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.