Alone and Not Alone Read online

  I wish I could do that!

  In Paris the heads that dropped into the basket

  —were they still thinking about the executioner?

  Today I am my own executioner.

  Survivor Guilt

  It’s very easy to get.

  Just keep living and you’ll find yourself

  getting more and more of it.

  You can keep it or pass it on,

  but it’s a good idea to keep a small portion

  for those nights when you’re feeling so good

  you forget you’re human. Then drudge it up

  and float down from the ceiling

  that is covered with stars that glow in the dark

  for the sole purpose of being beautiful for you,

  and as you sink their beauty dims and goes out—

  I mean it flies out the nearest door or window,

  its whoosh raising the hair on your forearms.

  If only your arms were green, you could have two small lawns!

  But your arms are just there and you are kaput.

  It’s all your fault, anyway, and it always has been—

  the kind word you thought of saying but didn’t,

  the appalling decline of human decency, global warming,

  thermonuclear nightmares, your own small cowardice,

  your stupid idea that you would live forever—

  all tua culpa. John Phillip Sousa

  invented the sousaphone, which is also your fault.

  Its notes resound like monstrous ricochets.

  But when you wake up, your body

  seems to fit fairly well, like a tailored suit,

  and you don’t look too bad in the mirror.

  Hi there, feller!

  Old feller, young feller, who cares?

  Whoever it was who felt guilty last night,

  to hell with him. That was then.

  The Young Cougar

  The doors swing open and in walks a young cougar wearing white shoes and light-blue socks, come to help his father. “Where do we put this in the registry?” one servant asks another. Or they were wearing the shoes and socks.

  Radio in the Distance

  for Yvonne Jacquette

  Beneath the earth covered with men

  with snow atop their heads, down

  to where it is dark and deep, to where

  the big black vibrating blob of wobble

  is humming its one and only note, I lie,

  orange hair not in the idea of diagonal,

  a Betty not composed of vertical fish

  or dog with grid-mark cancellations,

  but easy as an orchestra of toy atoms

  lazy with buzz and fizzle in their drift

  as if above this late and lost Manhattan

  spread out like a diagram of what we want

  from heaven, wherever it is when we think

  we know what it is and even when it really is.

  Face Value

  From a face comes a body an entire body

  and from a body everything

  but I can’t face you

  fully

  not yet

  maybe never

  and even if I did or thought I did

  how would I know

  How would I know

  what face value is

  From a face comes face value

  and from face value a lot of baling wire

  —the face scribbled over with dark coils of it

  I was born in Kentucky almost

  There were no faces there

  so I was born elsewhere

  from inside a fencepost

  to which barbed wire had been affixed

  by Frederic Remington

  The air was cool, the night calm

  and each star had a face

  like a movie star’s or someone in the family

  They too had star quality I thought

  but they had statue quality

  and then turned sideways

  like music blending into fabric and little curtains

  along the kitchen windows

  attractive kitchen windows

  Now you can sit down at this table

  and look me square in the eye

  and tell me what you’ve been wanting to

  or you can stand up like a photograph on a piano

  and sing to me

  a song that has no words or music

  Which is it? —But

  a heavy magnetic force pulls you to the wall

  and holds you there

  As soon as you get used to it

  it lets you go

  for a while

  and then your heavy magnetic force pulls the wall to you

  and you walk around with a wall stuck to your side

  The Wall of Forgetting

  it’s called

  but it’s not a wall it’s a mirror

  that picks your face up off the floor

  and whirls it onto a head

  that has gone on without you

  The Plank and the Screw

  There is one thing.

  In a fishing village on the coast of Norway

  an idea came forth and spread

  over the country and from there

  to the rest of the world, namely

  that floating inside the sun was its power source:

  a plank and a screw

  that had come loose from it,

  and as long as they floated around,

  never far one from the other,

  the sun would continue to burn.

  Let’s try to imagine how hot it is

  one inch from the sun.

  Now that we have found it

  impossible to imagine

  we can go on

  to the next thing we do not understand.

  Meanwhile, the plank and the screw

  continue to float—

  the plank is roughly an eight-foot

  one-by-ten, the screw a three-inch flathead—

  but since there is nothing around them

  except burning gas

  they are both highly visible.

