THEIR CLAVICLES PROCEEDING
It is their being here alone that is so poignant.
The child flinging bread to the gulls.
The aging one abstracted, confirming the child,
the swooping gulls,
the surf, the skies,
the song of the marsh wren,
the time, the place.
It is all unexceptional hypotheses to the child.
All convoluted actuality for the aging one,
consenting to the ironies, the absurdities,
the fossils strewn along the tide line,
the dark fables,
the small facets of things,
the blue heron stalking in the shallows.
They being practitioners of the sole mode
of acknowledging the metaphysical past,
the metaphysical future,
the morning, the waiting ---
anything anywhere.
Their viscera, their neurons,
their clavicles unaccountably proceeding.
HALLOWEEN AT CITY HALL
The cleaning people have gone.
Security has settled into their ruminations.
-
Spirits of incumbents preside at their desks.
-
Through the hallways, stirring the auras,
roam phantoms of operatives, favorites,
-
random instances off the table of human types.
-
Portraits of civic legends peer from the walls.
Electronics blink in the darkness,
-
The mores, the ethos await the morning news.
THE SHOWER HAS PASSED TO THE WEST
A sea urchin sits in a pool up the beach,
water streaming from its sides.
Black- bellied plovers run along the tide line,
snatching at the sea weed, the turtle grass.
Pennywort, sea oats come alive.
Gulls huddle against the wind,
feathers ruffling.
Up in the dunes a weathered rowboat rests,
half buried among the railroad vines.
PROCLAMATION FOR LABOR DAY
At least once in every decade
someone with an appropriate voice,
equitable as wisteria, pain,
the frets of a guitar,
shall retell the story of the youth who,
from blundering around in certain books,
affirming as respiration, sunrise,
the surge of an engine,
conceives of the vivid altercation
between these mottos:
From each according to his ability,
to each according to his need.
To each according to his ability,
from each according to his vulnerability.
Do unto others
as you would have them do unto you.
Do unto others
so that you may have theirs.
THE PAINTING HE HAS STARTED,
AGAIN AND AGAIN
Sometimes it is himself
advancing into the foreground,
emitting fragments of soliloquy
or talking to his country.
Sometimes it is a morning waiting.
Or he is rendering a justice.
*
Sometimes it is a scene
in a dream he scarcely remembers,
with colors of embryonic water
and sumac in a distant field.
Sometimes it is an expectation of night.
Or he is taking a creature’s revenge.
Or contemplating tempestuous feasibilities.
Or a quietude.
Or the journeys of the whales.
HAS ENDURED, HAS SUSTAINED
Here.
Stand here.
From this position it has the shape of a language
that has endured a drifter calling home,
the cries of the gulls on an eelgrass flat,
night coming in across a prairie,
culture wars,
the evanescence of perfect love,
the continents grinding on their plates,
Democritus, Lucretius, Descartes forgive, protect us,
has sustained eras breaking out,
unanswered songs,
the hot winds of the Mojave,
ironies straight from the double helix,
the lawless myths that cruise the freeway,
rooms without décor.
COMPLEXIONS OF THEIR SCULPTURE GARDEN
They have a nice enough city here,
but it was this retreat
that persuaded me to give myself a respite.
Unavoidably detained an extra day, I reported.
*
Before the gates are open,
a workman tidies about, clipping and raking.
I wait in the first slanting sunlight,
clairvoyant and strong,
thinking I may be here for an epiphany.
Asked why he became a sculptor,
Giacometti said so as not to die.
*
Inside, now, I am alone
in an aura of Rodin and Modigliani,
Donatello and Degas and Brancu si.
The pieces stand expressively apart,
each in its zone of thoughtfulness,
in its plausible, insistent light,
emitting ardors and hypotheses,
intimations of myth,
of intellect and danger,
bearing histories, empathies
out of the sketchbooks
of persons at risk like men.
*
Heat, I was taught, arises in matter
from an agitation of its elements.
*
Art, said Proust,
is the opposite of habit and banality.
*
Happenstance mumbles beyond the hedges.
Others arrive,
straggling singles, couples,
a robust man in a wheelchair with his companion,
an older woman and a teen
who ignores her, slouches off by himself,
while I, unknowing, know
some of the secrets of these makers,
something of malaise and exuberance,
flushing, faltering idea,
intuitive hand
out of the possible, determining just thus.
