He could tell from their pistol shots of laughter,
their bucking and surging
like someone learning to drive stick,
their pretense and collapse,
their talking on two cells at once,
how they down strange solvents,
their voices sax-raw or helium-high,
how they take each other harshly,
grinding together like stones,
grinding alone like stones, that the young
have statues in them, tall white statues
they must dance out, drink to sleep, outspeed.
Like a finger moving under a line of type—
O god, slower than that—
their future comes, the party they’re late for
where people are saying incredible shit about them
that they have to get to, and say, and say
like how it really is, so they pile in and floor it
till their backs stiffen and their faces change in the wind.
IV. Twilight of a God
That girl who drank from her hands
huge wastes of wine,
and his awe,
was it? So that he surfaced,
his head in a little clear spot above the music
and a good bet was
that whatever happened next
wasn’t going to happen to him.
Suddenly he wasn’t the minor deity,
coat still on, in the corner booth,
smiling benevolently upon his children,
but a guy walking out, head down,
into the cold of an outer borough,
the signs unreadable, the age of Changes over.
Though aren’t those still his angels
at the gold bar of Heaven
who lift glass trumpets to their lips?
V. Orpheus at Last Call
One of those dreams: you struggle and fail
for years
to dial a number, read a page, remember
not to look back…
(her hand confused in mine, soft struggle of a bird)
I’ve drunk so much
it rises in me: something like soft roots
parts softly
and my head sweeps down the singing river singing…
VI. Apollo in Age
Spring,
I am no good with pain.
Stop,
I’ll tell you anything.
Zeus: A Press Conference
Eons we rule in our tall pale closets
and all your talk is the few failures of distance
even a man can read, in Ovid, in a few hours:
brute swan, tsunami of gold, bull
sliding the girl shark-swift into open sea.
The robe drops, the sun widens to half the sky,
the tachycardic certainty of death…
So similar the stories, maybe all one.
Whereas a god, on a million channels,
is all thoughts always. Once a millennium, maybe,
in his whited-out daydream he meets dark eyes
and is rapt into an endless morning after:
one man, one thought, one cup of coffee
for what, to a god, feels like a millennium.
You vultures, if you have to write, write
this: the humiliation of a human story
no god, with all Time, has the time to live,
or even read to the end. No questions.
State-Sponsored
Oh dear, say the Tyrants, sex
is naughty and intense
and might save you.
Please mistake it
for what you’re not supposed to do.
Echo
And since she could only say back what she heard,
she had to listen for what she needed to say.
She haunted the edges of schoolyards first. Not it.
Lovers’ lanes: hopeless. Cell phones seemed promising,
but really. She started reading novels
to put herself in the way of secret lives. It was the old story,
speed that was made to be followed, not repeated:
she remembered the ends of sentences, of sentences.
Why hasn’t anyone said…? she thought, but couldn’t say it.
What I want is… lilies in time-lapse bloomed, faces, explosions,
which she tried repeating. Stares, curious at least.
And if it had never in all history been uttered
would accident help her? She tried mishearing
flags snapping in darkness, the rumble of subways,
misquoting the birds even, two-wit, twang-a-wire, sorry-sorry.
Not quite, but there was something deep within them:
hadn’t it been there at the world’s beginning,
a silence? Yes, she could hear it still. It was like,
like a dumbstruck boy who looked at her as blankly
as if she were a pool, or he was, it was a question
spreading out larger and smoother, time itself,
to which she could hardly wait to hear her answer.
Bit Parts
In that monster epic of the checkout girl
I’m the guy setting groceries on the belt
in order of decreasing density, or maybe the one
whose Did you get that coupon? is the last straw,
so she streams out, shedding her smock, through automatic doors.
In that later movie of the two old friends
stopped dead in the whitewater of the crowd
with sudden love, I’m the Excuse me sidestepping them,
or the waiter they hardly see, clacking down two plates
with tolerant amusement, which is my specialty.
