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Compulsive Qualifications
for Stewart Lindh
I
"Richard, May I Ask A Question? What Is An Episteme?"
A body of knowledge. As I know best now,
Regarding yours across the abyss between
That chair and this one,
My ignorance the kind of bliss unlikely
To bridge the furniture without a struggle,
A scene-mad or bad
Or just gauche. The known body is Greek to me,
Though I am said to have conspicuous gifts
As a translator.
More likely the Bible is the right version:
All knowledge was probably gained at first hand
And second nature;
To know the Lord was to be flesh of His flesh.
There was a God, but He has been dismembered;
We are the pieces.
u
"Richard, What Do You Mean When You Say You're
Writing Two-Part Inventions?"
The sense of invention is a coming-upon,
A matter of finding matter more than of fact,
So that the finding matters.
And if invention is finding, all finding is
Finally choosing, and a choice is something made.
Hence the sense of our saying
We "make" each other: because we choose that body
Over and above this one (ours), coming-upon
Becomes more than just coming,
Becomes rather a coming-to, and to . . . ourselves.
Now in a two-part invention, the choosing works
Both ways, we exchange our parts
So we can be found by each other, and coming
Together, coming apart, not even coming,
We shall have been invented.
Il
"Richard, May I Ask You Something? Is Poetry Involved
With Evil?"
If we follow Sade (as we do, from a distance-
After all, who could keep up?) the Law is crime's cause,
Wedlock the source of divorce,
Nor can any Garden grow till we acknowledge
The weeds suffered outside, not sadistically,
Just dialectically.
So much, then, for "involvement": no Paradiso
Without, in poetry at least, infernal parts.
But let the word itself speak-
Evil, from Indo-European roots, flowers
Like a weed, meaning "up-from-under" and "over"
(as eaves drop from above us),
Meaning also "supine", "thrown-backward" and "under",
Meaning, as roots so often seem to mean, its own
Opposite besides itself.
There we have it, as I would have it: infernal
Parts beside themselves, opposites supine, so that
As even this four-letter
Old-English word means, we can be "extended forms
Which signify exceeding the proper limit."
Flowers of excess-O good!
IV
"Richard, Isn't There A Good Movie We Could Go Out
To?"
Out? I keep going in to mine, the blue kind
You come in the middle of. But then, you are
Color blind, and not to blame.
Your memory for figures must be as bad
As a mirror's, or is it too dark in here?
The best features have moved on:
What merely happens passes, and what never
Happens is eternal-perpetual motion
Pictures. Camera! Action!
It is a good movie I am watching here
In which I began as its only actor, end
As its only audience.
v
"Richard, We Were Here Before, Don't You Remember?"
I remember how the valley turned from umber
To burnt siena, how the clouds above Siena
Broke their Tuscan habit
Of harboring grudges-it came down that morning
As if nothing would be held or held back again!
But we were never there.
I remember the road to Rocamadour turning
Round until it was ready to make a run for
The hills overhanging
A chateau caramel in the afternoon light.
I remember how you took one hand from the wheel
And your new driving-glove
Was the same caramel. You turned, like the valley
Or like the road, and I remember your face then,
But it never happened.
And your face now, now we are here and our hostess
Shows us to the same table we shared last time
In Ye Waverly Inn
-I forget your face. "Last time" is no more than lost,
A series of revelations leading up to
A full-length mirror,
And only my fictions can free me from myself.
Liberation is never complete while life "lasts",
And nothing afterward.
VI
"Richard, May I Ask A Horrible Question? Isn't It Painful
When Two Men Make Love Together?"
There is a horrible answer, to part of it-when
Two men make love apart, that is the most painful.
Remember what I say-it may come up again.
But you mean something else:
Bodies whose engineering has failed to manage
Or match their architecture, in which case Power
Gets no good out of Form, or only the better
Of Form. Is that what you mean?
There is a solution (I mean, it is soluble):
You concentrate upon the parts and let the whole
Take care of itself. Anyway, what about pain?
Is there pain and not-pain?
Or is there the discovery that they become
Each other when you traverse a certain terrain?
It is like electricity, pain: not a thing
But the way things behave.
Behaving yourself, then, is a way of having
Yourself be; pain a manner (sometimes a Grand one),
Not what is the matter. Merely signifying,
It is insignificant.
vu
"Afterwards, Richard, What Will We Do? What Will We
Say?"
When you work the mirror over, prying for signs,
Perhaps it will come as a surprise that there are
None to be found in the glass.
What we do leaves no trace on others, what is done
To us, none on ourselves: so much for principles.
Kissing is not cosmetic,
Merely cosmic, and even after there has been
Breaking and entering, everyone's flesh is opaque
To the feelings of others.
A given body takes time, like a good burglar,
And cleans up after itself. Nothing our hands do
Discharges our heart's behavior,
Yet the change will be there, you are right about that,
Though wrong to look for it where you do: there will be
No revealing scars-nothing
Shows up except what is shown up to be nothing,
Standing for what cannot be said or done now,
Or not standing for such things
Another minute, representative but intolerant.
