To Live in Peace
I’m not sure of the setting
or finances. Conceivably
a loft, wherever the galleries and
boutiques are now, their frenzied
stylishness waning towards evening,
with the sirens. Or a redoubtable former
farmhouse in the former countryside.
Or just an apartment. What matters
is the location, at the foot of money:
the day job with its sixty hours;
the various night jobs; retirement
constantly leaking, survival
almost a full-time job –
the fog of need one navigates
until the eyes adapt and only
the mind believes it wants the sun.
Towards evening the air is thick,
the pavement sticky with knowledge:
a widow’s, that the chance of joy
is gone, her voice gone shrill, her dress
and jewels drawing no useful look;
only her anger darkly beautiful.
An older man’s, that failure is
the paper day is written on,
the theme of everything written there,
so that to live he must deny the truth.
The knowledge of a brilliant youth
who wants, not at the core of his being
(there is none) yet somewhere,
to throw things, hurt, be hurt, shout bigotries
he doesn’t especially mean but might as well.
As they gather, the wind raises
country or city dust their breathing
filters as the mind must filter hell.
If their host were at all charismatic,
they could tell themselves, or deny,
they’re a cult (that jewel in the crown of betrayals).
But the leader doesn’t lead and isn’t
aggressively wise. Sets peanuts out,
and drinks; cheerfully loses
the thread of the evening; cleans
as if imitating a kind, abstracted
mother. So they tell themselves
they’re his thoughts, and he their tough, phlegmatic
soul. Or that they are characters
in a novel, whose final chapter will claim
him too. And discuss postmodernism,
which, desperate to find
some means of connection, praises
the self-devouring serpent of the mind.
They, and occasional shadowy other
guests who come and go (and feel
the shade is too intense, perhaps,
the air too clear), refuse the usual
debased communality
of gossip, therapeutics, funny
despair. They try to reason. Try
also to avoid pedantry,
as well as the more common tone of it.
The self appears in the third person, briefly;
anguish only if exemplary,
like politicians, creeds, and other
shadows. On successful evenings,
their body-language stilled, expressions
fleeting and young again, they enter
an unusual shadow,
like that of an immense but distant thing –
a world where one could effortlessly talk
so calmly, selves commensurate with that world,
and bodies, likewise suitable,
that would not only talk but laugh and sing.
They also try to decide
(since I can’t) where they are:
some tumbledown Victorian
in the penumbra of a college, say,
the lawn long trampled. Or the cited loft,
they serving some young futures-trader’s whim,
as perverse in its way
as those on other floors. Certainly one
of these; but that is not the essential
place. The aging failure wonders
whether they might already live
in that intelligible world, with colonnades,
cleanliness, cupolas. The widow
imagines endless sheltering woods
and a cave, somehow well-lit; the youth,
a series of connecting bunkers.
Yet all agree what phrase appears
beyond the checkpoint: Peace to him who enters.
|