And in the film of the autumnal Liebestod,
I’m the guy sliding her the desperate ticket,
the arm hailing a taxi against the sunset,
the blink of a bike going by. If you notice me at all
you never ask Who is that? just
What else was he in? since I am small, and they
are large, these lovers, comets, and so swift,
fast-forwarding their whole lives in two hours,
hair blown back, that their whispers, stooping to us,
would be sonic booms, their hot touch catastrophic.
I sit, hand on your arm, as the Wave of the Century,
some poor lifeboat poised on its crest
like a sparrow lost in the whited-out sky,
collapses, a terrible powder of light
against the screen, roaring, leaving us dry.
I’m the abrupt laugh, or the back of a dark coat
up which, like rain on a windshield, climb the credits.
I am that faint curve graphed on the sand
in wrack and paper cups and foam that shows,
as the light comes up, how far the night had risen.
The God Who
It was the small gods we talked to
before words, though soon enough
we forgot, and sadly, that what dawn
or the shine of hips made the heart do
was prayer.
The god of a particular
slow bend in the river, his friend
god of the white boats swung around it,
gods of moderately impressive rocks,
of spots warm where someone was just sitting,
of the deep sharp scents of shoes, of sounds
whose direction is unclear, of silver linings:
they appreciated whatever small appreciations
came their way and, ignored,
were not so much vengeful
as doubtful in that early world,
where the workload, if it can be called that,
of their divinely inefficient bureaucracy,
left plenty of time to enjoy the specialties
of their fellows, god of just sitting around,
god of the nasty slider, of low-batt
ery gleeps,
of wine that gets better by the glass,
the god (the high god!) of too excited to sleep.
Actually, with considerable power
over one thing, or a couple—a book maybe,
tennis, unusual salads—but only average
at, say, getting lovers or starting a car,
they were a lot like us. Distinctions, in fact,
were not rigidly maintained, it being proverbially
difficult to be sure you’re immortal
or that you’re not. There was intermarriage,
bargaining, and respectful confusion (once
language got going)
about what constituted worship
and what was just delighted
saying of the names of things,
which persists. So as for the god
of the squeak of clean hair,
of your hand out the car window
wind-lifted, of the small shades under hat brims
and not excluding
the banned gods of leaf-fires and tobacco,
oh and definitely including
she of the coffee-breath and fine cold hands
who says Sit down friend and let’s see,
let’s just see, and certainly
my other god, he of Least Resistance
who decrees what is going to happen anyway,
who listens only to prayers that end
Let all be as Thou will’st, who grants
only my wish to believe in him,
and with the possible exception only of the god of making a list
of all the other gods, who gets distracted and forgets so many
that suddenly the universe is His and only His,
praise them.
II. Vectors 3.0
Vectors 3.0: Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays
1.
The odds against today were insurmountable, until it happened.
2.
If you can’t take the first step, take the second.
3.
Experience afraid of its innocence is useless: no one is rich who cannot give his riches away.
4.
Spontaneity takes a few rehearsals.
5.
The days are in order, the months, the seasons, the years. But the weeks are work. They have no names; they repeat.
6.
Nothing dirtier than old soap.
7.
Office supplies stores are the cathedrals of Work in General. They forgive, they console, they promise a new start. These supplies have done work like yours a million times. Take them home and they will do it for you.
8.
When it gets ahead of itself, the wave breaks.
9.
Few plans survive their first success, which suggests they were less about their goals than about the possibility of a little success.
10.
The heart is a small, cracked cup, easy to fill, impossible to keep full.
11.
Hard disk: the letter I remembered as embarrassing is OK after all. I must have revised it just before sending. I never confuse what I dreamed with what I actually did, but this is different: which draft am I?
12.
Work is required play.
13.
My mistakes are not mine, but they are embarrassing because you might mistake them for my sins, which are.
14.
Perfection is besieged. Happier is the man who has done just a little better than he expected.
15.
How proud we are of our multitasking. What is Life but something to get off our desks, cross off our lists?
16.
I find my marginalia in an old book and realize that for decades I’ve been walking in a circle.
17.
