Fantasia on "The Nut-Brown Maid"

HE

Be it right or wrong, these men among

Others in the park, all those years in the cold,

Are a plain kind of thing; bands

Of acanthus and figpeckers. At

The afternoon closing you walk out

Of the dream crowding the walls and out

Of life or whatever filled up

Those days and seemed to be life.

You borrowed its colors, the drab ones

That are so popular now, though only

For a minute, and extracted a fashion

That wasn't really there. You are

Going, I from your thought rapidly

To the green wood go, alone, a banished man.

SHE

But now always from your plaint I

Relive, revive, springing up careless,

Dust geyser in city absentmindedness,

And all day it is writ and said:

We round women like corners. They are the friends

We are always saying goodbye to and then

Bumping into the next day. School has closed

Its doors on a few. Saddened, she rose up

And untwined the gears of that blank, blossoming day.

"So much for Paris, and the living in this world."

But I was going to say

It differently, about the way

Time is sorting us all out, keeping you and her

Together yet apart, in a give-and-take, push-pull

Kind of environment. And then, packed like sardines,

Our wit arises, survives automatically. We imbibe it.

HE

What was all the manner

Between them, let us discuss, the sponge

Of night pick us up with much else, carry

Some distance, so all the pain and fear

Will never be heard by anybody. Gasping

On your porch, but I look to new season

Which is exactly lost. "I am the knight,

I come by night." We will say all these

To the other, in turn. And now impatient for

Sleep will have strayed over the

Frontier to pass the time, and it might

As well, dried baby's breath stuck in an old

Bottle, and no man puts out to sea from these

Coves, secure or not, dwelling in persuasion.

SHE

It's as I thought: there there is

Nothing solid, nothing one can build on. The

Force may have ebbed in the green wood.

Here is nothing, not even

Lazy slipping away, feeling of being abandoned, a

Distant curl of smoke above a car

Graveyard. Instead, the shadows stand

Straight out. Uninvited, light grabs its due;

What is eaten away becomes etched impression

Of mutability, but nothing backs it up.

We may as well begin the litany here:

How all that forgotten past seasons us, prepares

Us for each other, now that the mathematics

Of winter is starting to point it out.

HE

It is true, a truer story.

Self-knowledge frosts each action, each step taken

Freely. Life is a living picture.

Alone, I can bind you like a pleated scarf,

But beyond that is much that might be

Examined for the purpose of examining it.

The ends stream back in the wind, it is too dark

To see them but I can feel them.

As Naming-of-Cares you precede the objection

To each, implying a Land of Cockaigne

Syndrome. You get around this as though

The eternally revised geography of spring meant

Something beyond its own sense of exaltation,

And love were cause for self-congratulation.

SHE

I might hide somewhere. I want to fly but keep

My morality, motley as it is, just by

Encouraging these branching diversions around an axis.

So when suddenly a cloud blackens the whole

Day just before noon, this is merely

Timing. So even when darkness swings further

Back, it indicates, must indicate, an order,

Albeit a restricted one, which tends to prove that idle

Civilizations once existed under a loose heading like

"The living and the dead." To learn more

Isn't my way, and anyway the dark green

Ring around the basin postulates

More than the final chapter of this intriguing

Unfinished last chapter. It's in the public domain.

HE

But you will take comfort in it again.

Others, patient murderers, cultivated,

Sympathetic, in time will have subtly

Switched the background from parallel rain-lines

To the ambiguities of "the deep," and in

Doing so will have wheeled an equestrian statue up

Against the sky's facade, the eye of God, cantering

So as not to fall back nor yet trample the cold

Pourings of sunlight. You will have the look

Reflected on your face. The great squash domes seem

To vindicate us all, yet belong to no one.

Meanwhile others will grow up and fuck and

Get older, beating like weeds against the door,

But this wasn't anticipated. You caught them off guard.

