John Koethe

for Susan Koethe This is the life I wanted, and could never see. For almost twenty years I thought that it was enough: That real happiness was either unreal, or lost, or endless, And that remembrance was as close to it as I could ever come. And I believed that deep in the past, buried in my heart Beyond the depth of sight, there was a kingdom of peace. And so I never imagined that when peace would finally come It would be on a summer evening, a few blocks away from home In a small suburban park, with some children playing aimlessly In an endless light, and a lake shining in the distance. Eventually, sometime around the middle of your life, There’s a moment when the first imagination begins to wane. The future that had always seemed so limitless dissolves, And the dreams that used to seem so real float up and fade. The years accumulate; but they start to take on a mild, Human tone beyond imagination, like the sound the heart makes Pouring into the past its hymns of adoration and regret. And then gradually the moments quicken into life, Vibrant with possibility, sovereign, dense, serene; And then the park is empty and the years are still. I think the saddest memory is of a kind of light, A kind of twilight, that seemed to permeate the air For a few years after I’d grown up and gone away from home. It was limitless and free. And of course I was going to change, But freedom means that only aspects ever really change, And that as the past recedes and the future floats away You turn into what you are. And so I stayed basically the same As what I’d always been, while the blond light in the trees Became part of my memory, and my voice took on the accents Of a mind infatuated with the rhetoric of farewell. And now that disembodied grief has gone away. It was a flickering, literary kind of sadness, The suspension of a life between two other lives Of continual remembrance, between two worlds In which there’s too much solitude, too much disdain. But the sadness that I felt was real sadness, And this elation now a real tremor as the deepening Shadows lengthen upon the lake. This calm is real, But how much of the real past can it absorb? How far into the future can this peace extend? I love the way the light falls over the suburbs Late on these summer evenings, as the buried minds Stir in their graves, the hearts swell in the warm earth And the soul settles from the air into its human home. This is where the prodigal began, and now his day is ending In a great dream of contentment, where all night long The children sleep within tomorrow’s peaceful arms And the past is still, and suddenly we turn around and smile At the memory of a vast, inchoate dream of happiness, Now that we know that none of it is ever going to be. Don’t you remember how free the future seemed When it was all imagination? It was a beautiful park Where the sky was a page of water, and when we looked up, There were our own faces, shimmering in the clear air. And I know that this life is the only real form of happiness, But sometimes in its midst I can hear the dense, stifled sob Of the unreal one we might have known, and when that ends And my eyes are filled with tears, time seems to have stopped And we are alone in the park where it is almost twenty years ago And the future is still an immense, open dream.

I drove to Oak Park, took two tours, And looked at some of the houses. I took the long way back along the lake. The place that I came home to—a cavernous Apartment on the East Side of Milwaukee— Seems basically a part of that tradition, With the same admixture of expansion and restraint: The space takes off, yet leaves behind a nagging Feeling of confinement, with the disconcerting sense That while the superficial conflicts got resolved, The underlying tensions brought to equilibrium, It isn’t yet a place in which I feel that I can live. Imagine someone reading. Contemplate a man Oblivious to his settings, and then a distant person Standing in an ordinary room, hemmed in by limitations, Yet possessed by the illusion of an individual life That blooms within its own mysterious enclosure, In a solitary space in which the soul can breathe And where the heart can stay—not by discovering it, But by creating it, by giving it a self-sustaining Atmosphere of depth, both in the architecture, And in the unconstructed life that it contains. In a late and very brief remark, Freud speculates That space is the projection of a “psychic apparatus” Which remains almost entirely oblivious to itself; And Wright extols “that primitive sense of shelter” Which can turn a house into a refuge from despair. I wish that time could bring the future back again And let me see things as they used to seem to me Before I found myself alone, in an emancipated state— Alone and free and filled with cares about tomorrow. There used to be a logic in the way time passed That made it flow directly towards an underlying space Where all the minor, individual lives converged. The moments borrowed their perceptions from the past And bathed the future in a soft, familiar light I remembered from home, and which has faded. And the voices get supplanted by the rain, The nights seem colder, and the angel in the mind That used to sing to me beneath the wide suburban sky Turns into dreamwork and dissolves into the air, While in its place a kind of monument appears, Magnificent in isolation, compromised by proximity And standing in a small and singular expanse— As though the years had been a pretext for reflection, And my life had been a phase of disenchantment— As the faces that I cherished gradually withdraw, The reassuring settings slowly melt away, And what remains is just a sense of getting older. In a variation of the parable, the pure of heart Descend into a kingdom that they never wanted And refused to see. The homely notions of the good, The quaint ideas of perfection swept away like Adolescent fictions as the real forms of life Deteriorate with