In My Way / On My Way

        Pardon my appearance.  I am old now,
	though someday I shall be young again.  Not, it’s true, in the near future.
	Yet one cherishes a hope
	of being young before today’s children are young grandparents,
	before the gipsy camp of today has picked up and moved
	into the invisible night, that sees,
	and sees on and on like a ritual conscience
	that bathes us, from whose dense curves we know
	we shall never escape.  We like it here as the trial begins,
	the warming trend, more air, even the malicious smile in the prefecture garden—
	would we like it as much there?  No, for we only like what we already
	know, what is familiar.  Anything different
	is to be our ruin, as who stands
	on pillars and pediments of the city,
	judging us mournfully, from whose cresting gaze is no
	turning away, only peering back into the blackness of the pit of water of night.
	 
        Once I tried to wriggle free of the loose skein of people’s suggestions
	chirping my name.  One can do that if one is rich.  But for others a bad
	supposition comes of it, there is more death and pain at the end,
	so that one is better off out of the house, sleeping in the open
	where chiggers infest the lilacs, and a sullen toad sits,
	steeped in self-contemplation.  By glory I had
	better know before too long what the verdict is.  As I said I was changing
	to more comfortable clothing when the alarm bell sounded.
	Which is why I am you, why we too
	never quite seem to escape each other’s shadow.
	Perhaps drinking has something to do with it
	and the colored disc of a beach umbrella, put up long ago against the sun.
	 
        Yet even where things go wrong there is more
	drumming, more clatter than seems normal.  There is a remnant of energy
	no one can account for, and though I try
	to despise my own ways along with others, I can’t help placing
	things in the proper light.  I aim to exult
	in the stacks of cloud banks, each silently yearning
	for the upper ether and curving its back, and in the way all things
	seem to have of shaping up before the deaf man comes.
	O in a way it is spiritual to be out from under these
	dead packages of the air that only inhibit
	further learning and borders, as those these too came to see the sea
	and having done so, returned
	to selfish buildings enclosed by walls.  Their conceit
	was never again to be quite as apt as that time that is remembered
	but no more, on a quilted sea of pylons and terminal anxiety
	far from the rich robe, imagined and unimagined, as far as the pole
	is from us.  As around the pond, several rods away, the liquid
	performance starts and repeats, endlessly.
	We live now in that dust
	but no one shakes it, to finish is yet prized, prized and forgotten.
	 
        As when we bumble, maintaining steadfastly that there is no life in the truth of us,
	no bearings in the grass, and who cares anyway, why the salt
	on his fingertip is life enough for us under the present circumstances,
	something always focuses attention on all we have done since school,
	how we were naked, and fell, and those
	coming up behind dutifully picked us up and presented us as evidence
	and the court in a major shift decided to hear the arguments
	and all was sadness, it was decreed, for a while,
	till pregnant passes were abandoned, and miniskirts returned, and with them
	a longing for a future of fashionable choices,
	dotted earthworks in the comforting desert,
	various fruits to assuage thirst
	and the almost maniacal voice of your leader
	reminding us of practical solutions so out of date they were all but forgotten.
	 
        Far from fear of crowds stumbling,
	what ought to incite you is a new hunger for all the angles of whatever
	day this is, placed against the sandstone of undoubted
	approval from many different quarters.
	True, all that we hurled
	returns to visit, and true too that the bayoneted
	clock recovers, that composure is a gift
	that sometimes the gods bestow, and sometimes not; their reasons in the one
	as in the other case remaining inscrutable even to apple-
	scented mornings where the light seems newly washed, the gnarled trees in the prime
	of youth, and the little house more sensible than ever before
	as a boat passes, acquiescing to
	the open, the shore, the listless waves that distract us
	out of prurience and melancholy, every time.  Yet something waits.
	I can hear the toad crooning.  It’s almost time for intermission.
	The guest register awaits signing.  It’s another, someone’s, voyage.