Timothy Steele

Angered, may I be near a glass of water; May my first impulse be to think of Silence, Its deities (who are they? do, in fact, they Exist? etc.). May I recall what Aristotle says of The subject: to give vent to rage is not to Release it but to be increasingly prone To its incursions. May I imagine being in the Inferno, Hearing it asked: “Virgilio mio, who’s That sulking with Achilles there?” and hearing Virgil say: “Dante, That fellow, at the slightest provocation, Slammed phone receivers down, and waved his arms like A madman. What Attila did to Europe, What Genghis Khan did To Asia, that poor dope did to his marriage.” May I, that is, put learning to good purpose, Mindful that melancholy is a sin, though Stylish at present. Better than rage is the post-dinner quiet, The sink’s warm turbulence, the streaming platters, The suds rehearsing down the drain in spirals In the last rinsing. For what is, after all, the good life save that Conducted thoughtfully, and what is passion If not the holiest of powers, sustaining Only if mastered.

As my Scotch, spared the water, blondly sloshes About its tumbler, and gay manic flame Is snapping in the fireplace, I grow youthful: I realize that calendars aren’t truthful And that for all of my grand unsuccesses External causes are to blame. And if at present somewhat destitute, I plan to alter, prove myself more able, And suavely stroll into the coming years As into rooms with thick rugs, chandeliers, And colorfully pyramided fruit On linened lengths of table. At times I fear the future won’t reward My failures with sufficient compensation, But dump me, aging, in a garret room Appointed with twilit, slant-ceilinged gloom And a lone bulb depending from a cord Suggestive of self-strangulation. Then, too, I have bad dreams, in one of which A cowled, scythe-bearing figure beckons me. Dark plains glow at his back: it seems I’ve died, And my soul, weighed and judged, has qualified For an extended, hyper-sultry hitch Down in eternity. Such fears and dreams, however, always pass. And gazing from my window at the dark, My drink in hand, I’m jauntily unbowed. The sky’s tiered, windy galleries stream with cloud, And higher still, the dazed stars thickly mass In their long Ptolemaic arc. What constellated powers, unkind or kind, Sway me, what far preposterous ghosts of air? Whoever they are, whatever our connection, I toast them (toasting also my reflection), Not minding that the words which come to mind Make the toast less toast than prayer: Here’s to the next year, to the best year yet; To mixed joys, to my harum-scarum prime; To auguries reliable and specious; To times to come, such times being precious, If only for the reason that they get Shorter all the time.

Even in fortunate times, The nectar is spiked with woe. Gods are incorrigibly Capricious, and the needy Beg in Nineveh or sleep In paper-gusting plazas Of the New World’s shopping malls. Meantime, the tyrant battens On conquest, while advisers, Angling for preferment, seek Expedient paths. Heartbroken, The faithful advocate looks Back on cities of the plain And trudges into exile. And if any era thrives, It’s only because, somewhere, In a plane tree’s shade, friends sketch The dust with theorems and proofs, Or because, instinctively, A man puts his arm around The shoulder of grief and walks It (for an hour or an age) Through all its tears and telling.

At dawn, down in the streets, from pavement grills, Steam rises like the spent breath of the night. At open windows, curtains stir on sills; There’s caging drawn across a market’s face; An empty crane, at its construction site, Suspends a cable into chasmed space. The roof shows other rooftops, their plateaus Marked with antennas from which lines are tied And strung with water beads or hung with clothes. And here and there a pigeon comes to peck At opaque puddles, its stiff walk supplied By herky-jerky motions of its neck. Downtown, tall buildings surmount a thinning haze. The newest, the world center of a bank, Has sides swept upward from a block-broad base, Obsidian glass, fifty stories tall; Against it hangs a window-washer’s plank, An aerie on a frozen waterfall. Nearer and eastward, past still-sleeping blocks, Crews on the waterfront are changing shifts. Trucks load at warehouses at the foot of docks; A tug out in the bay, gathering speed, With a short hollow blast of puffed smoke, lifts Gulls to a cawing and air-borne stampede. It is as if dawn pliantly compels The city to relax to sounds and shapes, To its diagonals and parallels: Long streets with traffic signals blinking red, Small squares of parks, alleys with fire escapes, Rooftops above which cloudless day is spread. And it’s as if the roofs’ breeze-freshened shelves, Their level surfaces of gravelled tar Where glassy fragments glitter, are themselves A measure of the intermediate worth Of all the stories to the morning star And all the stories to the morning earth.

The nominalist in me invents A life devoid of precedents. The realist takes a different view: He claims that all I feel and do Billions of others felt and did In history’s Pre-me period. Arguing thus, both voices speak A partial truth. I am unique, Yet the unceasing self-distress Of desire buffets me no less Than it has other sons of man Who’ve come and gone since time began. The meaning, then, of this dispute? My life’s a nominal/real pursuit, Which leaves identity clear and blurred, In which what happens has occurred Often and never—which is to say, Never to me, or quite this way.