  Many years passed.

  Gradually the idea that had come from Norway

  became so assimilated into the everyday lives

  of people that they never thought of it—

  it changed from an idea into people,

  so they forgot

  and for all practical purposes

  the idea ceased to exist.

  But everyone has inside them

  a plank and a screw

  floating around.

  Everyone is warm enough

  to be alive.

  102 Today

  If Wystan Auden were alive today

  he’d be a small tangle of black lines

  on a rumpled white bedsheet,

  his little eyes looking up at you.

  What did you bring?

  Some yellow daffodils and green stems.

  Or did they bring you?

  Auden once said,

  “Where the hell is Bobby?”

  and we looked around,

  but there was no Bobby there.

  Ah, Auden, no Bobby for you.

  Just these daffodils in a clean white vase.

  The Pounding Rabbit

  After a clock designed by Neya Churyoku (1897–1987)

  If you know the Japanese folktale

  about the rabbit that ended up

  on the moon, you will not be puzzled

  by a table clock depicting a rabbit

  pounding rice cakes on the moon,

  but if you do not know this story

  you will look at the clock and pound

  your own head in disbelief,

  as if to knock from it the spirit

  you wish to offer to the gods

  who munch the rice cakes

  and never turn to say thank you

  except by sending down a genius

  to crea
te such a clock, such a rabbit.

  Mountains and Songs

  Mountains of song

  exert their force up through the earth

  and rise above it

  Peasants and villagers

  cling to it as it rises

  and they sing

  and then they don’t

  for this is a pause

  in the history of the world

  and its mountains and songs

  I saw them rising

  and I knew it was weeping

  this rising

  for the mountains were going away

  the villagers and peasants too

  folded away in cupboards

  in mountains and songs

  It All Depends

  Que reste-t-il de nos amours?

  —CHARLES TRENET

  Et nos amours, faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne?

  —APOLLINAIRE

  But it is not love that I would speak of

  for as you see, I am of

  the nineteenth century, when love was

  . . . well, it all depends,

  and I can’t get out of it,

  whatever this love is.

  I will die in it and I hope

  of it, it is the preamble

  to walking in and sitting

  down and saying “Hi”

  before anything else has a chance

  to happen. And then

  of course nothing does,

  which is why you keep saying it—

  you can’t get out

  of saying it. So you may as well

  take off your hat and stay a while,

  which is what you always planned on anyway.

  The nineteenth century,

  what a tremendous thing

  to be in love in!

  Cottages go by

  and music piles up

  like excited dead people.

  They stop but don’t,

  like sleeping people who are alive,

  but it’s not that easy,

  the century is more complicated

  than one had expected

  now that everyone has a pot and a pan

  but not a love of the pot and the pan.

  Still, look at those sailing ships

  on the wide main and the stairways

  that spiral into heaven

  and that bird with a long red beard

  sticking straight up!

  It’s our chance to separate ourselves

  into numerous pieces and have them

  go in different directions,

  reassembling what time had dispersed

  in the form of granules and mist.

  Or was it even really there?

  A nightingale warbled

  the tune it was supposed to

  so the world would calm down.

  There’s nothing wrong with resting

  alongside this shady rill and taking medications

  as if they were piles of stones placed at intervals

  by people who must have had a meaning

  in mind but with no thought of telling you

  what it was, for they didn’t know that you

  would exist. Therefore, lie down and rest.

  The afternoon is mild and your love

  is not driving you crazy, temporarily.

  A rest might give you the strength

  to look love straight in the eye

  and not fade into granules and mist.

  Reverdy said

  “One must try to live”—

  the statement of a man

  who didn’t love

  or wasn’t loved

  enough. A small rectangle

  of light lay on his floor

  and his shoe

  flashed as it went by.

  His wife was hidden

  in the kitchen, his girlfriend

  hidden in celebrity,

  his God just hidden.

  Pierre opened the kitchen door,

  the trap door of fame,

  and the side of the cathedral,

  but there was nothing there,

  and when he opened his heart

  he found only a rectangle

  of sunlight on the floor.

