Flow Chart

        We’re interested in the language, that you call breath,
	if breath is what we are to become, and we think it is, the southpaw said.  Throwing her
	a bone sometimes, sometimes expressing, sometimes expressing something like mild concern, the way
	has been so hollowed out by travelers it has become cavernous.
	It leads to death.
	We know that, yet for a limited time only we wish to pluck the sunflower,
	transport it from where it stood, proud, erect, under a bungalow-blue sky, grasping at the sun,
	and bring it inside, as all others sink into the common mold.  The day
	had begun inauspiciously, yet improved as it went along, until at bed-
	time it was seen that we had prospered, I and thee.
	Our early frustrated attempts at communicating were in any event long since dead.
	Yet I had prayed for some civility from the air before setting out, as indeed my ancestors had done
	and it hadn’t hurt them any.  And I purposely refrained from consulting me,
	 
        the culte du moi being a dead thing, a shambles.  That’s what led to me.
	Early in the morning, rushing to see what has changed during the night, one stops to catch one’s breath.
	The older the presence, we now see, the more it has turned into thee
	with a candle at thy side.  Were I to proceed as my ancestors h ad done
	we all might be looking around now for a place to escape from death,
	for he has grown older and wiser.  But if it please God to let me live until my name-day
	I shall place bangles at the forehead of her who becomes my poetry, showing her
	teeth as she smiles, like sun-stabs through raindrops.  Drawing with a finger in my bed,
	she explains how it was all necessary, how it was good I didn’t break down on my way
	to the showers, and afterwards when many were dead
	who were thought to be living, the sun
	came out for just a little while, and patted the sunflower
	 
        on its grizzled head.  It likes me the way I am, thought the sunflower.
	Therefore we all ought to concentrate on being more “me,”
	for just as nobody could get along without the sun, the sun
	would tumble from the heavens if we were to look up, still self-absorbed, and not see death.
	It doesn’t matter which day of the week you decide to set out on your journey.  The day
	will be there.  And once you are off and running, it will be there still.  The breath
	you decide to catch comes at the far end of that day’s slope, when her
	vision is not so clear anymore.  You say goodbye to her anyway, for the way
	gleams up ahead.  You don’t need the day to see it by.  And though millions are already dead
	what matters is that they didn’t break up the fight before I was able to get to thee,
	to warn thee what would be done
	to thee if more than one were found occupying the same bed. 
	 
        Which is how we came to spend the night in the famous bed
	that James VI of Scotland had once slept in.  On its head the imperials sunflower
	was inscribed, amid a shower of shooting stars.  I say “imperial,” though by day
	he was a king like any other, only a little more decent perhaps.  And the next morning the sun
	came slashing through the crimson drapes, and I was like to have died.  Although my death
	would have encouraged a few, it did not happen then, or now, and still that me
	as I like to call him saunters on, caring little for the others, the past a dead
	letter as far as he’s concerned.  So that I wrote to her
	asking if she cared anything about the way
	he was going about it, and did she know what others had done
	to stop him in similar circumstances.  Her reply, brought to me late at night, when no breath
	of wind stirred in the treetops outside, caught me unawares.  “If to thee
	 
        he offers neither apology nor protest, then for him it is a good thing.  For thee,
	on the contrary, it augurs ill.  If I were thee I’d stay in bed
	from dawn to evening, waiting, at least until the sun
	disappears from our heavens and goes to hector those cringing in the house of the dead.
	There can be no luck in harvest-time, no tipping of the scales, while yet he draws breath.”
	I thanked her emissary and tiptoed out without telling him what I thought of her.
	How extraordinary that as soon as one settles on a plan of action, whether it be day
	or darkest midnight, someone will always try to discourage you, citing death
	as a possible side-effect.  Yet I could not, would not, dismiss my beloved boy.  No way
	would I proceed along the sea with no one to bounce my ideas off of but me.
	And so we two rode together.  It was almost late afternoon by the time we reached “The Sunflower,”
	as the gigantic, decaying apartment complex was named.  A noted architect had done
	 
        it right once, with open spaces, communal nurseries, walkways.  Yet when he had done,
	no one liked it.  People refused to move in.  It was cold and impersonal.  To thee
	however, it seemed a paradise.  The long, alienating corridors which the sun
	sliced through at regular intervals were as confusing as a casbah; the dead
	tennis-courts and watchtowers seemed a present sent by death
	to distract you while you waited, always for her
	touch.  That said, there was plenty to do at night, while during the day-
	long siesta one dreamed, and brooded not, and felt fairly good.  No hog’s breath
	stirred the rusting weeds in the little yard in front of the veranda.  Like me
	you too chose to put a better construction on these things than perhaps the case warranted; at any rate, bed
	always solves everything, at least for the time being.  I went out and plucked a sunflower
	but it was empty, the birds had eaten all the seeds.  Surely there’s a way
	 
