Diffidence
In the sidewalk café that replaced
the Local Group of galaxies, the old man
is a striking figure: old
where everyone else is young.
They’re wise in some worthwhile sense,
uniformly beautiful,
kind without strain and immune from boredom,
but young; while he,
though hale and quick, is small and lined and bald.
He seeks no attention except
from waiters (there are waiters,
insentient totems of the ambience),
and sits and sips his tea and gazes
at the ambience, which alternates
between sublimity and loveliness;
the marble leaves, the liquid towers.
Sometimes he reads an old thick book
that seems to wait wherever he may sit.
And when he shuts it, sighs,
and has peered absently awhile
at paradise, some few
of the young approach and ask
politely why he differs so.
He shrugs. “I was the original
creator. It’s hard to explain
how naïve I was – I thought
the idea was enough. I didn’t
imagine causality, violence, death
or boredom, or really even matter,
and so was easily deposed.
All I could do was record.
He who usurped the Usurper
and gave you this peace was not I,
but cannier and stronger.
Therefore I wear a form that seems to fit;
uncomfortable, but I’m at ease in it.”
The youngsters stay to chat
or not (their instincts are exquisite),
depending on his mood.
Sometimes he welcomes them;
some days he spends at other places
light-years way, among people
not alien enough to shun the light
but silent and incurious,
or unequipped to distinguish faces.
Moose Jaw
It occurs to me that, if we have to go
into exile, I can’t.
I’m too brittle – psychologically at least.
I visualize a grandpa on a mattress
on a cart, drawn by a horse
or a big family, Stukas overhead.
He’s staring into the Fabergé egg
of denial and senility, which gives
no comfort, only an image
of comfort at a distance.
Which is silly, of course – we’d drive,
until the gas ran out.
We talk about New Zealand,
if McCain wins. But they’ve
been globalized since we were there
and I doubt they’re still so attractively
quiet and self-effacing.
Or some gated community in Honduras. In photos,
the dust around carports
is a strange reddish-gray.
We’d learn Spanish finally, and be nice
enough to the maid to hope
she saw us as nice.
I find myself googling Moose Jaw,
Saskatchewan. Really exotic
places are those you have no image of.
It has tunnels where Chinese hid,
later used by bootleggers, and murals
of idealized molls and bootleggers.
And the Klan’s traditionally strong.
– I’d sit on a porch, hiding a gun
(one bullet? two? a full clip?),
waiting for the Mounties.
No fancy uniform, just cops,
resenting their FBI liaison
but resenting us more ...
Feeling vulnerable and old,
I wonder if McCain, or Cheney,
undergoes a nostalgia combining that
of the aristocrat
for *places, with everyone in his place,
and the classic bourgeois need
for endless expansion of the self in space.
Then I go to our back yard
to weed. The soil here is terrible
(DC was a swamp, after all)
and lawns are bad unless you have real money.
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