs Of the dead twinkled at me from above. The intimate domain of memory Became an endless field of entropy Transfigured, inking in the outlines of Eurydice entombed, Orpheus immured, And, in the center of their universe, That subtler diadem of stars obscured By the brighter constellations, the Hearse. Standing off to one side, as though bereft, There was a figure with averted eyes, Gesturing in a language of surprise That took possession of my heart, yet left The question of her meaning unresolved. I looked at her. It was time to begin. The apparations in the sky dissolved, Leaving me alone, and growing old. In The wide, unstructured heavens overhead The stars were still shining. When I got home, The message light was blinking on the phone. I don’t remember what the message said.

Sometimes I dream what’s called the male dream : I’m going somewhere not too far away, I’m almost there, When there’s a slight delay—a minor detour of no consequence, But then another, and another, as I get farther and farther Away from my initial destination, which becomes inaccessible. Before I left Berlin I went to Venice, a city that reminds me of that dream. However close you are to where you want to go, the compound Turnings of its narrow passageways and alleys carry you relentlessly away, Until you dead-end at a small canal that’s nowhere on your map. The late, wrecked century that started in Berlin, where all roads lead— I thought I’d find, if not the truth exactly, then at least an inkling Of some fantasy that lay beneath the placid surface of the day, The remnants of some dream so many people had to die for. Instead, I watched the boats go by, and clouds traverse the sky Above an unreal city floating on the water. We’re sure at first That something lies beyond the facts and books, but then we realize it isn’t there. Whatever lay behind the slaughter wasn’t in the world, Existing merely in the heart, in memory, in someone’s imagination, Places harboring nothing real. To try to see it is to watch it disappear, Stranding you a life away from where the unimaginable began, Staring blankly at your own face floating in the water.

It starts in sadness and bewilderment, The self-reflexive iconography Of late adolescence, and a moment When the world dissolves into a fable Of an alternative geography Beyond the threshold of the visible. And the heart is a kind of mute witness, Abandoning everything for the sake Of an unimaginable goodness Making its way across the crowded stage Of what might have been, leaving in its wake The anxiety of an empty page. Thought abhors a vacuum. Out of it came A partially recognizable shape Stumbling across a wilderness, whose name, Obscure at first, was sooner or later Sure to be revealed, and a landscape Of imaginary rocks and water And the dull pastels of the dimly lit Interior of a gymnasium. Is art the mirror of its opposite, Or is the world itself a mimesis? This afternoon at the symposium Someone tried to resurrect the thesis That a poem is a deflected sigh. And I remembered a day on a beach Thirty-five years ago, in mid-July, The summer before I left for college, With the future hanging just out of reach And constantly receding, like the edge Of the water floating across the sand. Poems are the fruit of the evasions Of a life spent trying to understand The vacuum at the center of the heart, And for all the intricate persuasions They enlist in the service of their art, Are finally small, disappointing things. Yet from them there materializes A way of life, a way of life that brings The fleeting pleasures of a vocation Made up of these constant exercises In what still passes for celebration, That began in a mood of hopelessness On an evening in a dormitory Years and years ago, and seemed to promise A respite from disquietude and care, But that left only the lovely story Of a bright presence hanging in the air.