manically increasing speed, The kind man wakes into a quiet dream of shelter, And the serenity it brings—not in reflection, But in the paralyzing fear of being mistaken, Of losing everything, of acquiescing in the Obvious approach (the house shaped like a box; The life that can’t accommodate another’s)— As the heart shrinks down to tiny, local things. Why can’t the more expansive ecstasies come true? I met you more than thirty years ago, in 1958, In Mrs. Wolford’s eighth grade history class. All moments weigh the same, and matter equally; Yet those that time brings back create the fables Of a happy or unsatisfying life, of minutes Passing on the way to either peace or disappointment— Like a paper calendar on which  it’s always autumn And we’re back in school again; or a hazy afternoon Near the beginning of October, with the World Series Playing quietly on the radio, and the windows open, And the California sunlight filling up the room. When I survey the mural stretched across the years —Across my heart—I notice mostly small, neglected Parts of no importance to the whole design, but which, In their obscurity, seem more permanent and real. I see the desks and auditorium, suffused with Yellow light connoting earnestness and hope that Still remains there, in a space pervaded by a Soft and supple ache too deep to contemplate— As though the future weren’t real, and the present Were amorphous, with nothing to hold on to, And the past were there forever. And the art That time inflicts upon its subjects can’t Eradicate the lines sketched out in childhood, Which harden into shapes as it recedes. I wish I knew a way of looking at the world That didn’t find it wanting, or of looking at my Life that didn’t always see a half-completed Structure made of years and filled with images And gestures emblematic of the past, like Gatsby’s Light, or Proust’s imbalance on the stones. I wish there were a place where I could stay And leave the world alone—an enormous stadium Where I could wander back and forth across a field Replete with all the incidents and small details That gave the days their textures, that bound the Minutes into something solid, and that linked them All together in a way that used to seem eternal. We used to go to dances in my family’s ancient Cadillac, which blew up late one summer evening Climbing up the hill outside Del Mar. And later I can see us steaming off the cover of the Beatles’ Baby-butcher album at your house in Mission Bay; And three years later listening to the Velvet Underground performing in a roller skating rink. Years aren’t texts, or anything like texts; And yet I often think of 1968 that way, as though That single year contained the rhythms of the rest, As what began in hope and eagerness concluded in Intractable confusion, as the wedding turned into a Puzzling fiasco over poor John Godfrey’s hair. The parts were real, and yet the dense and living Whole they once composed seems broken now, its Voice reduced to disembodied terms that speak to me More distantly each day, until the tangled years Are finally drained of feeling, and collapse into a Sequence of the places where we lived: your parents’ House in Kensington, and mine above the canyon: Then the flat by Sears in Cambridge, where we Moved when we got married, and the third floor Of the house on Francis Avenue, near Harvard Square; The big apartment in Milwaukee where we lived the Year that John was born, and last of all the House in Whitefish Bay, where you live now And all those years came inexplicably undone In mid-July. The sequence ended late last year. Suppose we use a lifetime as a measure of the world As it exists for one. Then half of mine has ended, While the fragment which has recently come to be Contains no vantage point from which to see it whole. I think that people are the sum of their illusions, That the cares that make them difficult to see Are eased by distance, with their errors blending In an intricate harmony, their truths abiding In a subtle “spark” or psyche (each incomparable, Yet each the same as all the others) and their Disparate careers all joined together in a tangled Moral vision whose intense, meandering design Seems lightened by a pure simplicity of feeling, As in grief, or in the pathos of a life Cut off by loneliness, indifference or hate, Because the most important thing is human happiness— Not in the sense of private satisfactions, but of Lives that realize themselves in ordinary terms And with the quiet inconsistencies that make them real. The whole transcends its tensions, like the intimate Reflections on the day that came at evening, whose Significance was usually overlooked, or misunderstood, Because the facts were almost always unexceptional. Two years ago we took our son to Paris. Last night I picked him up and took him to a Lou Reed show, And then took him home. I look at all the houses as I Walk down Hackett Avenue to work. I teach my classes, Visit friends, cook introspective meals for myself, Yet in the end the minutes don’t add up. What’s lost Is the perception of the world as something good And held in common; as a place to be perfected In the kinds of everyday divisions and encounters That endowed it with integrity and structure, And that merged its private moments with the past. What broke it into pieces? What transformed the Flaws that gave it feeling into objects of a deep and Smoldering resentment—like coming home too early, Or walking too far ahead of you on the rue Jacob? I wish that life could be a window on the sun, Instead of just this porch where I can stand and Contemplate the wires that lace the parking lot And feel it moving towards some unknown resolution. The Guggenheim Museum just reopened. Tonight I Watched a segment of the news on PBS—narrated by a Woman we met years ago at Bob’s—that showed how Most of Wright’s interior had been restored, And how the ramp ascends in spirals towards the sky. I like the houses better—they flow in all