SHE

What I hear scraping at the door

Is palaver of multitudes who decided to come back,

Having set out too soon, and something must be

Done about them, names must be written down,

Or simply by being hoarse one whole side

Of the world won't count any more,

The side with the story of our lives

And our relatives' on it, the memory

Of the day you bicycled over.

But the reason for the even, tawny flow

Of the morning as it turned was the thought of riding

Back down all those hills that were so hard

To get up, and climbing the ones you had

Coasted down before, like mirror-writing.

HE

And when the flourish under the signature,

A miniature beehive with a large bee on it, was

Finished, you chose a view of distant factories,

Tall smokestacks, anything. It didn't matter

So long as it was emptied of all but a drop

At the bottom like the medicine bottle that is thrown

away.

The catch in the voice goes out of style then,

The period of civilities is long past.

Strange we should be continually waking up

To a barbaric calm that has probably

Always supported us, while still

Apologizing to the off-white walls we saw through

Years ago. But it stays this way.

SHE

What happened was you had finished

Nine-tenths of it before the great explosion,

The meteorite or whatever it was that tore out the

Huge crater eight miles in diameter.

Then somehow you spliced the bleeding wires,

Made it presentable long enough for

Inspection, then collapsed and slept until

The part where she takes the bus. And all

Because someone in a department store made some

Cryptic allusion, or so you thought as that person

Passed by, reducing the architecture of a life

To a minus quantity. There was no way

Back out of this because it wasn't a departure.

HE

I one stole a pencil, but now the list with my name in it

Disgusts me. It is the horizon, tilted like the deck

Of a ship. And beyond, what must be the real

Horizon congeals into a blue roebuck whose shadow

Hardens every upturned face it trails across

And sets a blister there. If there was still time

To turn back, you must not follow me, but rather

Stay in your living, in your time,

Sizing up the future as accurately as the woman

In the old photograph, and, like her, turn away,

Your hand barely grazing the top of the little doric

column.

Anything outside what the sheaf of rays delineates

For the moment is pain and at last illusion,

A piece of not very good news.

SHE

Then we must be like each other, because this afternoon's

Ballast barely holds back the rising landscape

Of premonitions against that now distant (yet all too

Contemporaneous) magnesium flare in which

The habits of a moment, like wrinkles in a piece of

backcloth,

Plummeted into the space under the stage

Through a trapdoor carelessly left open,

Joining other manifestations of human stick-to-itiveness

In a "semi-retirement" which has its own rewards

Except the solution only comes about much later, and

then

Won't entirely fit all the clues of the atmosphere

(Books, dishes and bathrooms), but is

Empty and vigilant, but too late to make the train,

And at night stands like tall buildings, disembodied,

Vaporous, rhapsodic, going on and on about something

That happened in the past, at the point where the recent

Past ends and the darker one begins.

HE

But since "we know what we are, but know not

What we may be," and it's later now, the romance

Of moderation takes over again. Something has to be

Living, not everyone can afford the luxury of

Just being, not alive but being, at the center,

The perfumed, patterned center. Perhaps it's all fun

But we won't know till we see it, as on a windless day

It suddenly becomes obvious how wonderful the fields

are

Before it all sickens and fades to a melange

Of half-truths, this gray dump. Then double trouble

Arrives, Beppo and Zeppo confront one

Out of a hurricane of colored dots, twin

Windshield wipers dealing the accessories:

Woe, wrack, wet-probably another kingdom.

SHE

I was going to say that the sky

Could never become that totally self-absorbed, bachelor's-

Button blue, yet it has, and nothing is any safer for it,

Though the outlines of what we did stay just a second

longer

On the etching of the forest, and we know enough not

To go there. If brimstone were the same as the truth

A gate deep in the ground would unlock to the fumbling

Of a certain key and the dogs at the dog races

Would circumambulate each in his allotted groove

Casting an exaggeratedly long shadow, while other

Malcontents, troublemakers, esprits frondeurs moved up

To dissolve in the brightness of the footlights. I would

Withstand, bow in hand, to grieve them. So it is time

To wake up, to commingle with the little walking

presences, all

Somehow related, to each other and through each other

to us,

Characters in the opera The Flood, by the great

anonymous composer.