  But it was enough.

  Perhaps his wife was hiding

  her love in the kitchen,

  the dark kitchen in Solesmes,

  where I saw her walking

  briskly down the street

  at the age of 97 or 98,

  the same street

  a few years later

  she would move slowly up

  and down the way

  to lie down in the tomb

  next to Pierre, her Pierre.

  By then the girlfriend

  had twirled into Eternity,

  and God had hidden so deeply

  in Pierre’s poems

  Pierre didn’t know

  He was there—

  He had gone back and disappeared

  beneath the period

  that ended Pierre’s first book,

  like a dark glint.

  But God too was trying to live.

  He hasn’t been around lately,

  which is perhaps why

  the landscape is so cheerful—

  it gets to be just itself,

  brutally wonderfully so, and birds

  veer and chirp and lift

  their wings to see what’s there.

  It’s air.

  And so singing.

  “But that’s what I did,”

  says Pierre

  out of nowhere.

  “And you can’t tell

  if the singing made the air

  or the other way around—

  or both, which is most likely.”

  And then, like a Frenchman,

  he left, before I had a chance

  to throw him around the room,

  but with respect,

  affection, and mountains,

  the kind they had in the century

  he was born in, mountains as black

  as his tomb, which I am unable

  to throw around now

  that his wife’s in there too.

  Henriette: her name.

  (Henri: his real first name.)

  (Her name a little feminine version of his.)

  (But we all get smaller and smaller.)

  (Hoping to fit

  inside a rectangle of sunlight.)

  (And not be a shoe!)

  (Though have the calmness of a shoe.)

  (Beneath the bed at night.)

  I will tell you this tonight.

  The Elevation of Ideals

  To construct a set of ideals, a toy tool kit suffices, provided that the handles of the hammer, saw, and screwdriver are of wood and painted light blue. However, a full set of adult tools enables the builder to work more rapidly and with greater precision. Of equal importance are the raw materials, though it is possible to use various bits and pieces that one finds along the way. Remember, though, never to use metaphors in the construction, for over time they will shift, and the entire construction will sag and perhaps collapse. (Of course these rules apply only if you live on dry land; another set covers undersea construction.)

  (If you end one ideal in parentheses, you must begin the next also in parentheses. Otherwise, the joint will not bond.) To construct a solid set of ideals, do not begin too early, for all too often the ideals do not turn out to be ideals at all: they are ideas, and, like bubbles, they tend to float away and pop. In doing so they can be beautiful, but æsthetic beauty is not of great importance here, unless it happens to be the same as moral beauty, which happens very rarely in modern societies. So allow your ideals to evolve through the decades. If you cherish them and don’t think about them too much, they will change themselves by rotating on their axes while flashing on and off, to show you that all is well. When you turn fifty, they stop flashing, and for a while you think they have vanished, but it is
you who have vanished, so thoroughly that even you do not know you are there. But you are.

  You are, the way your mother is there, and your father, too. At this point you can obtain a set of tools and start thinking about the construction, how to begin it and where. These choices will be up to you: some choose the head, some the heart, and others even elect to build it outside themselves. The choice of location might bedevil you, but I will tell you now that the location doesn’t really matter, except to you.

  Deciding on the design of the construction can prove extremely difficult. This is normal, so don’t fret about it. Just pick up the first ideal and see how it feels in your hand, then pick up a tool in the other hand. You will know immediately if they match. If they don’t, try others. If nothing seems to work, you are not really fifty, and it is best to put the tools away and try later.

  But do not postpone the resumption too long, for you might have grown so old that you no longer remember your project, or you may not be physically strong enough to make difficult moral decisions. Assuming, however, that you do resume, aim to build a perfect structure, no matter how small, for if the one you do complete is good enough it will float up of its own accord and stop in midair, where you can sing to it any time you want. If a door or window falls off, do not be concerned. Another door or window will appear in its place. And anyway, you will be inside, looking out.

  Birgitte Hohlenberg

  for Bill Berkson

  I do not know who Birgitte Hohlenberg was

  or why C. A. Jensen painted her portrait, in 1826,