directions, Merging with the scenery and embodying a milder, More domestic notion of perfection, on a human scale That doesn’t overwhelm the life that it encloses. Isn’t there a way to feel at home within the Confines of this bland, accommodating structure Made of souvenirs and emblems, like the hammock Hanging in the backyard of an undistinguished Prairie School house in Whitefish Bay—the lineal, Reduced descendant of the “Flameproof” Wright house Just a block or two away from where I live now? I usually walk along the street on Sunday, Musing on how beautiful it seems, how aspects of it Recapitulate the Oak Park house and studio, with Open spaces buried in a labyrinthine interior, And with the entrance half-concealed on the side— A characteristic feature of his plans that made it Difficult to find, although the hope was that in Trying to get inside, the visitor’s eye would come to Linger over subtleties he might have failed to see— In much the way that in the course of getting older, And trying to reconstruct the paths that led me here, I found myself pulled backwards through these old, Uncertain passages, distracted by the details, And meeting only barriers to understanding why the Years unfolded as they did, and why my life Turned out the way it has—like his signature “Pathway of Discovery,” with each diversion Adding to the integrity of the whole. There is this sweep life has that makes the Accidents of time and place seem small. Everything alters, and the personal concerns That love could hold together for a little while Decay, and then the world seems strange again, And meaningless and free. I miss the primitive Confusions, and the secret way things came to me Each evening, and the pain. I still wonder Where the tears went, standing in my room each day And quietly inhabiting a calm, suspended state Enveloped by the emptiness that scares and thrills me, With the background noise cascading out of nothing Like a song that makes the days go by, a song Incorporating everything—not into what it says, But simply in the way it touches me, a single Image of dispersal, the inexhaustible perception Of contingency and transience and isolation. It brings them back to me. I have the inwardness I think I must have wanted, and the quietude, The solitary temper, and this space where I can Linger with the silence curling all around me Like the sound of pure passage, waiting here Surrounded by the furniture, the books and lists And all these other emblems of the floating world, The prints of raindrops that begin as mist, that fall Discreetly through the atmosphere, and disappear. And then I feel them in the air, in a reserved, More earthly music filled with voices reassembling In a wellspring of remembrance, talking to me again, And finding shelter in the same evasive movements I can feel in my own life, cloaked in a quiet Dignity that keeps away the dread of getting old, And fading out of other people’s consciousness, And dying –with its deepest insecurities and fears Concealed by their own protective colorations, As the mind secretes its shell and calls it home. It has the texture of an uncreated substance, Hovering between the settings it had come to love And some unformulated state I can’t imagine— Waiting for the telephone to ring, obsessed with Ways to occupy these wide, unstructured hours, And playing records by myself, and waking up alone. All things are disparate, yet subject to the same Intense, eradicating wills of time and personality, Like waves demolishing the walls love seemed to build Between our lives and emptiness, the certainty they Seemed to have just two or three short years ago, Before the anger spread its poison over everything. I think about the way our visions locked together In a nightmare play of nervousness and language, Living day to day inside the concentrated Force of that relentless argument, whose words Swept over us in formless torrents of anxiety, two People clinging to their versions of their lives Almost like children—living out each other’s Intermittent fantasies, that fed upon themselves As though infected by some vile, concentrated hatred; Who then woke up and planned that evening’s dinner. It’s all memories now, and distance. Miles away The cat is sleeping on the driveway, John’s in school, And sunlight filters through a curtain in the kitchen. Nothing really changes—the external world intrudes And then withdraws, and then becomes continuous again. I went downtown today and got a lamp with pendant Lanterns made of opalescent art glass—part, I guess, Of what this morning’s paper called the “Wright craze.” I like the easy way the days go by, the parts of aging That have come to seem familiar, and the uneventful Calm that seems to settle on the house at night. Each morning brings the mirror’s reassuring face, As though the years had left the same enduring person Simplified and changed—no longer vaguely desperate, No longer torn, yet still impatient with himself And still restless; but drained of intricacy and rage, Like a mild paradox—uninteresting in its own right, Yet existing for the sake of something stranger. Now and then our life comes over me, in brief, Involuntary glimpses of that world that blossom Unexpectedly, in fleeting moments of regret That come before the ache, the pang that gathers Sharply, like an indrawn breath—a strange and Thoughtful kind of pain, as though a steel Band had somehow snapped inside my heart. I don’t know. But what I do know is that None of it is ever going to come to me again. Why did I think a person only distantly like me Might finally represent my life? What aspects Of my attitudes, my cast of mind, my inconclusive Way of tossing questions at the world had I Supposed might realize another person’s fantasies And turn her into someone else—who gradually became A separate part of me, and argued with the very Words I would have used, and looked at me through Eyes I’d looked at as though gazing at myself? I guess we