HE

Mostly they are

Shoals, even tricks of the light, armies

In debacle, helter skelter, pell mell,

Fleeing us who sometime did us seek,

And there is no place, nothing

To hide in, if it took weeks and months

With time running out. Nothing could be done.

Those ramparts, granular as Saturn's rings,

That seem some tomb of pleasures, a Sans Souci,

Are absent clouds. The real diversions on the ground

Are shrub and nettle, planing the way

For asking me to come down, and the snow, the frost,

the rain,

The cold, the heat, for dry or wet

We must lodge on the plain . . . Later, dying

"Of complications," only it must really have been much

later, her hair

Had that whited look. Now it's darker.

SHE

And an intruder is present.

But it always winds down like this

To the rut of night. Boats no longer come

Plying along the sides of docks in this part

Of the world. We are alone. Only by climbing

A low bluff does the intent get filled in

Along the edge, and then only subtly.

Evening weaves along these open tracts almost

Until the solemn tolling of a bell

Launches its moment of pain and obscurity, wider

Than any net can seize, or star presage. Further on it says

That all the missing parts must be tracked down

By coal-light or igloo-light because

In so doing we navigate these our passages,

And take sides on certain issues, are

Emphatically pro or con about what concerns us,

Such as the strangeness of our architecture,

The diffuse quality of our literature.

HE

Or does each tense fit, and each desire

Drown in the lake of one vague one, featureless

And indeterminate? Which is why one's own wish

Keeps getting granted for someone else? In the forest

Are no clean sheets, no other house

But leaves and boughs. How many

Other things can one want? Nice hair

And eyes, galoshes on a rainy day? For those who go

Under the green helm know it lets itself

Become known, at different moments, under different

aspects.

SHE

Unless some movie did it first, or

A stranger came to the door and then the change

Was real until it went away. Or is it

Like a landscape in its inner folds, relaxed

And with the sense of there being about to be some more

Until the first part is digested and then it twists

Only because this is the way we can see things?

It is revisionism in that you are

Always trying to put some part of the past back in,

And although it fits it doesn't belong in the

Dark blue glass ocean of having been remembered again.

From earliest times we were cautioned not to get excited

About things, so this quality shows up so far only in

Slightly deeper tree-shadows that anticipate this

PACING THE FLOOR

That takes in the walls, the window and the woods.

HE

Then it was as if a kind of embarrassment,

The product of a discretion lodged far back in the past,

Blotted them against a wall of haze.

Pursuing time this way, as a dog nudges a bone,

You find it has doubled back, the flanges

Of night having now replaced the big daffy gray clouds.

O now no longer speak, but rather seem

In the way of gardens long ago turned away from,

And now no one any more will have to believe anything

He or she doesn't want to as golden light wholly

Saturates a wooden fence and speaks for everybody

In a native accent that sounds new and foreign.

But the hesitation stayed on, and came to be permanent

Because they were thinking about each other.

SHE

That's an unusual . . . As though a new crescent

Reached out and lapped at a succession of multitudes,

Diminished now, but still lively and true.

It seems to say: there are lots of differences inside.

There were differences when only you knew them.

Now they are an element, not themselves,

And hands are idle, or weigh the head

Like an outsize grapefruit, or an ocarina

Closes today with a comical wail.

Go in to them, see

What the session was about, how much they destroyed

And what preserved of what was meant to shuffle

Along in its time: hunched red shoulders

Of huntsmen, what they were doing

There in the grass, ribbons of time fluttering

From the four corners of a square masonry tower.

HE

Having draped ourselves in villas, across verandas

For so many years, having sampled

Rose petals and newspapers, we know that the eye of the

storm,

As it moves majestically to engulf us, is alive

With the spirit of confusion, and that these birds

Are stamped with the same dream of exaltation moving

Toward the end. 'Tis said of old, soon

Hot, soon cold. There are other kinds of privacy

Coming in now, and soon,

In three or four months, enough leisure

To examine the claim of each

And to reward each according to his claim

On a sliding scale coinciding with the rush

Into later blue sun-divided weather.