*
Someone keeps books on this place.
Someone is the director, the curator.
Someone conceived its endowment.
*
So it goes on,
the day, another day, passing,
my plane waiting.
*
Last week, last year
they were here at the false dawn,
in falling snow,
acid rain.
Next week, next year
they will be here in the moonlight,
emitting eerie continuities,
rumors of a language
for what cannot be said.
AN AFTERNOON ON TRAGIC EARTH
I drive through accidental neighborhoods,
warehouses and grassy plots,
restless lore and target markets,
through patches of miscellaneous culture,
beauty parlors and garage sales,
brand names and prevailing fictions,
through sifting, cunning vicinities,
coffee shops and street repairs,
zones of sociology and fable,
past a pot of geraniums,
an athletic field,
a lone boy,
poised, intent,
holding a vaulting pole.
I pull up and park,
engine idling.
The bar is put aside.
He makes a run,
leaps --- for style,
it seems, not height,
returns, sets up,
imaging his flight,
conferring, I conclude,
with his reflexes,
his motor intuitions,
his natural ingenuities,
surrounded by silence,
runs, leaps, images,
with an unconsenting face,
again and again.
*
He may be mythic.
Man, said John Locke,
is a system of matter
fitly disposed
to perceive and think.
But perhaps also to soar.
It is not impossible
that he is a prodigy,
a sport of physiology.
Man, said Neitzsche,
is an entity
to be overcome.
This may be, I declare,
a not inapt,
not inappreciable,
canto of anthropology, I profess,
pulling out, rolling on in the direction of life.
APRIL 19, 1980
One must end up, said Sartre, by ending up.
An atheist’s orthodoxy.
And it was true, in a sense, four days ago
when the nurse forbade Simone
to embrace his still warm cadaver,
declaring the gangrene contagious.
The humiliation of his ugliness was over,
his slight stature, pudgy face, disfigured eye.
His hypochondria utterly resolved,
his squeamish appetite,
egosexual mania,
narcotic hallucinations,
lingual obfuscation.
But in another, a transcendent sense,
he had never been more alive than today ,
his funeral procession through Montparnasse
followed by fifty thousand citizens.
Few of whom are apt to be ontologically inclined,
nor phenomenologically.
Perhaps none believe there is no Louvre in itself,
no Jardin des Tuileries as such,
only their massively various ideas of them.
Nor believe that the innate human capacity
to conceive what is not the case, to make choices,
to observe the self from apart,
are the cause of much of their perturbation.
Why, then, are they there?
Because Jean-Paul was singular as Baudelaire?0D
Compelling, controversial as Voltaire?
Novelistic as Flaubert?
An authentic French celebrity?
An incumbent essential French intellectual?
DE NEXUS
Here is your mother’s diary.
She is still alive.
Will you read it?
She is dead.
Will you read it?
SAUL BELLOW IN OUTER SPACE
Voyager 1, launched September 5, 1977,
to explore the boundaries of the solar system,
bears electronic scenes and sounds of Earth ---
surf, a barking dog, a violinist, a whistling train,
greetings in several dozen languages,
Saul remarking you pay for what you want,
not always for what you get,
a kiss, a laughing infant, a crowing rooster.
FROM HER MEMORABILIA
On a Saturday
in a mood of pleasant expectation
or inadequacy or chagrin,
Alice or Mae or Lucille
takes a left or right from her driveway
toward civilization.
Emerges from a parking garage
into downtown,
random traffic of the populace,
amorphous instances of all sociology,
all psychology.
Enters her bank,
emporium of fiscal demeanor,
of significant wherewithal.
Drives to her usual mall,
acquisitive extravaganza,
incitor of uncommon needs,
of mindful and lurking desires,
vanities, fantasies, delusions.
Has lunch with Judi or Liz or Mabel
in a venue for confidentiality,
grievances, passages, complacencies,
the entire human condition to survey.
Stops by the library,
aura upon aura of human experience.
Arrives at home,
miscellany of her being,
of her psyche to date.
TUESDAY AGAIN
Spring moves imperceptibly to the north.
The iris are provoked. And the sparrows.
A breeze arises, then subsides.