I used to like being young, and I still do, Because I think I still am. There are physical Objections to that thought, and yet what Fascinates me now is how obsessed I was at thirty-five With feeling older than I was: it seemed so smart And worldly, so fastidiously knowing to dwell so much On time — on what it gives, what it destroys, on how it feels. And now it’s here and doesn’t feel like anything at all: A little warm perhaps, a little cool, but mostly waiting on my Life to fill it up, and meanwhile living in the light and listening To the music floating through my living room each night. It’s something you can only recognize in retrospect, long after Everything that used to fill those years has disappeared And they’ve become regrets and images, leaving you alone In a perpetual present, in a nondescript small room where it began. You find it in yourself: the ways that led inexorably from Home to here are simply stories now, leading nowhere anymore; The wilderness they led through is the space behind a door Through which a sentence flows, following a map in the heart. Along the way the self that you were born with turns into The self that you created, but they come together at the end, United in the memory where time began: the tinkling of a bell On a garden gate in Combray, or the clang of a driven nail In a Los Angeles backyard, or a pure, angelic clang in Nova Scotia — Whatever age restores. It isn’t the generalizations that I loved At thirty-five that move me now, but particular moments When my life comes into focus, and the feeling of the years Between them comes alive. Time stops, and then resumes its story, Like a train to Balbec or a steamer to Brazil. We moved to San Diego, Then I headed east, then settled in the middle of the country Where I’ve waited now for almost forty years, going through the Motions of the moments as they pass from now to nothing, Reading by their light. I don’t know why I’m reading them again — Elizabeth Bishop, Proust. The stories you remember feel like mirrors, And rereading them like leafing through your life at a certain age, As though the years were pages. I keep living in the light Under the door, waiting on those vague sensations floating in And out of consciousness like odors, like the smell of sperm and lilacs. In the afternoon I bicycle to a park that overlooks Lake Michigan, Linger on a bench and read Contre Sainte-Beuve and Time Reborn, A physics book that argues time is real. And that’s my life — It isn’t much, and yet it hangs together: its obsessions dovetail With each other, as the private world of my experience takes its place Within a natural order that absorbs it, but for a while lets it live. It feels like such a miracle, this life: it promises everything, And even keeps its promise when you’ve grown too old to care. It seems unremarkable at first, and then as time goes by it Starts to seem unreal, a figment of the years inside a universe That flows around them and dissolves them in the end, But meanwhile lets you linger in a universe of one — A village on a summer afternoon, a garden after dark, A small backyard beneath a boring California sky. I said I still felt young, and so I am, yet what that means Eludes me. Maybe it’s the feeling of the presence Of the past, or of its disappearance, or both of them at once — A long estrangement and a private singularity, intact Within a tinkling bell, an iron nail, a pure, angelic clang — The echo of a clear, metallic sound from childhood, Where time began: “Oh, beautiful sound, strike again!”

I think I like this room. The curtains and the furniture aren’t the same Of course, but the light comes in the window as it used to Late in the morning, after the others had gone to work. You can even shave in it. On the dresser with the mirror Are a couple of the pictures we took one afternoon Last May, walking down the alley in the late sunlight. I remember now how we held hands for fifteen minutes Afterwards. The words meander through the mirror But I don’t want them now, I don’t want these abbreviations. What I want in poetry is a kind of abstract photography Of the nerves, but what I like in photography Is the poetry of literal pictures of the neighborhood. The late afternoon sunlight is slanting through the window Again, sketching the room in vague gestures of discontent That roll off the mind, and then only seem to disappear. What am I going to do now? And how am I going to sleep tonight? A peculiar name flickers in the mirror, and then disappears.

I have a perfect life. It isn't much, But it's enough for me. It keeps me alive And happy in a vague way: no disappointments On the near horizon, no pangs of doubt; Looking forward in anticipation, looking back In satisfaction at the conclusion of each day. I heed the promptings of my inner voice, And what I hear is comforting, full of reassurance For my own powers and innate superiority—the fake Security of someone in the grip of a delusion, In denial, climbing ever taller towers Like a tiny tyrant looking on his little kingdom With a secret smile, while all the while Time lies in wait. And what feels ample now Turns colorless and cold, and what seems beautiful And strong becomes an object of indifference Reaching out to no one, as later middle age Turns old, and the strength is gone. Right now the moments yield to me sweet Feelings of contentment, but the human Dies, and what I take for granted bears a name To be forgotten soon, as the things I know Turn into unfamiliar faces In a strange room, leaving merely A blank space, like a hole left in the wake Of a perfect life, which closes over.