SHE

No, but I dug these out of bureau drawers for you,

Told you which ones meant a lot to me,

Which ones I was frankly dubious about, and

Which were destined to blow away.

Who are we to suffer after this?

The fragrant cunt, the stubborn penis, winding

Paths of despair and memory, reproach in

The stairwell, and new confidence: "We'll

Do something about that," until a later date

When pines march stiffly right down to the edge of the

water.

And after all this, finding

Someone at home, as though memory

Had placed chairs around

So that these seem to come and go in the present

And will escape the anger of a fixed

Destiny causing them to lean all the way over to one side

Like wind-heaped foam.

HE

It's enough that they are had,

Allowed to run loose.

As I was walking all alane

The idea of a field of particulars-that

Each is shaped, illustratable, accountable

To us and to no man-leached into the pervading

Gray-blue sense of moving somewhere with coevals,

Palmers and pardoners, a raucous yet erasable

Rout pent in the glimmer of

An American Bar. Whereupon Barry Sullivan-type avers

To Bruce Bennett-type that inert wet blackness is

Superior to boudoir light in which

Dull separateness blazes and is shriven and

Knows it isn't right.

SHE

And shall, like a Moebius strip

Of a tapestry, play to our absences and soothe them,

Whether in some deprived tropic or some

Boudoir-cave where it finds that just

Paying the interest on the bonanza is dressier.

Alas, but there are others, he thought, and we are children

Again, the children our parents were, trampling

Under foot the delicate boundary, last thing of day

Before night, that resurrects and comforts us here.

Patience

Of articulation between us is still what it is,

No more and no less, but this time the night shift

Will have to be disturbed, and wiping out the quality

Of yesterday with the sponge of dreams is being phased

out.

HE

You're making a big mistake. Just because Goofus has been

lucky for you, you imagine others will make a fuss over

you, all the others, who will matriculate. You'll be left with

a trowel and a lot of empty flowerpots, imagining that the

sun as it enters this window is somehow a blessing that will

make up for everything else-those very years in the cold.

That the running faucet is a sacred stream. That the glint of

light from a silver ball on that far-off flagpole is the equiva-

lent of a career devoted to life, to improving the minds and

the welfare of others, when in reality it is a common thing

like these, and less profitable than any hobby or sideline

that is a source of retirement income, such as an antique

stall, pecan harvest or root-beer stand. In short, although

the broad outlines of your intentions are a credit to you,

what fills them up isn't. You are like someone whose face

was photographed in a crowd scene once and then gradu-

ally retreated from people's memories, and from life as well.

SHE

But the real "world"

Stretches its pretending into the side yard

Where I was waiting, at peace with my feelings, though

now,

I see, resentful from the beginning for the change to

happen

Like lilacs. We were walking

All along toward a door that seemed to recede

In the distance and now is somehow behind us, shut,

Though apparently it didn't lock automatically. How

Wonderful the fields are. They are

Like love poetry, all the automatic breathing going on

All around, and there are enchanted, many-colored

Things like houses to explore, if there were time,

But the house is built under a waterfall. The slanting

Roof and the walls are made of opaque glass, and

The emerald-green wall-to-wall carpeting is sopping moss.

HE

And last, perhaps, as darkness

Begins to infuse the lawns and silent streets

And the remote estuary, and thickens here, you mention

The slamming of a door I wasn't supposed to know about,

That took years. Each of us circles

Around some simple but vital missing piece of

information,

And, at the end, as now, finding no substitute,

Writes his own mark grotesquely with a stick in snow,

The signature of many connected seconds of indecision.

What I am writing to say is, the timing, not

The contents, is what matters. All this could have happened

Long ago, or at least on some other day,

And not meant much except insofar as the eye

Extracts a progress from almost anything. But then

Tt wouldn't have become a toy.

