forsythia bushes,
but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction.
“That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction?
‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do
when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.”
I tell you, something went wrong there a while back.
Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject.
No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know
exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could
seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong?
I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone
with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel
with the other. And then something like braids will stand out,
on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious.
We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house,
talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know
that’s probably what’s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean.
I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some
sometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater
had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards
drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves
sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly
crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully
know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly
amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.
THE WATER INSPECTOR
Scramble the “Believer” buttons. Silence the chickens. We have more important things, like intelligence. We say so many cruel things in a lifetime, and yet. In a whorehouse, young, I obfuscated. Destiny was this and that, no it was about this and that. Do you see what I’m saying? Nobody needs the whole truth.
Even so we exact repetition. The beat goes on. Terribly surprised about the report, about your father’s death, but these things happen. Often the dead are found next day, alive but shaken, wondering what it was that happened to them, trembling beneath a cellar door. And we too wonder what happens when the sky as we know it cracks in two. Beetle voices serenade us. The earth and its fountains can’t do enough for us, yet we remember, shaken too, like in the old days.
We were reading and there came a knock at the door. The water inspector, we thought, and of course no one was there. Stung, and stung again. So we proceed, always on course, always begging the stars to tell us what happened, whether we were clean really, were we on course. Always the silence says yes, you can go home now, round up your playmates, head for the nearest wooded area if you think that will help.
I was once surprised but lay and brooded, my life at my back now, my discourse like weeds far out on a lake. It must have come to me, it always does, part of my profound business.
I think in the think tank, always elegant in my thinking, far away. Far from what I consider. Once it was all grace in the lifting. Awkward, yes, and not a little disconcerting.
CINÉMA VÉRITÉ
Be kind to your web-footed friends, I murmur to myself half anxiously, hurrying to the movies. After all, a duck may be somebody’s uncle. Or niece. I am lost. I ask directions of a horse-faced policeman who gives no satisfying reply. Or is it? “Somewhere up there ... You’ll be sure to find it,” he offers. I’d like to wipe the smug expression off his cheeks. Or is it a kindly and beatific smile? I continue along what I think is my way and come to a grassy riviera, a few rusted hotels browsing among smug new ones. A large red and yellow plastic sign says, “Cinema.”
Those rocks have a basalt look about them. I was here before once. I can tell by the way the breeze scurries by, patting my cheek as it does so. O solemn breeze! You are the one thing I wanted to have happen to me, the only thing that matters in this concrete canyon of years, so why can’t I get close to you? Already you have made off with the
but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction.
“That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction?
‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do
when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.”
I tell you, something went wrong there a while back.
Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject.
No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know
exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could
seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong?
I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone
with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel
with the other. And then something like braids will stand out,
on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious.
We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house,
talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know
that’s probably what’s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean.
I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some
sometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater
had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards
drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves
sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly
crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully
know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly
amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.
THE WATER INSPECTOR
Scramble the “Believer” buttons. Silence the chickens. We have more important things, like intelligence. We say so many cruel things in a lifetime, and yet. In a whorehouse, young, I obfuscated. Destiny was this and that, no it was about this and that. Do you see what I’m saying? Nobody needs the whole truth.
Even so we exact repetition. The beat goes on. Terribly surprised about the report, about your father’s death, but these things happen. Often the dead are found next day, alive but shaken, wondering what it was that happened to them, trembling beneath a cellar door. And we too wonder what happens when the sky as we know it cracks in two. Beetle voices serenade us. The earth and its fountains can’t do enough for us, yet we remember, shaken too, like in the old days.
We were reading and there came a knock at the door. The water inspector, we thought, and of course no one was there. Stung, and stung again. So we proceed, always on course, always begging the stars to tell us what happened, whether we were clean really, were we on course. Always the silence says yes, you can go home now, round up your playmates, head for the nearest wooded area if you think that will help.
I was once surprised but lay and brooded, my life at my back now, my discourse like weeds far out on a lake. It must have come to me, it always does, part of my profound business.
I think in the think tank, always elegant in my thinking, far away. Far from what I consider. Once it was all grace in the lifting. Awkward, yes, and not a little disconcerting.
CINÉMA VÉRITÉ
Be kind to your web-footed friends, I murmur to myself half anxiously, hurrying to the movies. After all, a duck may be somebody’s uncle. Or niece. I am lost. I ask directions of a horse-faced policeman who gives no satisfying reply. Or is it? “Somewhere up there ... You’ll be sure to find it,” he offers. I’d like to wipe the smug expression off his cheeks. Or is it a kindly and beatific smile? I continue along what I think is my way and come to a grassy riviera, a few rusted hotels browsing among smug new ones. A large red and yellow plastic sign says, “Cinema.”
Those rocks have a basalt look about them. I was here before once. I can tell by the way the breeze scurries by, patting my cheek as it does so. O solemn breeze! You are the one thing I wanted to have happen to me, the only thing that matters in this concrete canyon of years, so why can’t I get close to you? Already you have made off with the
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