Before, what we did not do or say found its sense
Or subsistence-livelihood-
In the unlived life. From here on in, a likeness
Alone remains, a semblance of the unspeakable.
So little is to be learned
: From our fashions of making love, even from passions:
Our faces do not show the past, they face our fate.
Every sentence has been earned.
vill
"Richard, May I Ask You Something? Does The Particular
Spoil Things?"
All things speak names, by which they leave us.
Once I have learned, close up, what to call
The corners of your mouth, what label
Attaches to the blue italics
Under your eyes-once spoken, the names
No longer apply.
Abstraction is the one property
That may be shared, the rest is only
Impropriety. Nothing is "spoiled",
Merely erased, by particulars.
As you teach me, what must be learned
Can be forgotten.
Ix
"Richard, Everything Is Genre, Isn't It?"
"Sort of"... "You know"... "Like" -idiomatic
Efforts to accord ourselves to the world
Where one of a kind counts for nothing
More than an unrequited
Passion for things in general. A life
In which anything can happen is all
Right, but what if nothing happens twice?
Consider the freakishness
We fear in ourselves because it so much
Fascinates us in others . . . Consider,
For instance, that bald man leaving the bar
With you beside him, talking:
Are they a genre, that pair? He listens
For more than you can be telling him-what
You have read is no excuse for what you say.
You are young enough to take
Care of yourself, though he must be young too:
He claims he is growing older. Still talking
Round the revolving door, you walk outside
Under a sky corroded
By stars- a cold night boding a slow spring
To come. Is that genre? The two of you
Reach the corner, separate into single
Figures among the many.
Who was ever an individual when
He was alone? We belong to states, kinds,
Likenesses not ourselves. We are others,
And others are all genre.
x
"Richard, May I Ask You Something? Is Auden Senile?"
Seen ill. Seen too much-our media enforcing
Upon that face a commonplace extremity:
Hibernation all year round.
Say, his contempt breeds our familiarity,
Such ceremonious trifling as renews the old
Teutonic myth of a cap
Which renders its captive invisible to us,
His contemptuaries. How often have we heard
The obvious old refrains?
Listen and be grateful. When greatness means being
Able to grow old in a peer-group that parades
Eternal adolesecence,
Then repetition is a seemly tunic for
A man everywhere dismantled by the human
Envelope he wears like stone.
Let it not come as a shock but a saving grace,
If he should answer our hungry interviewers:
"My dear, let them eat cock!"
Poets should be obscene and not stirred. It is their
Own method acting up; making themselves public
Without making themselves known.
XI
"Richard, Do You Mind If I Split?"
Enough to be of two minds about the matter,
Unless it is the manner, of your going hence
Even as your coming hither:
Ripeness is hell, if the way you lead up to it
Or down from it is all there is likely to be-
A question of enduring
Each departure to prepare for each arrival.
I watch you at the start of our times together,
Lathered by onset-angst,
Then subsiding into the solace that is my
Easy gift, to patiently split infinitives,
Or hairs, or seconds, until
The old withdrawal symptoms bubble up again.
I have more than half a mind to say I do,
Because I want you to be whole,
But my parting shot must be a partial lie-white
Or off-color, as you leave the room: "Of course not.
Split. I shall be of one mind soon."
xu
"Richard, Can I Have Change For The Bus Fare?"
Of course: the Buss Fair! The Kiss Affırmative!
Fervent device of some obsolescent lore,
(As though compulsory busing
Had not become a commonplace business now,
A matter of changing, merely, who we are).
COUNT YOUR CHANGE. I am counting
Mine, and counting on it, in fact. Beware,
Plain though you may find the fare I can afford:
I mean it not to take you far,
Needing a force to take you only further
In-necessary transformations, fortunes
Reinforcing the affair.
XII
"Richard, What Will It Be Like When You Ask The Ques-
tions?"
Like a landscape by night, and in summer, riding
The ghost of a road (or what you take for a road,
Wet still and hissing under your bicycle tires
After an afternoon's rain)
But the ground keeps rising, the gray cumulus thins,
And there is the moon! round and sudden in the sky
Like an old sun casting a sort of dead daylight
Upon the world's premises,
Cancelling shadowy promises of escape
At a slowed tempo of resignation, so that
There is no story left to tell yourself or me
About the Day that Never
Or about the Night that Always-no story now
About what had been or what would be-it is how
You become a storyteller: there is no story,
So you have to make it up.
Even the same actions differ when repeated;
This one will be the same, but with a difference
More interesting than the sameness, which is
More significant than
The difference. You will find it matters little
Whether noon or the false noon of moonlight fastens
Your shadow to the macadam, whether you put
Questions or are put to them,
Loser, you will find there is nothing to choose,
Whether you make others suffer or prefer them
To inflict suffering on you: it is always
A god being crucified.