Pyrography

Out here on Cottage Grove it matters. The galloping

Wind balks at its shadow. The carriages

Are drawn forward under a sky of fumed oak.

This is America calling:

The mirroring of state to state,

Of voice to voice on the wires,

The force of colloquial greetings like golden

Pollen sinking on the afternoon breeze.

In service stairs the sweet corruption thrives;

The page of dusk turns like a creaking revolving stage in Warren, Ohio.

If this is the way it is let’s leave,

They agree, and soon the slow boxcar journey begins,

Gradually accelerating until the gyrating fans of suburbs

Enfolding the darkness of cities are remembered

Only as a recurring tic. And midway

We meet the disappointed, returning ones, without its

Being able to stop us in the headlong night

Toward the nothing of the coast. At Bolinas

The houses doze and seem to wonder why through the

Pacific haze, and the dreams alternately glow and grow dull.

Why be hanging on here? Like kites, circling,

Slipping on a ramp of air, but always circling?

But the variable cloudiness is pouring it on,

Flooding back to you like the meaning of a joke.

The land wasn’t immediately appealing; we built it

Partly over with fake ruins, in the image of ourselves:

An arch that terminates in mid-keystone, a crumbling stone pier

For laundresses, an open-air theater, never completed

And only partially designed. How are we to inhabit

This space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing,

As in a stage-set or dollhouse, except by staying as we are,

In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yet

Unrealized projects, and a strict sense

Of time running out, of evening presenting

The tactfully folded-over bill? And we fit

Rather too easily into it, become transparent,

Almost ghosts. One day

The birds and animals in the pasture have absorbed

The color, the density of the surroundings,

The leaves are alive, and too heavy with life.

A long period of adjustment followed.

In the cities at the turn of the century they knew about it

But were careful not to let on as the iceman and the milkman

Disappeared down the block and the postman shouted

His daily rounds. The children under the trees knew it

But all the fathers returning home

On streetcars after a satisfying day at the office undid it:

The climate was still floral and all the wallpaper

In a million homes all over the land conspired to hide it.

One day we thought of painted furniture, of how

It just slightly changes everything in the room

And in the yard outside, and how, if we were going

To be able to write the history of our time, starting with today,

It would be necessary to model all these unimportant details

So as to be able to include them; otherwise the narrative

Would have that flat, sandpapered look the sky gets

Out in the middle west toward the end of summer,

The look of wanting to back out before the argument

Has been resolved, and at the same time to save appearances

So that tomorrow will be pure. Therefore, since we have to do our business

In spite of things, why not make it in spite of everything?

That way, maybe the feeble lakes and swamps

Of the back country will get plugged into the circuit

And not just the major events but the whole incredible

Mass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off,

Channeling itself into history, will unroll

As carefully and as casually as a conversation in the next room,

And the purity of today will invest us like a breeze,

Only be hard, spare, ironical: something one can

Tip one’s hat to and still get some use out of.

The parade is turning into our street.

My stars, the burnished uniforms and prismatic

Features of this instant belong here. The land

Is pulling away from the magic, glittering coastal towns

To an aforementioned rendezvous with August and December.

The hunch is it will always be this way,

The look, the way things first scared you

In the night light, and later turned out to be,

Yet still capable, all the same, of a narrow fidelity

To what you and they wanted to become:

No sighs like Russian music, only a vast unravelling

Out toward the junctions and to the darkness beyond

To these bare fields, built at today’s expense.

Source: Houseboat Days (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1977)