I In these I find my calling: In the shower, in the mirror, in unconscious Hours spent staring at a screen At artifacts complete unto themselves. I think of them as self-sufficient worlds Where I can sojourn for a while, Then wake to find the clouds dispersing And the sidewalks steaming with the Rain that must have fallen while I stayed inside. The sun is shining, and the quiet Doubts are answered with more doubts, For as the years begin to mirror one another And the diary in the brain implodes, What filters through the theories on the page Is a kind of settledness, an equilibrium Between the life I have and what time seemed to hold— These rooms, these poems, these ordinary streets That spring to life each summer in an intricate construction Blending failed hopes and present happiness— Which from the outside seems like self-deception. There is no end to these reflections, To their measured music with its dying fall Wherein the heart and what it seeks are reconciled. I live them, and as though in gratitude They shape my days, from morning with its sweetest smile Until the hour when sleep blows out the candle. Between, the present falls away, And for a while the old romance resumes, Familiar but unrecognized, an undiscovered place Concealed within the confines of this room, That seems at once a form of feeling and a state of grace Prepared for me, written in my name Against the time when time has finally merged These commonplace surroundings with what lies behind the veil— Leaving behind at least a version of the truth Composed of what I felt and what I saw outside my window On a summer morning; melding sound and sense, A music and a mood, together in a hesitant embrace That makes them equal at the end. II There may be nothing for a poem to change But an atmosphere: conventional or strange, Its meaning is enclosed by the perception —Better, by the misperception— Of what time held and what the future knew; Which is to say this very moment. And yet the promise of a distant Purpose is what makes each moment new. There may be nothing for the soul to say In its defense, except to describe the way It came to find itself at the impasse Morning reveals in the glass— The road that led away from home to here, That began in wonderment and hope, But that ended in the long slope Down to loneliness and the fear of fear. The casuistry is all in the event, Contingent on what someone might have meant Or might still mean. What feels most frightening Is the thought that when the lightning Has subsided, and the clearing sky Appears at last above the stage To mark the only end of age, That God, that distant and unseeing eye, Would see that none of this had ever been: That none of it, apparent or unseen, Was ever real, and all the private words, Which seemed to fill the air like birds Exploding from the brush, were merely sounds Without significance or sense, Inert and dead beneath the dense Expanse of the earth in its impassive rounds. There may be no rejoinder to that thought. There may be nothing that one could have sought That might have lent the search significance, Or even a kind of coherence. Perhaps. Yet closer to me than the grandeur Of the vast and the uncreated Is the calm of this belated Moment in its transitory splendor. III Someone asked about the aura of regret And disappointment that surrounds these poems, About the private facts those feelings might conceal, And what their source was in my life. I said that none of it was personal, That as lives go my own life was a settled one, Comprising both successes and misfortunes, the successes Not especially striking, the misfortunes small. And yet the question is a real one, And not for me alone, though certainly for me. For even if, as Wittgenstein once claimed, That while the facts may stay the same And what is true of one is true of both, The happy and unhappy man inhabit different worlds, One still would want to know which world this is, And how that other one could seem so close. So much of how life feels lies in the phrasing, In the way a thought starts, then turns back upon itself Until its question hangs unanswered in the breeze. Perhaps the sadness is a way of seeming free, Of denying what can change or disappear, Of tearing free from circumstance, As though the soul could only speak out from the Safety of some private chamber in the air. Let me try once more. I think the saddest moments Are the ones that also seem most beautiful, For the nature of a moment is to fade, Leaving everything unaltered, and the landscape Where the light fell as it was before. And time makes poetry from what it takes away, And the measure of experience Is not that it be real, but that it last, And what one knows is simply what one knew, And what I want is simply what I had. These are the premises that structure what I feel, The axioms that govern my imagination, And beneath them lies the fear— Not the fear of the unknown, but the fear of growing old Unchanged, of looking in the mirror At a future that repeats itself ad infinitum. It could be otherwise so easily. The transience that lectures so insistently of loss Could speak as clearly of an openness renewed, A life made sweeter by its changing; And the shadows of the past Could seem a shade where one could linger for a while Before returning to the world, and moving on. The way would be the same in either case, Extending for an unknown span of