And all the myths,

Legends and misinterpretations, would have scattered

At a single pistol shot. And it would no longer know what

I know.

SHE

It was arriving now, the eyes thick

With their black music, the wooden misquotable side

Thrust forward. Tell about the affair she'd had

With Bennett Palmer, the Minnesota highwayman,

Back when she was staying at Lake Geneva, Wisc.,

In the early forties. That paynim'd

Go to any lengths to shut her up, now,

Now that the time of truth telling from tall towers

Had come. Only old Thomas a Tattamus with his two tups

Seemed really to care. Even Ellen herself

Could muster but a few weak saws about loving-how it

leaves us

Naked at a time when we would rather be clothed, and

She looked all around the room with a satisfied air.

Everything was in order, even unto bareness, waiting to

receive

Whatever stamp or seal. The light coming in off the kale

In the kaleyard outside was like the joyous, ravening

Light over the ocean the morning after a storm.

It hadn't betrayed her and it never would.

HE

To him, the holiday-making crowds were

Engines of a parallel disaster, the fulfilling

Of all prophecies between now and the day of

Judgment. Spiraling like fish,

Toward a distant, unperceived surface, was all

The reflection there was. Somewhere it had its opaque

Momentary existence.

But if each act

Is reflexive, concerned with itself on another level

As well as with us, the strangers who live here,

Can one advance one step further without sinking equally

Far back into the past? There was always something to see,

Something going on, for the historical past owed it

To itself, our historical present. Another month a huge

Used-car sale on the lawn shredded the sense of much

Of the sun coming through the wires, or a cape

Would be rounded by a slim white sail almost

Invisible in the specific design, or children would come

Clattering down fire escapes until the margin

Exploded into an ear of sky. Today the hospitals

Are light, airy places, tented clouds, and the weeping

In corridors is like autumn showers. It's beginning.

*

Unless this is the shelf of whatever happens? The cold sun-

rise attacks one side of the giant capital letters, bestirs a little

the landmass as it sinks, grateful but asleep. And you too are

a rebus from another century, your fiction in piles like lace,

in that a new way of appreciating has been invented, that

tomorrow will be quantitatively and qualitatively different

-young love, cheerful, insubstantial things-and that these

notions have been paraded before, though never with the

flashing density climbing higher with you on the beanstalk

until the jewelled mosaic of hills, ploughed fields and rivers

agreed to be so studied and fell away forever, a gash of

laughter, a sneeze of gold dust into the prism that weeps

and remains solid.

Well had she represented the patient's history to his apathetic

scrutiny. Always there was something to see, something

going on, for the historical past owed it to itself, our historical

present. There were visiting firemen, rumors of chattels on

a spree, old men made up to look like young women in the

polygon of night from which light sometimes breaks, to be

sucked back, armies of foreigners who could not understand

each other, the sickening hush just before the bleachers col-

lapse, the inevitable uninvited and only guest who writes on

the wall: I choose not to believe. It became a part of oral

history. Things overheard in cafés assumed an importance

previously reserved for letters from the front. The past was

a dream of doctors and drugs. This wasn't misspent time.

Oh, sometimes it'd seem like doing the same thing over and

over, until I had passed beyond whatever the sense of it had

been. Besides, hadn't it all ended a long time back, on some

clear, washed-out afternoon, with a stiff breeze that seemed

to shout: go back! For the moated past lives by these dreams

of decorum that take into account any wisecracks made at

their expense. It is not called living in a past. If history were

only minding one's business, but, once under the gray shade

of mist drawn across us... And who am I to speak this

way, into a shoe? I know that evening is busy with lights,

cars... That the curve will include me if I must stand here.

My warm regards are cold, falling back to the vase again

like a fountain. Responsible to whom? I have chosen this

environment and it is handsome: a festive ruching of bare

twigs against the sky, masks under the balconies

that

I sing alway