Is this a day we should fear?
It was morning. Now it is afternoon.
What are the silences saying?
White clouds float in from the bay.
How is it feasible to be a man?
HANDLE
Beneath its patina
the grain is clearly mountain mahogany.
It nestles in the palm as if taken from a mold.
The working end is enigmatic,
faintly suggesting the stump of an amputation.
It seems inapplicable for a pistol.
A cane.
A saw.
Any device.
But has extraordinary worth.
As if available for eventuality.
AND GUSTING WINDS
The lilac leaves in the bowl, Darlene,
turn brown at the edges.
Is a maxim obscured in this?
Drying raindrops leave spots on the windowpane.
A root of the sycamore bulges the sidewalk.
Do we see intimations of allegory here?
A grit, Darlene, settles on the tabletops.
The door acquires a patina.
Can we believe these are not parables of betrayal?
THE WASTE BACKETS ARE EMPTY
These are the various offices and cubicles,
and these the dynamic aisles and hallways.
There are the locked filing cabinets,
and that is the litter on the surfaces.
Those are the cleaning people
who left only the night lights as they departed.
The enterprise is absent until Monday morning.
Dispersed to the precincts, the suburbs,
self-regarding selves with expectations
of domesticities, jollities, solemnities,
of idleness, silence, privacy,
disquietude,
trouble,
the work of belonging, of enduring.
---
This is the weekend weather passing through.
These are the neighborhoods
where they have lives,
unsuspected, turning lives,
egos randomly diverging,
whose names are unemphatic on their lips,
who evade the ambiguities in their snapshots,
who vacillate between too little and too much,
who, taking the subway to the sketch class,
trimming the hedges, baking the cookies,
listening in the afternoon from the recliner
to the sublimated lovesong,
the street noises,
the insistent ironies,
ambivalently contemplate the enterprise.
AEOLUS DREAMS
OF THE VANES OF PRAIRIE VILLAGE
Boreas,
the north wind,
rustles the dogwoods of Birmingham .
Zephyr,
the west wind,
ripples the puddles of Harrisburg .
Ruby Felicia Dodd nurses her baby.
Notus,
the south wind,
ruffles the flags of Grand Rapids .
Calvin “Buddy” Parrish, route man,
is just the age of his father at the end.
Eurus,
the east wind,
rattles the eaves of Oregon City .
GRAY SQUIRRELS, METAPHYSICAL KITES
What is that sound?
It is a feast of excited insects.
It is a warbler in the loblolly pines.
A music that listening makes.
What is that motion?
It is the arc of a spider’s eye.
It is a hawk flashing through the birches.
A great slow progress of legend.
What is that efflorescence?
Minnows. Gray squirrels. Willlows breathing.
I see. I see.
It is allegory sailing on the bay.
It is the sheen of metaphysical kites.
And how is it all rectified?
Why, by death. Ingeniously. Exquisitely.
NEAR PILTDOWN
It is noon.
An autumn breeze stirs the leaves.
They have stopped,
hairy and filthy,
to take food.
Now they rest.
Listen.
Do you hear,
faintly as the thunder in the west,
a chorus of “Melancholy Baby”?
BERN . 1905. SPRING.
If, there, beneath the astounding Alps ,
the red-tiled roofs, the ingenious clock tower,
if, along the medieval arcades, the cobbled streets,
at the university, the patent office,
where all physics seethed with will to disclose,
time, space, energy, matter, light,
if there was a deity watching, listening,
an Intellligence covetous of Its Laws,
despairing of Its Mystifications,
Its Sovereignty over Knowledge,
how might It/He/She have Regarded
Einstein, Planck, and the others?
AND THE DISQUIETUDES LEFT FROM THEIR DREAMS
I think of Tom, Dick, Harry, and Eva,
of their attachments back in the towns,
of their affinities for Alaska , for the Blue Grass,
for all abundant milieus,
think of their ambivalent lives,
endowed as they are with free will,
with counteregos and motley genetic trails,
with proliferating cognition,
with obstinate glands,
whose selves can never quite perceive themselves.
But I think also of Edgar, the exile
who has never left the place he was reared,
think of him sitting at a table
with coffee and the news.
© Copyright Oliver Rice. All Rights Reserved.
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