years Experienced from two perspectives, a familiar course Accessible to all, yet narrowing, As the journey nears its end, to one. The difference isn’t in the details Or the destination, but in how things feel along the road: The secret of the quest lies all around me, While what lurks below the surface is another story, One of no more consequence or import than the last. What matters isn’t what one chances to believe, But the force of one’s attachments, And instead of looking for an answer in a dream Set aside the question, let the songs continue Going through the motions of the days And waking every morning to this single world, Whether in regret, or in celebration. IV Each day begins as yesterday began: A cat in silhouette in the dim light Of what the morning holds— Breakfast and The New York Times, a man Taking a shower, a poem taking flight As a state of mind unfolds So unpredictably. Through the hot summer air I walk to a building where I give a lecture on philosophy In the strict sense; then go home to the cat. A narrow life; or put another way, A life whose facts can all Be written on a page, the narrow format Of this tiny novel of a day, Ulysses written small, A diary so deep Its rhythms seem unreal: A solitary meal. Some records or a movie. And then sleep. V At the ending of the remake of The Thing Kurt Russell and one other guy Are all that’s left of what had been the crew Of an Antarctic outpost. Some horrifying presence —Some protean thing—establishes itself Inside the person of an ordinary man And then, without a warning, erupts in devastation. The two survivors eye each other slowly, Neither knowing whether one of them Still holds the horror. “What do we do now?” The second asks, and Russell says, “Let’s see what happens,” and the movie ends. “Horror” is too strong, but substitute the fear I spoke about before, and the scene is apt. I don’t know, as no one really knows, What might lie waiting in the years to come, But sometimes when the question touches me I feel afraid— Not of age, but an age that seems a prolongation of this afternoon, That looks ahead, and looks instead into itself. This is the fear that draws me back inside: That this is all there is, that what I hold so easily Will vanish soon, and nothing like it will be given me again. The days will linger and the nights rehearse themselves Until the secret of my life has finally emerged— Not in devastation, but in a long decline That leads at least as surely to a single end. And then I turn away and see the sky That soars above the streets of North Point North, Reducing everyone to anonymity, an anonymity In which I find a kind of possibility, a kind of freedom As the world—the only world—rolls on its way, Oblivious to anything I might say, or that might happen in a poem. A poem can seize and hold a moment fast, yet it can Limit what there is to feel, and stake a distance from the world. The neighborhood around me wakes each day to lives No different than my own, lives harboring the same ambitions And regrets, but living on the humbler stuff of happiness. The disappointments come and go; what stays Is part of an abiding presence, human and serene. The houses wait unquestioning in the light Of an approaching summer evening, while a vast Contentment answers from the air. I think I know where this is going to end, But still my pleasure is to wait— Not wait, perhaps, for anything within, But for what lies outside. Let’s see what happens.

Words can bang around in your head Forever, if you let them and you give them room. I used to love poetry, and mostly I still do, Though sometimes “I, too, dislike it.” There must be Something real beyond the fiddle and perfunctory Consolations and the quarrels—as of course There is, though what it is is difficult to say. The salt is on the briar rose, the fog is in the fir trees. I didn’t know what it was, and I don’t know now, But it was what I started out to do, and now, a lifetime later, All I’ve really done. The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, Rivers and Mountains : I sat in my room Alone, their fragments shored against the ruin or revelation That was sure to come, breathing in their secret atmosphere, Repeating them until they almost seemed my own. We like to think our lives are what they study to become, And yet so much of life is waiting, waiting on a whim. So much of what we are is sheer coincidence, Like a sentence whose significance is retrospective, Made up out of elementary particles that are in some sense Simply sounds, like syllables that finally settle into place. You probably think that this is a poem about poetry (And obviously it is), yet its real subject is time, For that’s what poetry is—a way to live through time And sometimes, just for a while, to bring it back. *     *     * A paneled dining room in Holder Hall. Stage right, enter twit: “Mr. Ashbery, I’m your biggest campus fan.” We hit it off And talked about “The Skaters” and my preference for “Clepsydra” Vs. “Fragment.” Later on that night John asked me to a party in New York, And Saturday, after dinner and a panel on the artist’s role as something (And a party), driving Lewis’s Austin-Healey through the rain I sealed our friendship with an accident. The party was on Broadway, An apartment (white of course, with paintings) just downstairs From Frank O’Hara’s, who finally wandered down. I talked to him A little about Love Poems (Tentative Title) , which pleased him, And quoted a line from “Poem” about the rain, which seemed to please him too. The party ended, John and I went off to Max’s, ordered steaks And talked about our mothers. All that talking!