only realize ourselves in dreams, Or in these self-reflexive reveries sustaining All the charms that contemplation holds—until the Long enchantment of the soul with what it sees Is lifted, and it startles at a space alight with Objects of its infantile gaze, like people in a mall. I saw her just the other day. I felt a kind of Comfort at her face, one tinctured with bemusement At the strange and guarded person she’d become— Attractive, vaguely friendly, brisk (too brisk), But no one I could think might represent my life. Why did I even try to see myself in what’s outside? The strangeness pushes it away, propels the vision Back upon itself, into these regions filled with Shapes that I can wander through and never see, As though their image were inherently unreal. The houses on a street, the quiet backyard shade, The room restored to life with bric-a-brac— I started by revisiting these things, then slowly Reconceiving them as forms of loss made visible That balanced sympathy and space inside an Abstract edifice combining reaches of the past With all these speculations, all this artful Preening of the heart. I sit here at my desk, Perplexed and puzzled, teasing out a tangled Skein of years we wove together, and trying to Combine the fragments of those years into a poem. Who cares if life—if someone’s actual life—is Finally insignificant and small? There’s still a Splendor in the way it flowers once and fades And leaves a carapace behind. There isn’t time to Linger over why it happened, or attempt to make its Mystery come to life again and last, like someone Still embracing the confused perceptions of himself Embedded in the past, as though eternity lay there— For heaven’s a delusion, and eternity is in the details, And this tiny, insubstantial life is all there is. —And that would be enough, but for the reoccurring Dreams I often have of you. Sometimes at night The banished unrealities return, as though a room Suffused with light and poetry took shape around me. Pictures line the walls. It’s early summer. Somewhere in Remembrance of ThingsPast, Marcel, Reflecting on his years with “Albertine”—with X— Suggests that love is just a consciousness of distance, Of the separation of two lives in time and space. I think the same estrangement’s mirrored in each life, In how it seems both adequate and incomplete—part Day-to-day existence, part imaginary construct Beckoning at night, and sighing through my dreams Like some disconsolate chimera, or the subject Of a lonely, terrifying sadness; or the isolation Of a quiet winter evening, when the house feels empty, And silence intervenes. But in the wonderful Enclosure opening in my heart, I seem to recognize Our voices lilting in the yard, inflected by the Rhythms of a song whose words are seamless And whose lines are never-ending. I can almost See the contours of your face, and sense the Presence of the trees, and reimagine all of us Together in a deep, abiding happiness, as if the Three of us inhabited a fragile, made-up world That seemed to be so permanent, so real. I have this fantasy: It’s early in the evening. You and I are sitting in the backyard, talking. Friends arrive, then drinks and dinner, conversation… The lovely summer twilight lasts forever… What’s the use? What purpose do these speculations serve? What Mild enchantments do these meditations leave? They’re just the murmurs of an age, of middle age, That help to pass the time that they retrieve Before subsiding, leaving everything unchanged. Each of us at times has felt the future fade, Or seen the compass of his life diminished, Or realized some tangible illusion was unreal. Driving down to Evanston last week, I suddenly Remembered driving down that road eight years ago, So caught up in some story I’d just finished That I’d missed the way the countryside was changing— How in place of trees there now were office towers And theme parks, parts of a confusingly panoply of Barns and discount malls transfiguring a landscape Filled with high, receding clouds and rows of flimsy Houses in what used to be a field. I thought of Other people’s lives, and how impossible it seemed To grasp them on the model of my own—as little Mirrors of infinity—or sense their forms of Happiness, or in their minor personal upheavals Feel the sweep of time reduced to human scale And see its abstract argument made visible. I thought of overarching dreams of plenitude— How life lacks shape until it’s given one by love, And how each soul is both a kingdom in itself And part of some incorporating whole that Feels and has a face and lets it live forever. All of these seemed true, and cancelled one another, Leaving just the feeling of an unseen presence Tracing out the contours of a world erased, Like music tracing out the contours of the mind— For life has the form of a winding curve in space And in its wake the human figure disappears. Look at our surroundings—where a previous age Could visualize a landscape we see borders, Yet I think the underlying vision is the same: A person positing a world that he can see And can’t contain, and vexed by other people. Everything is possible; some of it seemed real Or nearly real, yet in the end it spoke to me alone, In phrases echoing the isolation of a meager Ledge above a waterfall, or rolling across a vast, Expanding plain on which there’s always room, But only room for one. It starts and ends Inside an ordinary room, while in the interim Brimming with illusions, filled with commonplace Delights that make the days go by, with simple Arguments and fears, and with the nervous Inkling of some vague, utopian conceit Transforming both the landscape and our lives, Until we look around and find ourselves at home, But in a wholly different world. And even those Catastrophes that seemed to alter everything Seem fleeting, grounded in a natural order All of us are subject to, and ought to celebrate. —Yet why? That things are temporary doesn’t Render them unreal, unworthy of