Remains of the Day

1

In candlelight and over a good Shiraz,
the eyes of the liberals
focus, fuzzily, where those of the educated
do.  Who do not share
the ancient wisdom of ordinary folk,
that I am my children and through them
impose my narrowness on the future.  For liberals
in candlelight look past each other’s
sweaters and face-lifts and single, tasteful
jewels at the future itself.
They once could find some comfort there,
the happiness of others
fulfilling, replacing any default
of theirs.  Now they no longer can.
For tonight, at this party,
unbeknownst to them, unmeasured
by any instrument, the last synapse
of the idea of progress
stops.  Ideas die
long after their death has been announced,
and are digested by history,
which is like an old man,
tossing, moaning, and farting in sick sleep.
Momentarily the liberals
consider a form of Platonism:
a scolding, essentially conservative
curatorship of values without
a future.  They aren’t ready
for this unattractive shift.  And the evening
is soft, the Shiraz traveled well,
the candidates
of one of the parties have courted them;
and for an hour they
indulge the childish parlor game of hope.
The mysterious higher being who tries
to form at every dinner party
stirs … But they’re old,
adulterous, medicated, and the god
slouches at table, as frustrated as they.

2

That night, the female poet begins
a poem.  She draws on her knowledge
of the birds of her native Michigan shore,
alludes tentatively to environmental
pollution in the thinness of the shells
of their eggs, and other frailties:
beaks, the faded plumage
of the males, the treated corporate seeds
they steal.  Her imagination
is nonetheless caught
by the male, soaring, providing, while
the female waits on the defective nest.  And the “you”
who enters halfway (how clever
this sidestep always is!) seems likewise
damaged, hardly there.  It occurs to her
she has no actual “you” in her life
now.  The composite features
she addresses have long since blurred.  The kids
have flown; their father
seeks younger and younger mates, and makes
himself a laughingstock as if in penance.
Then the thought of the unreal
Cynthias and Celias invoked
by Roman and Renaissance poets
revives her – the point being to fly
from subject to Theme, from the alone to the Alone;
herself now taking her place among these.

3

The male poet waits for the morning after.
He admires painters (the image may be obsolete)
who sleep in their studios to catch
the canvas at dawn, bleary-eyed,
incapable of sentiment.
At his desk, the tepid grimy
disillusion awaits that has become
for him the very fire of creation.
He can’t write
about his wife, he’s happy with her.
If you call attention to happiness, God takes it from you,
and he doesn’t want to write poem after poem
of mourning.  (His own death
presents a similar problem as subject-matter.)
So he’s drawn to the past,
thirty years before, when his life broke
as the lives of many talented people do.
He’d like to feel that communing
with that solitary figure in a slum
could create a bond, a readership
of other lonely men, solidarity.
No subject he will ever think of can.
The past listens to the sirens,
the hateful hysterical drunks outside
and asks how he’ll get out of here.
The present wonders how he did.  They try
to see each other across time.
They agree that having nothing to hope for sucks.

4

For what was poetry?  Selves,
so boring one might be forgiven
for becoming nauseated with selves.
Sad guests, as Goethe said, on the dark earth.
Or forgive poets who abandoned
mind to series of nonsense phrases.
For if one reads carefully,
one sees them come alive
when a brand-name is mentioned, a pop song,
a program, some hermetic bit of slang.
And sees that the only poem
they want is the one we all read
gawp-eyed on the screens, and hear everywhere.
They want to become it, strive
for that final abandonment …
My teeth hurt.  The sun
has come out, but it’s cold;
the runways are frozen.  The swine
in their columns will joke about global warming.
Sparrows rise from the lawn
and circle, in their beaks
little banners with sayings about nature and life, cheep cheep.
Let the morons attack
whom we fear more than we ever feared the Bomb.
Let the ice-sheet slip, the seas rise
so that I may outdo
Larkin’s boastful complaint that the green wouldn’t last his time.
Let me not die alone
or not laughing. – Email from Jeffrey
in Portland.  He’s deeply troubled, but old school:
talks round and round an emotion,
will joke, philosophize … That’s fine
with me; I’m used
to maintaining separate conversations,
and tell him that the moods of neglected genius
are identical to those of neglected cranks.