The Compartments
1
He isn’t smart,
connected, or obsequious enough
for promotion; there’s no question
of making Detective. But he loves
the job. Another car
shares the speedtrap this week:
gray, unmarked,
with a female officer
who will go far. He doesn’t
begrudge her a few
noisy, flashy chases,
but wishes she’d go away.
Leave him to lift
the camera, point it
at people doing 35,
his smile in their rear-view mirrors
as grim, himself as huge
as justice.
He sits there all day.
The city needs
the fines. But the force
is always shorthanded, and he
is often, unhappily,
reassigned. Nights; a ward
with ninety dead
so far this year. Junkies
go there with guns
to renegotiate prices, gangs
to redraw markets. All
available officers stop
all cars at the borders
of that neighborhood, talk
to the drivers. Until lawyers squawk.
Or he must wait
for hours in the vehicle, blocking
intersections. Traffic
snarls, honks,
makes illegal turns
behind him. If the eventual convoy
flies some weird flag,
treating some foreigner
to a quick tour
up Pennsylvania Avenue, the officer
taps a thick finger. Not
if it’s the president. A good man.
2
The voice is blonde, the whole world
lying before it, responsibly sliced
and diced. She seems to have
five internships. They’re all in the
Human Resources Development
area, and nice. Her parents are being
incredibly nice. I visualize the legs,
the cleavage. Her supervisor
at one job is being a real mentor.
So perky and fervid, the voice
can go three sentences without
the floating “like,” that pro forma
disclaimer. Her friend,
less present but equally gung-ho,
says “Awesome.” The choice
is between futile annoyance
and banal nostalgia. I rise,
turn to go. She’s dark and obese,
her friend deformed and blind.
3
An anomaly: he reads.
“Everything.” Some overlap
with the cultural capital
of previous generations: Gaddis,
Ginsberg, Camus. No sense of
generations: these names might
as well be technologically-challenged
but gutsy contemporaries. History, politics,
even the words “class”
and “revolution” (God knows why
or how he learned them): unconnected
to his other data, a loose thread,
another metaphor for misery.
Of the young-intellectual modes
of forty years ago, the febrile showoff,
the wounded mute, he corresponds
to neither. Has girls, friends,
binges no more
or less often than they. Only,
at my office hours, in the vast
characterless cafeteria,
he attacks himself. Is “superficial.”
Has no “vision.” I say the expected things
about time and growth. He enjoys
and ignores them. Later in
the semester, he’s “selfish,”
“doesn’t care,” “gets hurt.”
I’m paralyzed by delicacy
and boredom. His poems
address with unusual skill
the usual faceless goddess,
meeting her eyes no more than his meet mine.
4
In ’88, in Guérande, Brittany,
Gracq and Jünger meet.
They walk together through the *vieille ville*.
They inspect a *châtelet, a *passage, a shop.
Jünger is 93,
dapper in blue, with the famous cap
of white hair; looks no older
than Gracq, a hale, gray-sweatered 78.
One wonders if Gracq mentions
having read *On the Marble Cliffs*
just out of prison camp,
hungry, at a train station. Jünger then
was in Paris, attending salons
in his uniform, with his *Pour le mérite* from the first war.
Noting with disgust
certain reports from the East. Dining with aristos
with an eye towards reviving
the Duchy of Burgundy, which straddled the Rhine.
This Old Town may mean something
like Burgundia to Jünger.
He’s doing most of the talking.
He is after all the last wearer of the *Pour le mérite*.
But also, Gracq lives
in the next *département, the village he was born in.
They don’t seem to like each other much.
A meter apart. What they have
in common is a taste
for half-uninhabitable palaces,
problematic suns, forests conserving
the Ice Age, dream-women,
a growth in darkness that is vegetable
in one, cyborg in the other. One wonders
how Jünger has praised Gracq’s work, and read
his recent meanders through backwaters
of the Loire and a discreet, eternized
childhood. One doubts
they discuss Jünger’s old vision
of Man as a worker-soldier, eager
for immolation. One knows
that if Gracq quoted himself,
saying *Literature, the last of the arts
to arise, will be the first
to die*, the German would agree
instantly. What’s unclear
is who filmed those two minutes
of walking, whether you grasp
what they mean, and how they wound up on YouTube.
5
The display cases
are enormous, glass
spotless, bases
marble. The floor,
a splendid parquet
of light woods, goes on
room after room,
wing after wing, the rooms
variously, darkly painted, their moldings
superbly carved, light and airflow
even and correct. But someone
forgot to put explanations
beside or inside the tableaux,
or on walls. Or the script is like nothing.
At first the animals
are more or less recognizable,
wolves, rats; there’s an accent
on teeth and beaks, the finicky parceling gestures
of claws. Then bears reappear,
slimmed-down; small fast group-minded
dogs; and cats, big and pleased with themselves,
asleep in the sun. There’s lots of sun,
apparently. It’s been done
to death, this modest porn of life-after-us,
but maybe that isn’t what happening here;
in the absence of text, who can say? And the clever
perspectives of painted backgrounds rising
from rocks and ground-cover hint
at vastnesses: glaciers returning, deserts
retreating – I didn’t know
they could. Then *big is the theme again, pot-bellied soft-eyed
ruminants filling the vitrines; and *graceful,
in off-putting, alien ways. It’s too much
the museum from *The Time Machine*.
Not even that. I’d have preferred
software under glass, some heroic
fragment. And … *displays? Not even
holograms, interaction?
I look for chipping paint, bare plaster,
yet feel again I’m missing something.
Though the rooms don’t change, or the silence,
I’m rushed somehow, and left with a confused
impression of things no longer fighting.
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