—poems and paintings, Parents, all those parties, and the age of manifestos still to come! I started coming to New York for lunch. We’d meet at Art News , Walk to Fifty-sixth Street to Larre’s, a restaurant filled with French expatriates, Have martinis and the prix fixe for $2.50 (!), drink rose de Provence And talk (of course) about Genet and James and words like “Coca-Cola.” It was an afternoon in May when John brought up a play That he and Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara—Holy Trinity! ( Batman was in vogue)—had started years ago and never finished. There was a dictator named Edgar and some penicillin, But that’s all I remember. They hadn’t actually been together In years, but planned to finish it that night at John’s new apartment On Ninety-fifth Street, and he said to come by for a drink Before they ate and got to work. It was a New York dream Come true: a brownstone floor-through, white and full of paintings (Naturally), “with a good library and record collection.” John had procured a huge steak, and as I helped him set the table The doorbell rang and Frank O’Hara, fresh from the museum And svelte in a hound’s tooth sports coat entered, followed shortly By “excitement-prone Kenneth Koch” in somber gray, And I was one with my immortals. In the small mythologies We make up out of memories and the flow of time A few moments remain frozen, though the feel of them is lost, The feel of talk. It ranged from puns to gossip, always coming back To poems and poets. Frank was fiercely loyal to young poets (Joe Ceravolo’s name came up I think), and when I mentioned Lewis In a way that must have sounded catty, he leapt to his defense, Leaving me to backtrack in embarrassment and have another drink, Which is what everyone had. I think you see where it was going: Conversation drifting into dinner, then I stayed for dinner And everyone forgot about the play, which was never finished (Though I think I’ve seen a fragment of it somewhere). I see a table In a cone of light, but there’s no sound except for Kenneth’s Deadpan “Love to see a boy eat” as I speared a piece of steak; And then the only voice I’m sure I hear is mine, As those moments that had once seemed singular and clear Dissolve into a “general mess of imprecision of feeling” And images, augmented by line breaks. There were phone calls, Other people arrived, the narrative of the night dissolved And finally everyone went home. School and spring wound down. The semester ended, then the weekend that I wrote about in “Sally’s Hair” Arrived and went, and then a late-night cruise around Manhattan for a rich friend’s Parents’ anniversary bash, followed by an Upper East Side preppie bar That left me looking for a place to crash, and so I rang John’s bell at 2 AM And failed (thank God) to rouse him, caught a plane to San Diego The next day, worked at my summer job and worked on poems And started reading Proust, and got a card one afternoon From Peter Schjeldahl telling me that Frank O’Hara had been killed. Ninety-fifth Street soldiered on for several years. I remember a cocktail party (the symposium of those days), Followed by dinner just around the corner at Elaine’s, Pre-Woody Allen. It was there I learned of R.F.K.’s assassination When I woke up on the daybed in the living room, and where John told me getting married would ruin me as a poet (I don’t know why—most of his friends were married), a judgment He revised when he met Susan and inscribed The Double Dream of Spring “If this is all we need fear from spinach, then I don’t mind so much” (Which was probably premature—watering his plants one day She soaked his landlord, Giorgio Cavallon, dozing in the garden below). It was where Peter Delacorte late one night recited an entire side Of a Firesign Theatre album from memory, and set John on that path, To his friends’ subsequent dismay, and where he blessed me with his extra copy Of The Poems , and next day had second thoughts (though I kept it anyway). Sometimes a vague, amorphous stretch of years assumes a shape, And then becomes an age, and then a golden age alive with possibilities, When change was in the air and you could wander through its streets As though through Florence and the Renaissance. I know it sounds ridiculous, But that’s the way life flows: in stages that take form in retrospect, When all the momentary things that occupy the mind from day to day Have vanished into time, and something takes their place that wasn’t there, A sense of freedom—one which gradually slipped away. The center Of the conversation moved downtown, the Renaissance gave way to mannerism As the junior faculty took charge, leaving the emeriti alone and out of it Of course, lying on the fringes, happily awake; but for the rest The laws proscribing what you couldn’t do were clear. I got so tired Of writing all those New York poems (though by then I’d moved to Boston— To Siena, you might say) that led to nowhere but the next one, So I started writing poems about whatever moved me: what it’s like To be alive within a world that holds no place for you, yet seems so beautiful; The feeling of the future, and its disappointments; the trajectory of a