Flow Chart, "...how trivial the music..."

Excerpt from Part II, Flow Chart (1991)

        But how trivial the music.  All this.  Yet it is where part of the gender first starts to
	emerge and become a blur.  The various members
	of both sexes never seem to get hurt: theirs is a life that drifts peacably along
	as on a stream and they can wave
	to each other like boats and join in the fun and never be forgotten.  Possibly
	a door opens far down in the wall to admit a lover
	who as silently departs later.  Possibly there is more to it all than this,
	but if we can decipher even what the fair-minded man wants us to, what about the rest,
	poverty and disclaimers?  And who sees the mountain-mad man through goatshine
	and never confesses to an early blunder concealed, to having left a child in the cold once?
	And as they marginally edge each other, new and good truths and others, older
	and not so good, begin to appear along the bicycle-trail of their intimacy
	through space, here on earth.  One was a Spanish longshoreman’s daughter,
	a laughing girl, who, when told the truth, deliberately spat on it.  Another,
	young too,  and in the full flower of “the devil’s beauty,” had good cause to come up and grab
	an arm, an elbow resting on a newspaper as it happened, and tickle the thing
	half to death.  And in the interval of slide, or portamento, a lot of laughing does
	get to be heard, only it’s like you’re not doing it, it’s the boys
	on the other side of the ridge obeying their zeal again.  The moon abruptly decides to set
	and kids pester their parents for more firecrackers, in the crevices, where eyes
	lately pecked out—O bored hero,
	why not return to earth for a while?  We have forgiven thee
	what was construed as negligence rather than rancor, so in return we
	should be taught by thy knee.  Later when she comes to throw out the table scraps there it will be,
	a little sliver of haven made and purposely rigged for you
	to come and go many times without noticing, slinging your coat over your shoulder
	as you go looking in the dirt for a whistle.  But that day
	it was all roses.  And it turned out that the inquiry was silenced,
	deliberately erased from the file.
	And if a man wanted this, and got it, how about the heathen rest of us
	who wait in silence for food
	as though a drug got planted in one’s abdomen?  Sooner or later, boys and girls declare, there
	will be someone on whom a care like this could devolve,
	a woman made to see through, analyze, and correct the errant circuitry
	and in doing so bring us back to the habor of recollection
	from which we strayed so long ago, but it was a mistake in a dream.
	The formula is now reconstituted.
	From the awfulness of times long gone by it wrests
	a polite excuse, small even by its standards, but alive to us, and harsh, dry, a wrong prism.
	 
        Or stand all right, lowering the teabag into the mug until something
	comes of it, is plumbed, but meanwhile what of zombies standing around in clinging seersucker
	in frigid temperatures, awaiting your decision?  When the curse
	arrives, are you prepared to deal with it?  Apologies don’t matter any more; it’s
	a question of biting off the end, spitting it out, and sucking the poison through a small tube
	if you want to go that way.  Otherwise, listless years of atrophy could be your fate
	though there are undoubtedly worse ones.  Pick a channel, explore, document it—
	please take all the evidence into account in your report, when you write it:
	you’ll find your story isn’t so different from any honest man’s, not less
	bizarre and compelling: was it always a savage rite?  Weren’t there times
	in childhood when one felt neutral, a shy appraiser gazing unendangered into
	the reflecting globe, and when you turned back, moments later, the horrible clashes
	hadn’t gone away, but you were somehow separated, a person with things to do?  And if
	the urgency thinned out in later decades, why be compromised?  Because these others
	were waging war on things and people with words and things does it follow that your employment
	was slighted, that you weren’t free to clean out your desk?  Sullen
	newsprint blows back and forth, a double sheet of it is suddenly tossed six stories high
	and drops back, heavy as a sinker: does this have something
	to do to you; more to the point, are you alive severed from it?  The old ghouls
	will have to be derided before one faces up to the spector of the empty stadium
	at dusk, bare branches aquiver.  How about your friend
	in the hospital: did you call him?  How many bridges between here and the end of that journey?
	Over wells, along walls, silently one creeps along.  Employment is difficult: I mean
	it’s difficult for me to hold a job long, not that I’m not efficient, it’s, well,
	so easy not to understand, to take full possession of one’s unawareness and
	then refuse to leave, a squatter in one’s own house.  And so much will
	have happened by the time even this minor wrangle is settled.  It’s impossible
	to keep abreast of the times, and yet we still think of wings.