        to avoid feeling lonesome and sorry for oneself, but up until today, no way
	has opened before me, I’m both those things, though one would suffice.  What’s done
	is done, they say, yet I can’t help wondering whether, on a different day,
	you might have turned around and walked back to where I was lying face down in bed
	and told me all the love, all the respect you had for me, that was like a shining in you at me,
	and we could have gone off to analyze our situation and add up the particulars.  Your breath
	was your own private property, of course, and you cared little for mine, but in the case of her
	father being in the news and so many other officials who had turned out to be dead,
	perhaps in a few years’ time we would have forgotten all that, to live, sunflower
	and sun, in periods of rain and drought, as they do in Africa, and never fear the sun.
	It is written, and played on the African thumb-piano, that those who to thee
	go, and return, unremembering, are earmarked for a lonely, unpleasant death,
	 
        and those to whom thou goest never grumble, even at the prospect of death.
	Therefore it is urgent that we all, pursuers and pursued, be moving in the common way,
	for that is the only way to outwit death, none-too-clever though he may be.  To thee
	I say, stand, as though on a ladder picking apricots; your back should be to the sun,
	and all will pass.  You’ll be satisfied, you’ll see.  No need to shake the sunflower
	husk for dried kernels.  Indeed, all the grasses are long dead;
	the reaching angles of the thorn-tree branches barely jerk erratically in the breath
	of the savannah.  If I thought for one instant that the day
	of the week spelled out protection for me, or that my own misdeed would trickle off me
	like water from a duck’s back, sure and I’d have done what any decent-minded preacher would have done:
	I’d place bunches of fresh rue and meadowsweet in glass jars filled with water near the bed.
	I’d point with my stick not at her sins but to the shy, closed flower of her womanhood, her
	 
        puckered glen of swansdown, and there would have been an end to it, unless her
	parents had some say in the matter.  We two have lasted almost until death,
	and still nothing shields us from the aspirations of the sunflower;
	even at night you can hear its ever-unquiet breath
	that makes of life a station on some suburban railway.
	Too bad you did what you did; I, meanwhile, was lying in bed
	and caught the rumble of the vans of approaching day.
	“This is my day, even though it belong as well to many who are dead.
	I say it not in a spirit of possessiveness, only as a fact.  Indeed, I pass it to thee
	as generations of aspiring lovers and writers before me have done.
	Look, this is what was done to me, written on me.  Take it from me.”
	She stood up and began to do a little dance, then as abruptly stopped, noting the sun
	 
        had passed the zenith, and was waiting to be relieved by a replacement sun.
	In all our lives I still continue to try to make headway, and though to her
	what I do never makes much sense, I do it anyway, for thee.
	Scratching around one is sure to uncover bits of the ancient way;
	meanwhile I am reasonably well-fed, clothed and happy and spend nights in a bed
	that seems beautiful to me.  We used to laugh; with every breath
	we’d take, some new funny thing would point a moral and adorn the day,
	until at last the earth lay baking in the heat, and the sunflower
	had the last laugh.  “Be strong, you that are now past your prime!  When you are dead
	we’ll talk again and see how you understand this thing men call death,
	that is in reality but a shadow of what God has done
	to others, to the sun and to me.”
	 
        I awoke, yet I dreamed still.  It seemed that all had been destined for me
	all along, and as I had traveled in fear, and alone, always the sun
	traveled with me.  At night one sleeps in fear of wetting the bed
	but he makes amends for that by pointing to our eventual death
	as a teacher would point with a wand to the solution of a problem on a blackboard.  His way
	is as inscrutable as a fox’s.  He brings to full bloom the cornflower and the sunflower,
	then lets them slip into oblivion.  Why?  If I knew the answer, I wouldst tell thee,
	but since thou sufferest much, I’ll vouchsafe that the way of the dead
	is as a lightness to our dreaming, a sense of gaiety, of irresponsibility.  She in her
	longing realizes much, and would tell it to us, but the breath
	is gone.  Still, there’ll come a time and not too far off when all we have done
	returns to charm us; we can go back, taste, repeat it any day.
	 
        So for the moment, although tomorrow is our day,
	the sun shines through the meshes.  You can have me
	for anything I am, or want to be, and I’ll replace you with me, introduce you to the sun.
	When summer calls, and people wish they only had a way,
	and nights are too thick, and days have barely begun to be spoiled., I’ll riddle thee
	about what we heard before we came here, how much is already done.
	The moral of the story however is that the ubiquitous sunflower
	knows the secret and cares.  As a door on its hinges, so he in his bed
	turns and turns, and in his turning unlocks the rusted padlock of death,
	that flies apart and at once I am shriven.  Take me in, teach me her
	ways, but above all don’t leave me for dead:
	I live, though I draw only a little breath.
	 
        The story that she told me simmers in me still, though she is dead
	these several months, lying as on a bed.  The things we used to do, I to thee,
	thou to me, matter still, but the sun points the way inexorably to death,
	though it be but his, not our way.  Funny the way the sun
	can bring you around to her.  And as you pause for breath,
	remember it, now that it is done, and seeds flare in the sunflower.