regretting. It’s not as though the past had never happened: All those years were real, and their loss was real, And it is sad—I don’t know what else to call it. I’m glad that both of us seem happy. Yet what Troubles me is just the way what used to be a world Turned out, in retrospect, to be a state of mind, And no more tangible than that. And now it’s gone, And in its place I find the image of a process Of inexorable decay, or of some great unraveling That drags the houses forward into emptiness And backwards into pictures of the intervening days Love pieced together out of nothing. And I’m Certain that this austere vision finally is true, And yet it strikes me as too meager to believe. It comes from much too high above the world And seems to me too hopeless, too extreme— But then I found myself one winter afternoon Remembering a quiet morning in a classroom And inventing everything again, in ordinary Terms that seemed to comprehend a childish Dream of love, and then the loss of love, And all the intricate years between.

Is this what I was made for? Is the world that fits Like what I feel when I wake up each morning? Steamclouds Hovering over the lake, and smoke ascending from ten thousand chimneys As in a picture on a calendar, in a frieze of ordinary days? Beneath a sky of oatmeal gray, the land slides downwards from a Kmart parking lot Into a distance lined with bungalows, and then a vague horizon. Higher and higher, until its gaze becomes a part of what it sees, The mind ascends through layers of immobility into an unfamiliar atmosphere Where nothing lives, and with a sense of finally breaking free Attains its kingdom: a constructed space, or an imaginary city Bordered all around by darkness; or a city gradually sinking into age, Dominated by a television tower whose blue light warns the traveler away. People change, or drift away, or die. It used to be a country Bounded by possibility, from which the restless could embark And then come home to, and where the soul could find an emblem of itself. Some days I feel a momentary lightness, but then the density returns, The salt-encrusted cars drive by the factory where a clock tower Overlooks the highway, and the third shift ends. And then softly, The way the future used to sing to me when I was ten years old, I start to hear the murmur of a voice that isn’t mine at all, Formless and indistinct, the music of a world that holds no place for me; And then an image starts to gather in my mind—a picture of a room Where someone lingers at a window, staring at a nearly empty street Bordered by freight yards and abandoned tanneries. And then the bus stops And a man gets off, and stands still, and then walks away. Last night I had a dream in which the image of a long-forgotten love Hovered over the city. No one could remember what his name was Or where he came from, or decipher what that emptiness might mean; Yet on the corner, next to the USA Today machine, a woman seemed to wave at me, Until the stream of morning traffic blocked her from my view. It’s strange, the way a person’s life can feel so far away, Although the claims of its existence are encountered everywhere —In a drugstore, or on the cover of a tabloid, on the local news Or in the mail that came this morning, in the musings of some talk show host Whose face is an enigma and whose name is just a number in the phone book, But whose words are as pervasive as the atmosphere I breathe. Why can’t I find my name in this profusion? Nothing even stays, No image glances back at me, no inner angel hurls itself in rage Against the confines of this surface that confronts me everywhere I look —At home or far away, here or on the way back from the store— Behind an all-inclusive voice and personality, fashioned out of fear And scattered like a million isolated points transmitting random images Across a space alive with unconnected signals. I heard my name Once, but then the noise of waiting patiently resumed. It felt the same, Yet gradually the terms I used to measure out my life increased, Until I realized that I’d been driving down these streets for sixteen years. I was part of the surroundings: people looked at me the way I used to look at them, And most of what I felt seemed second nature. Now and then that sense I’d had in high school —Of a puzzlement about to lift, a language just about to start— Meandered into consciousness; but by and large I’d spend the days Like something in the background, or like part of a design too intricate to see. Wasn’t there supposed to be a stage at which the soul at last broke free And started to meet the world on equal terms? To feel a little more at home, More intensely realized, more successfully contained Within the arc of its achievements? Filled with reservations, Moods and private doubts, yet always moving, with increasing confidence, Towards a kind of summary, towards the apex of a long career Advancing down an avenue that opened on a space of sympathy and public understanding? Or howling like the wind in the wires outside my window, in a cacophony of rage? I don’t think so. Age is like the dreams one had in childhood, Some parts of which were true—I have the things I want, the words to misdescribe them, And the freedom to imagine what I think I feel. I think that most of what I feel remains unknown, But that beneath my life lies something intricate and real and Nearly close enough to touch. I live it, and I know I should explain it, Only I know I can’t—it’s just an image of my life that came to me one day, And which remained long after the delight it brought had ended. Sometimes I think I hear the sound of death approaching Like a song in the trees, a performance staged for me and me alone And written in the ersatz language of loss, the language of time passing, Or the sound of someone speaking decorously into the unknown —Like a voice picked up on the telephone when two lines cross momentarily —Overheard, and then half heard, and then gone.

