Envy and Indifference


1

The gods make mistakes.  A certain goddess
(it’s unclear, postindustrially,
whether her original purview
was wisdom, the hunt, the harvest) allowed me
to see her.  But I was old –
old as a saint on an icon screen –
and gazed at her neutrally,
though she morphed into a Hindu number
and began, amid a wealth of birds, trees, flowers,
to copulate with a divine boytoy.
(He had the hair I used to have
and an air of entitlement I hadn’t.)
Looking over his shoulder
at me, she remained disconcerted
because I asked for nothing,
not even youth restored and ten minutes alone
with her.  (Being as old as our Culture,
according to the outmoded precepts of Spengler.)
More than oxygen, pills,
drip, or strangely flat affect, my books
upset her.  So she smashed and dissolved
them and walls that had served them –
exposing grim futurity
I viewed with equanimity,
having meanwhile died.  It’s possible
that as poets have said the gods envy
mortality; what’s certain is
they don’t get it.  She poked at my corpse
like a vulture, wondering
why I was doing … that.

2

Denied with embarrassment a certain Chair,
the don accepted fate.
Positivism had carried the day, the field,
the colleges; the don believed
in a deplorably misty Absolute.
One afternoon in the common room, Bertrand
Russell, with impeccable brutal
grace, implored him to clarify
why he thought Time is unreal.
“You won’t deny the past happened,”
said the don gamely.
Russell wouldn’t.  “Nor that the future
will happen.  You believe it intuitively.”
Russell jibbed, but provisionally
agreed.  “It seems clear to me,”
said the don, “that this ‘happening’
and our intuitive sense of it are real;
‘when’ something seems to occur,
‘where’ (so to speak) it’s positioned,
much less so.”  “A sort of trick,”
smiled Russell.  One evening a throng
of undergraduates went to hear Rudolf Carnap.
The don accompanied them; dozed somewhat
during the lecture but thought he heard
that if we start with the corner of a room –
a dresser, say, a chair, a yellow wall –
and chart their exact position,
chemical composition,
electrical conductivity, atomic weight,
albedo, refractivity, melting point, point of
combustion, and proceed to those of a man
in the chair (adding brain activity, heart rate,
etc.), taking *every possible measurement*,
we will know everything about
that corner, and, by extension,
the universe we must go on to measure.
“What about Time?” someone asked,
but the don slept through the answer,
waking only when the German
insisted there must be no more war;
then, with the rest, he applauded.
By now he had few students.
He imagined a rational universe
where he would not be paid,
nor eat at high table, nor be allowed
his brandy or a char;
would live at best in a room
like that where they kept his son.
Whom he visited each weekend,
though he could barely crank or afford his car.
His son, however, could not see that room,
nor would its dimensions matter
if he had: he could not walk from bed to chair.
The don held his hand and spoke of quiet things,
of childhood, not of chlorine gas;
and when, almost lucid, his son hissed,
“It must never happen again,” he agreed, thinking,
*It happens.*

3

Men were replanting shrubbery
on our lawn.  They began laughing, shouting –
all chatter in a language you don’t know
is excessive – and I went out to check.
A snake lay where the lowest branches forked.
It lay straight out, full length, five feet
from one V to the next, and the next –
two feet above the ground.
I saw no color or pattern, only a darkness
in the dense shade, and knew
instantly that it had wanted
to *be above the ground*: to soar or at least
hover.  Not to climb but to be there,
like birds and insects.  And had done so
till the Salvadorians came.  They offered to kill it,
grinning, waving their shovels,
but I said No, too loudly – took
a stick and prodded; at which
it dropped somehow and quickly oozed away.

4

In the future, most people will be insane.
But the form madness takes
will in some, a few, be benign,
or harmless at least: a constant inappropriate
acceptance, even pleasure – self-
destructive, but no more than anything else.
In a seaside conurbation
of however many dozen millions,
half drowned already with the water still rising,
power gone and the NGOs pulled out,
lives one of them.  He even has
a room, not a rag on concrete.
So he must have been very rich,
or cut off from his fellows
by a code and for reasons we can’t imagine,
*individually doomed.  But now he watches,
from his window, the Ecology Ship
afloat in the middle of the bay, about
to sail.  It’s like a huge raft.
It will live on desalinated, decontaminated
sea- and rainwater, tons of purified soil,
compost and solar cells, and renounce the land.
People walk on submerged
roofs, then swim by the tens of thousands
towards it, and are gunned down
and gassed by the treehuggers
aboard.  Ecologists love
all life, the madman thinks; they must be suffering.
From his window, the hordes
swarming towards the shoreline
and death look like a tsunami in reverse.
How much he wishes he were with them!
But no, he thinks, that’s wrong – I mean, aboard ship.
But perhaps the folks on the ship,
and those who designed it, if anyone did,
are mad, he thinks.  There are no real hydroponics
or desalination tanks.  The soil
is virus-laden sand.  The thing
will break in the first storm.
Whatever the case, he sighs,
and blesses them in his heart,
and contemplates, as if from a distance,
his hunger and the grandeur
of the cloudless, deadly sky.
He wishes he could reflect
on life, on his life, but there is only
this sweetness.
Tomorrow the sea will come, or the air sour.