The Past


1

She must have been among the first
to join (or “find,” she said) that cult
which later became huge: maker
of newspapers and presidents –
whose leader, when he manically
declared himself Jesus,
was cheered by all the fatcats at that dinner.
(Why not? they must have thought;
Jesus, when he returns,
will have money.)  But in ’69 or ’70,
there was only this attractive, frail,
somewhat predictably elfin girl
in a coffeehouse, with whom I,
realizing she was mad,
continued to talk, to let myself
and her down gently.  The walls
were covered in the fashion of the time
with notices of rallies, posters
for Liberation Fronts, appeals
to *Free the Snow White Seven*, their graphics
courting and mimicking hallucination ...
all gone now.  Her voice,
almost inaudible yet certain; her
affect – hurt by logic, rising
above it – were the sort of thing
that had a larger future.

She said we were all lost because
our parents, though they tried as hard
as they could, could not defeat
the influence of Satan
(she may have just said “evil”) in the world.
And that we had to go back
to the *real Father and Mother.
(One saw the caps in the small pursed lips
and heard them in the musical near-whisper.)
I was slow to grasp
that by “*real” she meant,
or also meant, real.  I asked how They related
to God.  She seemed to feel
the answer was obvious; or by now
had merely lost all patience with the male.
This was before, as I’ve said,
the flower-sellers, the barracks full
of runaways, the mass weddings;
yet elsewhere in the café
sat *est types, smiling Rajneeshi in red …
I suppose there’s always *one
to start things off.  You sit by a fire.
They serve you milk or tea.
You talk, or they talk for you, easily,
the hearth so warm you’re sure
there must be toys somewhere, or would have been …
and, giving up the struggle to endure
or even to imagine human love,
you hear them say they want you, you alone.

2

Ah, Gill, you’ve called again.
Two years, not your usual one,
have passed.  You’re “still at the same old stand”
and, more importantly for you, I am
still writing.  You haven’t gotten around
to that last batch I sent.  I didn’t ask.
What matters is that “intellect”
survives.  It’s the term you favor,
now, for me; sounds somehow broader
than “talent.”  It’s a part of the brain
and can be retrieved, like email –
tapped, contacted
perhaps through a wire.  (What counts is that
it’s there.  I’m there for you.  It doesn’t change.)
On your dime, more like your fifty bucks,
you tout your multitudinous start-ups
with the same words you used for each prospectus,
eliding with a chuckle how they stop.
Hydrogen is the thing.
And corn.  And some sort of new
network.  Death will vanish from the air
apparently, and soon no one will hunger.
I should write about it. –
I could always stop you
with doubt and dialectics, but this time
I let you drone on.  You were that close
(at the same table, or in the front row?
unclear) to a Big Contact at ADM. –
Oh Gill, you could lie
beneath such people and be far from them.

Cool, or warm, precision,
however, about the kids:
their SATs, their avocations.
I can’t imagine them at all,
only their college applications.
(I remember babies, one who slept
and one who stared.)  Then –
or rather all-pervadingly,
a flutter of your single tone,
a photon leaking from the laser –
your personal religion, who
will someday bring them back to you:
the kids, herself, love;
that is its central tenet.
And like a true believer you can wait.
She serves a function, rather as I do;
she means something.  Fitzgerald said
there are no second acts in American lives.
He was wrong.  There are;
they never end, and everyone leaves the theater.