for John Godfrey 1. Animals Carved—indicated, actually, from solid Blocks of wood, the copper-, cream-, and chocolate-colored Cows we bought in Salzburg form a tiny herd. And in Dr. Gachet’s etching, six Or seven universal poses are assumed by cats. Misery, hypocrisy, greed: A dying Mouse, a cat, and a flock of puzzled blackbirds wearing Uniforms and frock coats exhibit these traits. Formally outlasting the motive Of their creation with a poetry at once too vague And too precise to do anything with but Worship, they seem to have just blundered into our lives By accident, completely comprehending Everything we find so disturbing About them; but they never speak. They never even move From the positions in which Grandville or some Anonymous movie-poster artist has left them, A sort of ghostly wolf, a lizard, an ape And a huge dog. And their eyes, looking At nothing, manage to see everything invisible To ours, even with all the time in the world To see everything we think we have to see. And tell Of this in the only way we really can: With a remark as mild as the air In which it is to be left hanging; or a stiff scream, Folded like a sheet of paper over all The horrible memories of everything we were Going to have. That vanished before our eyes As we woke up to nothing but these, Our words, poor animals whose home is in another world. 2. Summer Home Tiny outbursts of sunlight play On the tips of waves that look like tacks Strewn on the surface of the bay. Up the coast the water backs up Behind a lofty, wooded island. Here, According to photographs, it is less Turbulent and blue; but much clearer. It seems to exercise the sunlight less Reflecting it, allowing beaten silver sheets To roam like water across a kitchen floor. Having begun gradually, the gravel beach Ends abruptly in the forest on the shore. Looked at from a distance, the forest seems Haunted. But safe within its narrow room Its light is innocent and green, as though Emerging from another dream of diminution We found ourselves of normal, human size, Attempting to touch the leaves above our heads. Why couldn’t we have spent our summers here, Surrounded and growing up again? Or perhaps Arrive here late at night by car, much later In life? If only heaven were not too near For such sadness. And not within this world Which heaven has finally made clear. Green lichen fastened to a blue rock Like a map of the spot; cobwebs crowded with stars Of water; battalions of small white flowers. Such clarity, unrelieved except by our Delight and daily acquiescence in it, Presumably the effect of a natural setting Like this one, with all its expectations of ecstasy And peace, demands a future of forgetting Everything that sustains it: the dead leaves Of winter; the new leaves of spring which summer burns Into different kinds of happiness; for these, When autumn drops its tear upon them, turn. 3. Domes “Pleased in proportion to the truth Depicted by means of familiar images.” That One was dazed; the other I left in a forest Surrounded by giant, sobering pines. For I had to abandon those lives. Their burden of living had become Mine and it was like dying: alone, Huddled under the cold blue dome of the stars, Still fighting what died and so close to myself I could not even see. I kept trying to look at myself. It was like looking into the sun and I went blind. O, to break open that inert light Like a stone and let the vision slowly sink down Into the texture of things, like a comb flowing through dark, Heavy hair; and to continue to be affected much later. I was getting so tired of that excuse: refusing love Until it might become so closely mated to its birth in Acts and words of love; until a soft monstrosity of song Might fuse these moments of affection with a dream of home; The cold, prolonged proximity of God long after night Has come and only starlight trickles through the dome; And yet I only wanted to be happy. I wanted rest and innocence; a place Where I could hide each secret fear by blessing it, By letting it survive inside those faces I could never understand, Love, or bear to leave. Because I wanted peace, bruised with prayer I tried to crawl inside the heavy, slaughtered hands of love And never move. And then I felt the wound unfold inside me Like a stab of paradise: explode: and then at last Exhausted, heal into pain. And that was happiness: A dream whose ending never ends, a vein Of blood, a hollow entity Consumed by consummation, bleeding so. In the sky our eyes ascend to as they sweep Upwards into emptiness, the angels sing their listless Lullabies and children wake up glistening with screams They left asleep; and the dead are dead. The wounded worship death And live a little while in love; and then are gone. Inside the dome the stars assume the outlines of their lives: Until we know, until we come to recognize as ours, Those other lives that live within us as our own.

