Far House


It was that drawing of Phylis’s
that set me off: her mother and some friends
playing mah-jongg in the Fifties.
Big hair, big lampshade, percolator, pleats,
small real smiles, someone’s eyebrow.
And in a zone close to that table
though far from it, Phylis at ten,
asleep, with a cat (they never owned a cat)
curled counterclockwise by her head.
Vast floating tiles distinguish
yet link the two areas, inscribed
with vaguely Chinese-looking
characters meaning Happiness, no doubt,
and Love.  It hung
in the kitchen of her mother’s old apartment;
safely made the transition
to the Assisted Living facility where,
after weeks of depression, fear, holistic anger,
her mother at last thanked Phylis for helping her move.

And thinking of that drawing I noticed
I have no childhood moment that
remains because it was so fair,
or which I summon back without ambivalence.
The basement flooded.  Mother burned a steak.
I tried to get them to stop quarreling;
even drew up a “treaty,” which
they signed but disobeyed …
Enough.  The family romance
is not the deepest theme,
though saying this will trouble the mainstream.
In my earliest memories I’m already
on the move, though to the imperceptive eye
I was only shifting my weight
from side to side or sitting
with a dull expression in a corner.
The wish to be elsewhere
implied an elsewhere to go to, would
someday suggest a means, and was my whole thought.

So my hallowed place was built early
and far away, and remains so,
though visible across great lawns and trees
that are simply there, having no life-cycle.
Birds migrate in enormous loops
over the grounds and two different groups
of security guards, both assholes:
one claims the distant house is God;
the other that, with work, I could have bought it.
My life is the villages – shantytowns, rather –
around the perimeter.  I steal
fruit from the orchards, poach game,
do odd jobs; and when
the sun goes down in all directions,
I talk about the Big House with my friends.
Who, as so often
when a life or poem has not
sufficiently detached itself from yearning,
are never entirely real.

One broods in lamplight over the days
we planned to march upon and seize the House,
then found there was no one behind us.
The question, what we would have used it for –
command center, files, perpetual orgy –
breaks out again, but we’re old
and nobody recalls what he supports.
One talks about the art that lines the walls,
the masterpieces one will never see.
Another, of the twits who bought the art,
the bar on every floor, the food they eat,
the thousand-inch TV,
the pearls and perfume over cleavages
whose depth we’ll never know,
the braying voices echoing in ours.
One who sits apart announces
he wants to burn it to the ground;
then he could go.
Go where? I ask, and am answered wittily by silence.

In dreams the rent-a-cops disperse, unpaid,
and I set off across the sward,
strong as in dreams, the moonlight clearer than the sun’s.
And sometimes curving space returns
my straight line to the hovel where it started,
and sometimes leads it to a grander ruin.
In either case I scowl;
more than obsequiousness, longing, tears,
it is the look appropriate to exile,
which plays throughout its run to mirrors.
Till I reflect that in that house
the one important feature
is the room to which a mother
carries a sleeping girl –
both wrapped in peace, with no bitterness
or hurt to come to them;
the nightlight on, sheets drawn, a kindly
world budded from ours
attentively by agents of the future.