life, That always brought me back to time and memory (I’d finished Proust by then), And brings me back to this. John finally moved downtown himself, Into a two-story apartment at Twenty-fifth and Tenth, with a spiral staircase Leading to a library, the locus of the incident of Susan, Alydar and John And the pitcher of water (I’ll draw a veil over it), and Jimmy Schuyler sighing “It’s so beautiful ,” as Bernadette Peters sang “Raining in My Heart” from Dames at Sea . The poetry still continued—mine and everyone’s. I’d added Jimmy To my pantheon (as you’ve probably noticed), but the night in nineteen sixty-six Seemed more and more remote: I never saw Kenneth anymore, And there were new epicenters, with new casts of characters, like Madoo, Bob Dash’s garden in Sagaponack, and Bill and Willy’s loft in Soho. John moved again, to Twenty-second Street, and Susan and I moved to Milwaukee, Where our son was born. I stopped coming to New York, and writing poems, For several years, while I tried to dream enough philosophy for tenure. One afternoon in May I found myself at Ninth and Twenty-second, And as though on cue two people whom I hadn’t seen in years—David Kalstone, Darragh Park—just happened by, and then I took a taxi down to Soho To the loft, and then a gallery to hear Joe Brainard read from I Remember , Back to John’s and out to dinner—as though I’d never been away, Though it was all too clear I had. Poems were in the air, but theory too, And members of the thought police department (who must have also gotten tenure) Turned up everywhere, with arguments that poetry was called upon to prove. It mattered, but in a different way, as though it floated free from poems And wasn’t quite the point. I kept on coming back, as I still do. Half my life was still to come, and yet the rest was mostly personal: I got divorced, and Willy killed himself, and here I am now, ready to retire. There was an obituary in the Times last week for Michael Goldberg, A painter you’ll recall from Frank O’Hara’s poems (“Why I Am Not a Painter,” “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births)”). I didn’t know him, But a few months after the soiree on Ninety-fifth Street I was at a party In his studio on the Bowery, which was still his studio when he died. The New York art world demimonde was there, including nearly everyone Who’s turned up in this poem. I remember staring at a guy who Looked like something from the Black Lagoon, dancing with a gorgeous Woman half his age. That’s my New York: an island dream Of personalities and evenings, nights where poetry was second nature And their lives flowed through it and around it as it gave them life. O brave new world (now old) that had such people in’t! *     *     * “The tiresome old man is telling us his life story.” I guess I am, but that’s what poets do—not always Quite as obviously as this, and usually more by indirection And omission, but beneath the poetry lies the singular reality And unreality of an individual life. I see it as a long, Illuminated tunnel, lined with windows giving on the scenes outside— On Ninety-fifth Street forty years ago. As life goes on You start to get increasingly distracted by your own reflection And the darkness gradually becoming visible at the end. I try not to look too far ahead, but just to stay here— Quick now, here, now, always —only something pulls me Back (as they say) to the day, when poems were more like secrets, With their own vernacular, and you could tell your friends By who and what they read. And now John’s practically become A national treasure, and whenever I look up I think I see him Floating in the sky like the Cheshire Cat. I don’t know What to make of it, but it makes me happy—like seeing Kenneth Just before he died (“I’m going west John, I’m going west”) In his apartment on a side street near Columbia, or remembering Once again that warm spring night in nineteen sixty-six. I like to think of them together once again, at the cocktail party At the end of the mind, where I could blunder in and ruin it one last time. Meanwhile, on a hillside in the driftless region to the west, A few miles from the small town where The Straight Story ends, I’m building a house on a meadow, if I’m permitted to return, Behind a screen of trees above a lower meadow, with some apple trees In which the fog collects on autumn afternoons, and a vista Of an upland pasture without heaviness. I see myself Sitting on the deck and sipping a martini, as I used to at Larre’s, In a future that feels almost like a past I’m positive is there— But where? I think my life is still all conversation, Only now it’s with myself. I can see it continuing forever, Even in my absence, as I close the windows and turn off the lights And it begins to rain. And then we’re there together In the house on the meadow, waiting for whatever’s left to come In what’s become the near future—two versions of myself And of the people that we knew, each one an other To the other, yet both indelibly there: the twit of twenty And the aging child of sixty-two, still separate And searching in the night, listening through the night To the noise of the rain and memories of rain And evenings when we’d wander out into the Renaissance, When I could see you and talk to you and it could still change ; And still there in the morning when the rain has stopped, And the apples are all getting tinted in the cool light.