Above a coast that lies between two coasts Flight 902 turns west towards San Diego. Milwaukee falls away. The constant passenger, Removed from character and context, resumes His California story, gradually ascending, Reading Farewell, My Lovely for the umpteenth time, Like a book above the world, or below the noise. I recall some houses halfway in the desert, And how dry the trees all seemed, and temporary Even the tallest buildings looked, with bungalows Decaying in the Santa Ana wind. And finally Just how small it was, and mean. Is it nostalgia For the limited that makes the days go quickly, Tracing out their spirals of diminishing concern? Like all the boys who lived on Westland Avenue, I learned to follow the trails through the canyon, Shoot at birds with a BB gun, and dream of leaving. What are books? To me they seemed like mirrors Holding up a vision of the social, in which people, Beckoning from their inaccessible preserves Like forgotten toys, afforded glimpses of those Evanescent worlds that certain minor writers —Raymond Chandler say, or even Rupert Brooke— Could visualize somehow, and bring to life again. And though these worlds were sometimes difficult to see, Once having seen them one returned to find the words Still there, like a part of the surroundings Compliant to one’s will. Yet these are attitudes, And each age has its separate store of attitudes, Its store of tropes—“In Grantchester, in Grantchester!—” That filter through its dreams and fill its songs. Hume tried to show that sympathy alone allows “The happiness of strangers” to affect our lives. Yet now and then a phrase, echoing in the mind Long after its occasion, seems to resurrect A world I think I recognize, and never saw. For what was there to see? Some houses on a hill Next to a small stream? A village filled with people I couldn’t understand? Could anyone have seen the Transitory sweetness of the Georgians’ England And the world before the War, before The Waste Land? Years are secrets, and their memories are often Stories of a past that no one witnessed, like the Fantasies of home one builds to rationalize The ordinary way one’s life has gone since then. Words seem to crystallize that life in pictures— In a postcard of a vicarage, or of a canyon Wedged between the desert and an endless ocean— But their clarity is fleeting. I can nearly See the coast from here, and as I hear the engines And the bell chimes, all those images dissolve. And then I start to hear the murmur of that Constant voice as distant from me as a landscape Studied from an airplane: a contingent person With a particular mind, and a particular will, Descending across a desert, westward over mountains And the sparsely peopled scrub beyond the city, Pocked with half-filled reservoirs and rudimentary Trails with nothing waiting for me at the end —“And is there honey still for tea?”— But isolated houses nestled in the hills.

In the last book of The Republic Plato turns to poetry, implicitly contrasts it with philosophy, and argues that it shouldn’t even exist in the ideal city he’s meticulously constructed. His reasoning is liable to strike us now as quaint: poets traffic in appearances, not essences, and write of things they don’t know anything about, like military strategy and battles; they portray heroic figures in the grip of powerful, deranged emotions, to which their readers must inevitably succumb; and there’s a metaphysical complaint: all art, including poetry, is essentially mimetic, and representations are inherently inferior to what they represent. You need to make some changes if you want to know what’s going on. Poetry for Plato wasn’t what you’d probably think of if you’re reading this, a marginalized enactment of experience and subjectivity in which the medium itself is half the point. Nor was philosophy the systematic study of the possibility of meaning we’ve become accustomed to, but sought instead to penetrate the veil of appearances, arriving at a vision of the good that shows us how we ought to try to live. It’s been suggested that to understand him, think of movies and TV instead of poetry, for they’re what occupy the space that poetry occupied in Athens. I agree, but then the question ultimately becomes: Should how we try to live be based on fantasies and feelings, or known facts and reason? And the suspicion that the latter aren’t much fun shows just how troubling the question really is. Yet even in their late, attenuated forms philosophy and poetry pose a problem, Plato’s problem.Write what you know: an admonition that concedes the point that poets usually don’t. And what exactly does one know, in the intended sense? I guess what’s meant is something like a lived identity within a social world, and yet behind those limited identities lies something larger, something commonplace and ordinary, but at the same time utterly unique. Like the hedgehog, each of us knows just one big thing, a thing philosophy can’t capture and that poetry can at best remind us of or intimate, but can’t describe. As it extends itself in time the individual life remains a captive of its point of view, confined to what it knows, cut off from all those others that resemble it in all respects but one. It’s what I know and everything I know, it’s something that I know so