as it started to sigh, just before tumbling into your lap, chagrined and satisfied at the same time,
Knowing its day over and your patience only beginning, toward what marvels of speculation, auscultation, world-view,
Satisfied with the entourage. It is this blank carcass of whims and tentative afterthoughts
Which is being delivered into your hand like a letter some forty-odd years after the day it was posted.
Strange, isn’t it, that the message makes some sense, if only a relative one in the larger context of message-receiving
That you will be called to account for just as the purpose of it is becoming plain,
Being one and the same with the day it set out, though you cannot imagine this.
There was a time when the words dug in, and you laughed and joked, accomplice
Of all the possibilities of their journey through the night and the stars, creature
Who looked to the abandonment of such archaic forms as these, and meanwhile
Supported them as the tools that made you. The rut became apparent only later
And by then it was too late to check such expansive aspects as what to do while waiting
For the others to show: unfortunately no pile of tattered magazines was in evidence,
Such dramas sleeping below the surface of the everyday machinery; besides
Quality is not given to everybody, and who are you to have been supposing you had it?
So the journey grew ever slower; the battlements of the city could now be discerned from afar
But meanwhile the water was giving out and malaria had decimated their ranks and undermined their morale,
You know the story, so that if turning back was unthinkable, so was victorious conquest of the great brazen gates.
Best perhaps to fold up right here, but even that was not to be granted.
Some days later in the pulsating of orchestras someone asked for a drink:
The music stopped and those who had been confidently counting the rhythms grew pale.
This is just a footnote, though a microcosmic one perhaps, to the greater curve
Of the elaboration; it asks no place in it, only insertion hors-texte as the invisible notion of how that day grew
From planisphere to heaven, and what part in it all the “I” had, the insatiable researcher of learned trivia, bookworm,
And one who marched along with, “made common cause,” yet had neither the gumption nor the desire to trick the thing into happening,
Only long patience, as the star climbs and sinks, leaving illumination to the setting sun.
Fragment
The last block is closed in April. You
See the intrusions clouding over her face
As in the memory given you of older
Permissiveness which dies in the
Falling back toward recondite ends,
The sympathy of yellow flowers.
Never mentioned in the signs of the oblong day
The saw-toothed flames and point of other
Space not given, and yet not withdrawn
And never yet imagined: a moment’s commandment.
These last weeks teasing into providential
Reality: that your face, the only real beginning,
Beyond the gray of overcoat, that this first
Salutation plummet also to the end of friendship
With self alone. And in doing so open out
New passages of being among the correctness
Of familiar patterns. The stance to you
Is a fiction, to me a whole. I find
New options, white feathers, in a word what
You draw in around you to the protecting bone.
This page only is the end of nothing
To the top of that other. The purity
Of how hard it is to choose between others where
The event takes place and the outside setting.
Day covers all this with leaves, with laughter and tears.
But at night other sounds are heard
Propositions hitherto omitted in the heat
Of smoke. You can look at it all
Inside out for the emblem to become the statue
Of discipline that rode in out of the past.
Not forgetting either the chance that you
Might want to revise this version of what is
The only real one, it might be that
No real relation exists between my wish for you
To return and the movements of your arms and
Knowing its day over and your patience only beginning, toward what marvels of speculation, auscultation, world-view,
Satisfied with the entourage. It is this blank carcass of whims and tentative afterthoughts
Which is being delivered into your hand like a letter some forty-odd years after the day it was posted.
Strange, isn’t it, that the message makes some sense, if only a relative one in the larger context of message-receiving
That you will be called to account for just as the purpose of it is becoming plain,
Being one and the same with the day it set out, though you cannot imagine this.
There was a time when the words dug in, and you laughed and joked, accomplice
Of all the possibilities of their journey through the night and the stars, creature
Who looked to the abandonment of such archaic forms as these, and meanwhile
Supported them as the tools that made you. The rut became apparent only later
And by then it was too late to check such expansive aspects as what to do while waiting
For the others to show: unfortunately no pile of tattered magazines was in evidence,
Such dramas sleeping below the surface of the everyday machinery; besides
Quality is not given to everybody, and who are you to have been supposing you had it?
So the journey grew ever slower; the battlements of the city could now be discerned from afar
But meanwhile the water was giving out and malaria had decimated their ranks and undermined their morale,
You know the story, so that if turning back was unthinkable, so was victorious conquest of the great brazen gates.
Best perhaps to fold up right here, but even that was not to be granted.
Some days later in the pulsating of orchestras someone asked for a drink:
The music stopped and those who had been confidently counting the rhythms grew pale.
This is just a footnote, though a microcosmic one perhaps, to the greater curve
Of the elaboration; it asks no place in it, only insertion hors-texte as the invisible notion of how that day grew
From planisphere to heaven, and what part in it all the “I” had, the insatiable researcher of learned trivia, bookworm,
And one who marched along with, “made common cause,” yet had neither the gumption nor the desire to trick the thing into happening,
Only long patience, as the star climbs and sinks, leaving illumination to the setting sun.
Fragment
The last block is closed in April. You
See the intrusions clouding over her face
As in the memory given you of older
Permissiveness which dies in the
Falling back toward recondite ends,
The sympathy of yellow flowers.
Never mentioned in the signs of the oblong day
The saw-toothed flames and point of other
Space not given, and yet not withdrawn
And never yet imagined: a moment’s commandment.
These last weeks teasing into providential
Reality: that your face, the only real beginning,
Beyond the gray of overcoat, that this first
Salutation plummet also to the end of friendship
With self alone. And in doing so open out
New passages of being among the correctness
Of familiar patterns. The stance to you
Is a fiction, to me a whole. I find
New options, white feathers, in a word what
You draw in around you to the protecting bone.
This page only is the end of nothing
To the top of that other. The purity
Of how hard it is to choose between others where
The event takes place and the outside setting.
Day covers all this with leaves, with laughter and tears.
But at night other sounds are heard
Propositions hitherto omitted in the heat
Of smoke. You can look at it all
Inside out for the emblem to become the statue
Of discipline that rode in out of the past.
Not forgetting either the chance that you
Might want to revise this version of what is
The only real one, it might be that
No real relation exists between my wish for you
To return and the movements of your arms and
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