Little Sensation


1

I imagine a style, humane, compassionate,
almost inhumanly understated,
full of immense but negotiable
imaginative leaps, *saying almost nothing,
*suggesting whatever is needed.
Impeccably liberal-minded,
urgent, engaged – well, I said
“compassionate.”  And the most perfect
element of this style would be
its unreadability.
Not only to those who don’t read,
who ask what they’re “supposed” to feel,
who never think or say
anything that isn’t
an authorized abstraction or cliché –
no: sophisticates like you,
heavy with knowledge and discipline,
would find their attention helplessly slipping
after a verse or two.
What would be interesting
would be to know what you, what they
vaguely imagine or desire,
instead of all this unbearable
complexity and passion
at their moment of departure.
A nap, a snack, beer?
TV (the Olympics are on)?
No reading ever again?
Universal conflagration?

2

The homeless man now
in residence in our neighborhood
is squarish, graying,
impassive.  If you saw him elsewhere
you’d think “veteran” first, then “plumber,” or even
“contractor.”  He sits on a bench by the library,
but it’s unclear if he’s reading
that thick, coverless paperback
or meditating.  And he has a base in the triangle,
half-waste half-park, at our intersection.
Among the trees, he encircled
an area with twigs and branches,
and planted flags and carefully-
labeled orchids.
One orchid partly bloomed.  Above
this garden, from a cord between trees
hang a bulging plastic bag and a small, red-and-purple
teddy-bear.  It’s better, I think,
not to think “madness,”
but that sanity shrinks to fill the space
provided.  It’s also good,
if there are homeless in your neighborhood,
to remember the gods who used to appear
in ancient times.
They were good for a laugh.
Our minor pity-spasms are like laughter.

3

Doing at 35
what I should have at 16, I sat in a park
within sight of the statues
of several kings.  It was one of those countries
where every fountain, tree, pissoir
bears a plaque thanking some king.
I was reading my guidebook,
seeking a restaurant within my budget,
where I would sit and read my guidebook,
as I did every night
in every town when the museums had closed.
Suddenly a couple at the next table
talked to me.  Brits, younger,
they had been everywhere
this side of the Iron Curtain; had made enough
in a year in, of all places, Seattle
to afford more travel.  I was charming.
I described the older woman
at the *Kulturhuset in Stockholm
who, lacking another American,
had blamed me for the first year of Reagan.
“We won’t do that,” laughed the wife,
“if you don’t blame *us for Maggie.”
They were light, neat, bold.  I’ve forgotten their names.
They made me feel, or perhaps I had always
felt heavy.  They played off each other
in a way that was delightful
yet painful to watch; the wife was unbearably lovely.
I had been alone awhile,
and was traveling alone.  The husband
counseled me not to despair: he had hope,
still, for Mitterand, Solidarity in Poland,
Euromarxism.  The wife was intensely
aware of the Sandinistas
and FMLN.  I cited, even quoted
leftist poets, Dalton, Enzensberger,
Cardenal, and impressed as well
as charmed them.  They knew a restaurant
in the dusty, unrecommended
district south of the Royal Palace.
We met there at eight.  The place
was dim, almost ruinous,
the food the best I had on my travels.
There was even a guitarist,
playing not for tourists (there were none but us)
but himself, in the corner opposite
the one in which a cat nursed her new kittens.
The wife had changed – spaghetti-straps;
the husband also – “Well, it’s a sort of defiance,
isn’t it?  Of the conditions of travel.”
I felt as dingy as the restaurant,
yet amused; a supporting role …
After the rest of the wine
we walked the crowded nearby plaza.
The wife had been describing her ambivalence
about endemic looks and whistles.  Comments,
pinching, grabbing were definitely
off-putting; but stares …
We decided she should walk ahead
ten or twelve paces.  In sight, but alone.
She became remarkably fearful and flushed,
then did it – clutching her purse, the lights
stroking the back of her neck, her shoulders
tense then relaxed, being bumped
but harmlessly, the husband and I
talking Marx, she gliding
ahead like the prow of a ship, an idea,
someone being tailed, or an allegorical figure.

4

Meanwhile, at that restaurant I thought
The guitar is like a poet.
Someone lightly, fluidly chokes a neck;
complaint resounds from the belly.

When in disgrace with meanings and ideas,
I wish like any Modernist I wrote music.
This poem was first entitled “Suite for Guitar,”
but that would have been pretentious.

5

Warmer summers have brought
strange centipedes, vines, bacteria
north – and this lizard,
emerald and purple-black
in bands, who is somehow
on the porch, tasting air.
He’s afraid of the cat, but not
of verticals; crosses
ceiling and wall with,
at each step, the same
double writhe, and one wonders
he can escape so fast –
between the screen and floor, onto
the lawn.  Where he encounters
an uncoiled hose
he avoids, the neighbor’s fence,
the place where the bird
that hit the window died,
the mole-tunnel mound,
the shadow of a fern.
Then scuttles under the brown
leaves that have fallen
all August.  A crow
makes a tactless remark
from a branch, but the lizard
eventually reaches
the brambles and brush
at the end of the lawn.
We think animals live
without stories; but what if
his stay on our porch
was a visit to Hellmouth,
his tale of the Crossing
still more sublime?

6

I was the sole crew
apart from software.  So trained
and dedicated, so wired and tubed
in frozen sleep I too
was scarcely human.  Beyond the Oort Cloud,
the Drive switched on and shit happened.
I appeared on a street
in my old – childhood, civilian –
neighborhood.   *It’s the guy from the Ship*, people said.
They were used to apparitions, holograms
they could poke their fingers into, but not one
that saw them when it spoke to them and,
I’m afraid, panicked.
When contacted, Mission Control
came up with an explanation:
quantum entanglement –
the effect vastly augmented
by the Drive.  Monitors showed
I was really asleep.  As to what
I should do, I faded before I heard,
and when I returned, Houston was gone.
I was always a team player,
gung-ho for the Mission,
and used each epiphany
to plump for the Mission,
science, and courage.  *We still don’t know –
I can tell from the data streamed through me –
if the Planet is inhabited
or just could be, but either way
it’s vitally important.  So stay
the course, like I am*, I said.
After a few centuries, however,
I noticed things weren’t changing;
were even regressing.  Even wars
looked personal again.  Only ruins were grand.
When people saw me
they seemed to have to struggle
to remember not to kneel.  *Sure, science*, they said.
*A new start for all of us*, they chanted.
But really they only wanted
to change in ways they were changing – backward.
I decided I was the problem,
and tried as far as I could
to appear only in wilderness
or to hermits, their books and cobwebs.
Till one day a new Mission Statement,
or let’s say a new truth occurred to me:
*It doesn’t matter if the Planet’s
inhabited or not.  There’s a third,
amazing, alternative* ...
And whenever the Ship let me
I sought out people again.

But I had become a myth.