What’s on the Wall
A sudden startling
Glimpse of someone quite unknown
In the mirror in
The bedroom: it had—
Given the facts of the room
(He alone in it,
All the angles of
Incidence and reflection
Being what they were)—
Nonetheless to be
Himself. This had come to be
A familiar
Occurrence. Though what
Was there tonight was his own
Good old—or old bad—
Image, now the wall
Behind him in the mirror
Belonged to a strange
Room not his, a wall
That looked as if a painting
Had been hung on it
And later removed.
Not because the usual
Tell-tale rectangle
Of paler tone like
A shadow of negative
Pallor revealed where
A framed picture of
Something had for years shielded
That part of the face
Of an innocent
Wall from the daylight
That so darkens what it falls
Upon. There was no
Such window showing some part
Of what once had been.
And yet the wall was
Not exactly blank, but full
Of invisible
Information, and
If he had been a picture
Himself, some image
On the wall behind
Him there would be its title,
Telling what he meant,
What he intended,
What his life had been about
In the end then, and
Perhaps pointing out
To what in the world outside
The room it applied.
What was it then that
Hung in the blankness of wall
For no one to see:
A faded map of
What realm or territory,
The ancient domain
Of his earlier
Failed aspirations, a world
Quite unrealized?
A battle-scene of
The retreat from Whatwherewhen?
A still-life with
Peaches, pears, and plums,
Bathed in a delicious light?
An Old Testament
(Which for him was quite
As good as New) anecdote
Of a renaming
Of person or place
Involving some pun hidden
By the translation?
Or (and this never
To be gleefully noticed
And identified
By historians
Of art) an unreadable
Self-portrait by Death?
—Questions not to be
Answered in a mirror now.
Or even on some
Long walkabout back
Into my since-hidden past,
Let alone into
The bushes of the
Future from which one cannot
Speak of returning.
Another Cause for Wonder
I wonder who’s kissing her now,
I wonder who’s teaching her how…
—(popular song, 1909)
But where’s her Now: right there next to her Then?
And which one? she has two Thens, one before
(“Maybe by then I’ll be a good deal more
Attractive . . .”), one behind (“Oh then! That’s when,
Back in the old days, I would never . . .”) How
Gently the English language can allow
A sinuous movement back and forth to mime
The swinging Thens of past and future time
With, charmingly between them both, her Now!
Still and Yet
Still and Yet parted company when they
Moved into the future; the twins oddly
Both named Before dashed off variously
Deep into space and time, but still joined back
To back, play ever the two-fronted beast.
Whether for sameness, or their mutual
Cancelling of opposites, their barren
Congress—with time behind us, space ahead—
Never yields more than the birth of nothing.
Our own enduring?—As if that could mean
Getting anywhere, as if it could mean
Being anywhen—It is ever to
Be to go toward all that will come to be.
Typing Lesson: A Little Fable
The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
They (whoever “they” are) say
That there is always more
Than just one way
To skin a cat,
Or scamper quickly, like a hungry rat
Right through the subset of the integers—a bore
To demonstrate this on the spot—
But its truth is revealed
Here on this wintry field
When, like a shot
(As “they” say), and
—As if at some stern but unheard command—
Over the lazy fox
Jumps the quick, brown dog
As if hurdling a scrawny-looking log
(And unaware of any lurking paradox.)
OK. But then what?
Well, the slow fox yawns again
And looks around—but not
At where the dog has gone; but then
The over-eager hound,
Tumbling heels-over-head
Scampers about till he has found
A bright green Frisbee lying there instead.
OK for the doggie, I guess
And as for the alphabet,
OK too, yet
Represented no less
Well than it was before, in a remix
Of the old twenty-six.
(With some repeated—paddingly, I must confess.)
“Were there an umpire whose decision
Could not be challenged—” fox maintains
(Still up to his old tricks)
“I’d win the point of the entire revision.”
But “Point not taken,” dog explains
Refusing to defer
To foxy casuistry (and you and I
Would probably concur)
“There is no winner here, for whether foxes fly
Over recumbent dogs, or quite
The opposite, all but a few
Downright and, alas upright,
Proverbs can be reversified.
And as for the alphabet,
OK too, yet
Represented no less
Well than it was before, in a remix
Of the old twenty-six.
(With some repeated—paddingly, I must confess.)
“Were there an umpire whose decision
Could not be challenged—” fox maintains
(Still up to his old tricks)
“I’d win the point of the entire revision.”
But “Point not taken,” dog explains
Refusing to defer
To foxy casuistry (and you and I
Would probably concur)
“There is no winner here, for whether foxes fly
Over recumbent dogs, or quite
The opposite, all but a few
Downright and, alas upright,
Proverbs can be reversified.
Yet that aside,
Wiser, and semper fi,
It is the dog always, who
Remains more than proverbially true.”
Let sleeping foxes lie.
Toward the End
I
Jane in graying November now on her last
Legs, looking up and around before eating,
As if wary of the presence of her two
Dead sisters, one gone less than two months ago,
The other one for somewhat over a year.
It is not their ghosts she wants to avoid, though
Nor is it in welcome as she slowly turns
Her head and stares at a new kind of nothing
(The healthiest cats, of course, always delighting
To stare at nothings as well as at somethings
That aren’t there.) Is it her own approaching
Death, unimagined, that she turns away from
Food and water, in order to sense it out?
And is her not knowing what it is—not
Being able to conceive that she would end,
Let alone wonder what that might be like—more
Enviable than our own nutty “knowledge”
Of Death, or not? I’m not sure I wish I knew.
II
(After the End )
And of course, for several weeks thereafter
She would be somehow present—in dark things
Of roughly the right size down on the floor in
Corners, as if lying in that official
Feline position, all paws tucked beneath the
Rest of her, in unwitting reassurance
(For us, naturally, not for herself, who,
Even at the last end, could not be said to
Need any) that she was there: Jane. Yes. Then. There,
Or in some other darkening along low
Surfaces glanced at in passing—a shadow
Of what had been there once and thereby perhaps
The shadow of some other kind of shadow.
But it could perhaps be said that every glimpse
Given us of What-Was-Not-Jane, each present
Absence, whether or not in place of what was
Not there at the end for Jane pointed toward
Some dark somewhere where our own ends crouched waiting.