The philosopher David Lewis spun a fantasy of two omniscient gods who know about one world, which might as well be ours. Each knows precisely all there is to know, the grand “totality of facts, not things.” Each knows the pattern of the light on each neglected leaf millennia ago. Each knows the number of the stars, their ages, all the distances between them, all the “things too tiny to be remembered in recorded history—the backfiring of a bus/In a Paris street in 1932,” as well as all the things that history distorts or just can’t see, like the thought that must have flashed across Patroklos’s mind (if he’d existed and had had a mind—the middle knowledge of the schoolmen) when Hektor split his stomach with a spear (if he’d existed too). Each one looks on, as though through ordinary eyes, as “Mme Swann’s enormous coachman, supervised by a groom no bigger than his fist and as infantile as St George in the picture, endeavored to curb the ardour of the quivering steel-tipped pinions with which they thundered over the ground,” and sees “the gray ‘toppers’ of old” the gentlemen strolling with her wore, the little “woolen cap from which stuck out two blade-like partridge feathers” that she wore (or would have worn if they and she’d been real). Each monitors the photons through the slits, the slow decay of radium, and knows the ratio of vermouth to gin in someone’s first martini at Larre’s. Each knows what Darragh, Geoff and Willy knew before the bullet or the pavement killed their worlds, and where the shots came from in Dallas. Each knows precisely what the other knows, in all the senses of those words, and if a question has a factual answer, each can answer it. Yet there’s a question neither can resolve: which god am I? The question posits both a world and a unique perspective on that world, which neither has. And if gods One and Two could reify themselves by wondering who or what they were, they’d have to know the answer—and, because they don’t, they can’t. Could gods like those be real, in something like the sense that you and I are real? But then, what sense is that? Gods One and Two are you and I writ large: I wander out into the day and feel the sunlight on my face. I see the sunlight on the first spring leaves like green foam on the trees, and so do you. The world we have in common, that the gods can comprehend in its entirety, remains beyond my grasp, and yours. The world I know belongs entirely to me, as yours belongs entirely to you. I know my world completely, as the gods know ours, because it’s nothing but my take on things, and starts and ends with me. I’m both the author and the captive of my world, because my take on things is all there is to me. When Mary, in Frank Jackson’s philosophical diversion, wanders from her room of black and white and shades of gray and finally sees a rose, and then goes on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, and drinks coffee, and talks for hours, it’s hard to see how all of this(as she might say) could be an artifact of her perspective. But it is. So what? Philosophers tell stories, but they make them up, and what are they to me? Sometimes I think I’m humoring myself (a good thing I suppose) with an extended exercise in nonsense.Have breakfast,have a cup of strong black common sense, get over it, I tell myself, refuting Berkeley with my foot. Instead of this entanglement of self with self, why can’t I just relax into my place inside the natural order, be a thing within the solid scheme of things, a Dane in Denmark? How can fantasies, unreal by definition, show me what I am, and know? How can the poetry of possibilities dissolve the prose of facts? My little life sustains me while it can, and that’s enough. It may be all contingent, but it’s real, and when catastrophes occur, as they inevitably do, I’d rather they occur to me, instead of writing them away, or redefining happiness or sorrow or tranquility as alterations of some abstract point of view that points at nothing. Inescapable illusions must be real, or might as well be real, no matter where reflection on them leads; and if accepting them means taking things on faith, that’s fine. Who wants to be a posit, or a site of possibilities? Who wants to walk out and evaporate into this green spring day? Who wants to have sex with a wraith? No matter where reflection on them leads. It leads, of course, to me. A cri de coeur is not an argument, but where the real argument begins. Hopkins: “searching nature I taste self at one tankard, that of my own being.” Kant: “the feeling of an existence without the least concept,” meaning that despite the certainty I have, I’ve no idea what I really am, or where, and as for “searching nature,” I have no idea even where to start. These matters mean the world to me, and yet no matter how I try to come to grips with them, they slip away.I and here and now are ever