thoroughly I can’t imagine or describe it, though it fills my eyes. But there’s no need for imagery or words: you know it too, for it lies floating in your eyes. Would Plato even recognize a poetry of consciousness? And what of consciousness itself? It’s sometimes said to have a history, a recent one, and to have been unknown to Homer’s Greeks. But that’s a fallacy, inferring how you feel from what you write; moreover, Bernard Williams showed that what they wrote shows that they felt like us. And yet the poems of the articulated consciousness lay in the blank, unwritten future, poised to spring from Hamlet’s mind, not Oedipus’s; and their challenge to Book X was still to be imagined, still to come. “There’s the part where you say it, and the part where you take it back” (J.L. Austin). I say these things because I want to, and sometimes even think they’re true; but now I want to take them back. Knowledge is factive, meaning one can’t know what isn’t true, and truth is simply correspondence with the facts. What are the facts of consciousness? They’re all analogies and metaphors, a feeling of existence but without reality’s defining contours, like a sense of something hesitating on the brink of being said, or hiding in the shadows of an inner room. They’re all appearances, but appearances of what? Something that wanders up your limbs and nerves and blossoms in your brain? They’re all just figments of perspective, of a point of view from which the time is always now, the place is always here, and the thought of something hiding underneath the surface a seductive spell. The harder I try to pin them down the more elusive they become, as gradually the shadows disappear, the words turn into syllables, the face becomes anonymous and leaves me staring at a silver sheet of glass. What starts out as self-scrutiny becomes a study in self-pity, and instead of something tangible and true one winds up chasing the chimeras of Book X: the fruitless quarrel between philosophy and poetry, reason and unreason, and that tedious myth about the soul, of what becomes of it at death, then of its journey and rebirth. I’m tired, I’m far from home, I’m waiting in a chamber in a castle on a mountaintop in Umbria (poets get to do this), seven hundred miles from Athens as the crow flies, where perhaps “the sun still shines upon the hills and has not yet set.” I write the way I do because I want it to exist, but then the spell breaks and it dries up like a dream, leaving me with just this smooth, unvariegated surface, which remains. “His words made us ashamed, and we checked our tears. He walked around, and when he said his legs were heavy he lay on his back as he had been told to do, and the man who had given him the poison touched his body, and after a while tested his feet and legs, pressed hard upon his foot and asked him if he felt this, and Socrates said no. Then he pressed his calves, and made his way up his body and showed us that it was cold and stiff. He felt it himself and said that when the cold reached his heart he would be gone. As his belly was getting cold Socrates uncovered his head—he had covered it—and said—these were his last words—‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget.’—‘It shall be done,’ said Crito, ‘tell us if there is anything else.’ But there was no answer. Shortly afterwards Socrates made a movement; the man uncovered him and his eyes were fixed. Seeing this Crito closed his mouth and his eyes.”

A clumsy hillock Unmolded like a cake on the meadow In the Laguna Mountains. Tough yellow-green grass growing up to a tree As thick as a tooth. In winter, on the road from San Diego, Thousands of cars crawl up to the snow And their passengers get out to investigate it And then drive, discoursing, back home. And that’s California, Solemnly discharging its responsibilities. Meanwhile we breakfast on pancakes the size of a plate While the console radio goes on the blink. Miss L’Espagnole looks out from her frame on the wall, Completely prepared (though for what it is impossible to say). Her left arm is white and dips into a puddle of fire Or a pile of cotton on fire. And each thing is severe: The house hemmed in by pepper trees and Mexico (This one is white and in Chula Vista), and the paraphernalia Strewn around home: a few magazines summing up politics, A matchbox with a lavender automobile on the cover, And a set of soldiers of several military epochs marching off to war on the raffia rug. Unless, you’ve grown up amidst palm trees (and buildings that are either unbuilt, or hospitals) It’s impossible to appreciate a reasonable tree. I sometimes consider the parrots that live in the zoo And are sold on the street in Tijuana. Colored like national flags, Their heads are always cocked to pick up something behind them. And unless you have lived in a place where the fog Closes in like a face, it is impossible to be (even temporarily) relieved When it lifts to expose the freshly painted trim of the city, and it seems Like a fine day for knowledge: sunlight sleeping on top of the rocks And lots of white clouds scudding by like clean sheets Which, when the air in the bedroom is cold, you pull over your head And let the temperature slowly increase while you breathe. But California has only a coast in common with this.