From early this year.
DISCOUNT
All of my old, political themes must go!
Hopefully, no mainstream exploiter
will build on this site: suburban
emotions given a Rilke-rinse,
elliptico-symbol plating … The problem is,
all themes
are political. When politics fails,
it does business as "vision." When vision
goes belly-up, it can trade for decades
as irony. Conservative talents
become audible, hymning enterprise
or order; religious types whistle
their timeless ditties. Meanwhile, it's
off to the suburbs.
… I
imagine (until I realize
I've imagined him before)
a refugee from the future.
We're supposed to meet at nine
at the Café X on Bleecker.
All afternoon I think
how the fame of this meeting
may bring the cutting edge
(after Soho, St. Mark's, the Avenues, Chelsea) to
the Village again,
and my life, likewise, full circle.
All afternoon, fulfilling
the tasks of a dying culture,
I tell myself ways he can fail.
Perhaps he'll only want
to eat - bald, mouselike,
unpleasantly enjoying
the X's enormous muffins. Or perhaps the weather
will prove his sole text - muttering "Cool,
cool" to our sooty heat,
like a famous madman of the German Baroque.
It never occurs to me
he's a fraud.
Or that constantly, as we talk,
he will peer about for Timecops.
Of course the future is written in lead!
Of course the past (i.e., we) can't be changed,
and he's only here to retire.
His account of horrors to come will seem
unsatisfying, like disaster flicks.
His remaining hopes, in aliens or cures,
will be inexplicably annoying.
Then with hooded eyes he'll ask,
"Why this wistfulness for the future?"
All day I ponder
my offhand answer:
"Reactionary moralists
make a big thing of coherent responsible selves.
Academic leftists doubt them
except, as we know, in their muggers.
I've felt for years that I
am whatever part of my vision
the future sanctions, and also
the part it doesn't,
which stands outside a door
like a pointless heroic gesture,
and neither part is whole.
I know I'd feel differently
had I been a man of action,
but that for me was always an abstraction."
Probably I won't say that.
Expect nothing.
But at nine, at the X, it appears
that some local rest-home
has let its people go: one
with oxygen tubes in his prominent nose
and the kind of pain you must flee;
another, less skeletal, his anguish mental
but equally bad to see;
and one who makes me shudder,
more derelict and older,
his eyes as bright as if he thought
he might still contribute,
perhaps by saying, It is we who come from the future.