present, yet they vanish in the act of apprehension, as a poem turns into language as you write it down. Dimensionless, atemporal, imprisoned in the present—even as I say them to myself the words fall short of what I thought I started out to say, like the conclusion of an argument too close to me to share, or like an empty thought balloon that hangs above me in the air. It’s not the question of what makes me who I am through time—of how a figure in a photograph from 1985, a couple sitting in the garden of the small Hôtel des Marronniers just off the rue Jacob, could be the person who remembers her and thinks of him today—but of what constitutes me now, and of what made me then. If giving it a name won’t help, then neither will pretending it’s divine. If I should be supplanted by a bright recording angel knowing everything about me in the way the gods know all about their world, I wouldn’t have survived. She takes the whole thing in—the house on Maxim Street, the bike rides down the hill on Wabash Street, my high school friends, their friends, the friends of friends of friends—with eyes that monitor my back, my face, the traces in my brain projected on a screen, the n degrees of separation linking me to nearly everyone who’s ever lived, a thing within a wilderness of things, with each one locked inside a universe with no outside, of which there’s nothing she can see. How could it be an afterlife? It’s just a different life, another life, complete or incomplete as anyone’s, consumed by questions that elude it, not because she can’t remember, but because the words that make them up are undefined: which one of them was I? which world was mine?

Snow melts into the earth and a gentle breeze Loosens the damp gum wrappers, the stale leaves Left over from autumn, and the dead brown grass. The sky shakes itself out. And the invisible birds Winter put away somewhere return, the air relaxes, People start to circulate again in twos and threes. The dominant feelings are the blue sky, and the year. —Memories of other seasons and the billowing wind; The light gradually altering from difficult to clear As a page melts and a photograph develops in the backyard. When some men came to tear down the garage across the way The light was still clear, but the salt intoxication Was already dissipating into the atmosphere of constant day April brings, between the isolation and the flowers. Now the clouds are lighter, the branches are frosted green, And suddenly the season that had seemed so tentative before Becomes immediate, so clear the heart breaks and the vibrant Air is laced with crystal wires leading back from hell. Only the distraction, and the exaggerated sense of care Here at the heart of spring—all year long these feelings Alternately wither and bloom, while a dense abstraction Hides them. But now the mental dance of solitude resumes, And life seems smaller, placed against the background Of this story with the empty, moral quality of an expansive Gesture made up out of trees and clouds and air. The loneliness comes and goes, but the blue holds, Permeating the early leaves that flutter in the sunlight As the air dances up and down the street. Some kids yell. A white dog rolls over on the grass and barks once. And Although the incidents vary and the principal figures change, Once established, the essential tone and character of a season Stays inwardly the same day after day, like a person’s. The clouds are frantic. Shadows sweep across the lawn And up the side of the house. A dappled sky, a mild blue Watercolor light that floats the tense particulars away As the distraction starts. Spring here is at first so wary, And then so spare that even the birds act like strangers, Trying out the strange air with a hesitant chirp or two, And then subsiding. But the season intensifies by degrees, Imperceptibly, while the colors deepen out of memory, The flowers bloom and the thick leaves gleam in the sunlight Of another city, in a past which has almost faded into heaven. And even though memory always gives back so much more of What was there than the mind initially thought it could hold, Where will the separation and the ache between the isolated Moments go when summer comes and turns this all into a garden? Spring here is too subdued: the air is clear with anticipation, But its real strength lies in the quiet tension of isolation And living patiently, without atonement or regret, In the eternity of the plain moments, the nest of care —Until suddenly, all alone, the mind is lifted upward into Light and air and the nothingness of the sky, Held there in that vacant, circumstantial blue until, In the vehemence of a landscape where all the colors disappear, The quiet absolution of the spirit quickens into fact, And then, into death. But the wind is cool. The buds are starting to open on the trees. Somewhere up in the sky an airplane drones.