Unreleased Movie

Let's start in the middle, as usual. Ever since I burnt my mouth

I talk two ways, first as reluctant explainer, then as someone

offstage

In a dream, hushing those who might wake you from this

dream,

Imperfectly got up as a lutanist. Then sighs, whirrs, screeches

Become so much its fabric that one listens to see what words

materialize

On the windowpane this time. I don't want to make an uneasy

habit

Of this though, because when the universe does turn into a

horror movie

It will mean Japanese undershirts for the kiddies and unusual,

invisible

Demerits for those of us caught talking back at the screen,

unless, of course,

The unnatural peace God predicted for us has settled like a

giant shell

Over the ocean floor, in which case we shall all be forgiven

and forgotten,

Like students in a correspondence school. And I mean what

shall be saved

Of us as we live aimed at some near but unattainable mark

on the wall?

Not, one fears, a thing of hitherto unheard-of compacted

density

That might relieve all the years with spaces in them, years of

leggy growth,

Too much foliage, the wrong light, the wrong taste to things.

There is so much we know, too much, cruelly, to be expressed

in any medium,

Including silence. And to harbor it means having it eventually

The spiritual retaining wall that so commends itself to us we

can never

Be other, and become a different habitat altogether in which

these transactions

Are the brittle sounds of insect wings, robbed of the solid

clink of something

Like the reality that now accosts one. It is all, we see too late,

a question

Of having the knack, but the knack is as universal as the wind

that now protects,

Now buffets, and is not ours. Thus, we are more formal this

year, can escape

Certain confrontations, obtain the release of certain compro-

mised acquaintances

Without looking at what they may have become, foil the plans

of a few

Middle-echelon apparatchiks until the day that finally does

come to rest, busily,

At your doorstep. Put it into a clean jar. Save it from the time

which

Has been, without promoting it too far beyond the venetian

blind of that

Future's early demise, in which we saw ourselves pre-figured

dimly and what would

Happen to us scattered all over the ground like bruised rinds.

Only say what

Cannot be done to us, for now, and keep us ever straying

over the border into

Insanity and back, and by then, becalmed, we shall know the

superior discipline

As something lived within us, something that magnetizes

everything toward us.

But beware the merely frivolous gesture, token of its own

smile, which clamps

One supremely to one's own past, in which one is lost. Better

the negative

Volumes of the lives of strangers carried out to a certain point

just this side of

Emptiness, so as to be done with it. And those who may be

hungry, or thirsty,

Or tired; those who lived in a landscape without fully un-

derstanding it, may,

By their ignorance and needing help blossom again in the

same season into a new

Angle or knot, without feeling unwanted again. So, at any

rate, it is written

And believed by some few, a hundred or maybe a thousand

of the summarily instructed.

Doors will forever bang in that wind, night moths assault the

screens until

We know what we are thinking about once more. And that

day may guide us.

So the dream curved back into something natural (it always

does!), beached us

Where we started, furious at being safe and sound again. The

old oar-locks

Encased in moss, the same tire marks in the gravel. And we

come together

To quarrel or make love without any memory of the crabbed

ambitions that were there

Before us, and may outlive us but we shan't know this, it

won't make any difference

Even tonight as I lie here placing a finger now on one page

of the book, now

On another, as though by planting it there I might outgrow

the busy destiny

Predicted in those teeming lines. Really, it makes no difference:

If we are all going to be one, or together, in the space between

the moment

I had this imperfect vision and tomorrow. Yet, as marble

Dust is gradually brushed away one does come upon it, that

split-second

Interval as formal as a jewel, that an army of well-meaning

enemies couldn't

Possibly displace. I hear it calling to me. I must turn over a

new leaf.

It is the extreme last chance for doing so. I want it so much.

And then the world is

Shredded as a blanket waiting for this to happen, returns to

it like a kiss,

To that agreeable triangle in a sea of asphalt where one so

rarely has difficulty

Getting a taxi, and all magic works, the wicked and the only

misguided.

I am recreated in the short-sleeved pajamas of my youth.

PETER BALAKIAN