The reader lives faster than life, the writer lives slower.
18.
Snakes cannot back up.
19.
First frost, first snow. But winter doesn’t really start till you’re sure that spring will never come.
20.
No one in human history has ever written exactly this sentence. Or anyway these two.
21.
Nothing important comes with instructions.
22.
The modesty of avoiding repetition is the vanity of thinking they must have been listening the first time.
23.
It can’t hurt to ask is a phrase favored by those who can’t quite tell people from institutions, thinking of both as randomly dispensing or refusing favors. Actually, it hurts me to be treated like a slot machine, maybe enough to pass the hurt along to you.
24.
I need someone above me—the Committee, the Law, Money, Time—to be able to say No. Sad my lack of integrity, though I suppose it would be sadder to need them to say Yes.
25.
The knife likes to think of itself as a mirror.
26.
The tyrant’s self-esteem is just fine, thank you. It’s you he doesn’t care much for. And yes, he recognizes that he doesn’t feel what you feel. Which is a good thing, since your feeling is so weak that it makes him need to beat you up.
27.
Self-sufficiency clings… to itself.
28.
He’s angry at the wronged for making the world unjust.
29.
If you do more than your share you’d better want to: otherwise you’re paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.
30.
The ascetic’s last pleasure is blaming you for all he has forgone.
31.
There are two kinds of people in the world… and who is not both of them?
32.
Beware speaking of The Rich as if they were someone else.
33.
We’ve learned to wonder which neutralizes truth more effectively, the tyranny’s censorship or the democracy’s ten thousand media outlets. In the former truth is too costly, in the latter there’s no market for it. In Freud the facts get around the censor in the metaphors of dreams, in Shelley we live in a dream of overfamiliarity and dead metaphor that only the poet can revivify. Does repetition emphasize or hypnotize? Which is clearer, what we see or what we don’t see. Are we new or old? Do we love hate or hate love?
34.
You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don’t.
35.
Somehow the guy who’s really interested in absolutely everything is really boring.
36.
Sophistication is upscale conformity.
37.
The mirror’s so quick it only sees what’s in front of it.
38.
Knowing how to be pleased with what’s there is a great secret of happy living, sensitive reading, and bad writing.
39.
If you think you might be lost, you are. If you know you’re lost, you’re at least free to look for the way.
40.
What keeps us deceived is the hope that we aren’t.
41.
Everything is about politics. No, wait: everything is about sex. Money, art, God, self, work.
42.
For those who tread lightly enough the air is a stair.
43.
I often find myself intoning Clarke’s Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, or anyway half of it, since everyone’s heard it already and interrupts. Actually the technology doesn’t have to be very advanced. I drive a car and grasp the basics of internal combustion engines but I still treat mine as halfway between pet and malevolent deity, muttering reassurances, curses and spells. Maybe a chip designer gets computers well enough that they are purely technology, but he can’t know that much about meteorology or gene-splicing or, well, poems. What differentiates technology from magic is not our knowledge but our faith: that someone else understands.
44.
Clarity is neither transparency nor light. It’s the angle t
hat suddenly lets you see through the window’s glare, the pond’s reflections.
45.
Faith is broad. It’s Doubt that’s deep.
46.
How badly I’d like to believe that my cherished moderation and heavily defended calm could rule the world. But as things are, somebody has to feel too much, somebody has to speak too loud, somebody has to be completely unreasonable.
47.
Don’t trust the revolutionist with your freedom: he’s an authoritarian who just happens to be out of power.
48.
Patience is easiest when it’s the best way to make Impatience really mad.
49.
Is he talking about world hunger or just hungry to talk, is he angry at injustice or just angry, is he ruled by conscience or does he just need to rule mine? Probably my scruple about purity of Faith is irrelevant, but so, if the standard is Good Works, are his words.
50.
Listen hardest to the one you hope is not telling the truth.
51.
The coy and impotent self-importance of subversive. A bunch of kids in black who can’t think of anything better to talk about between drags than how uncool their parents are.
By the Numbers Page 2
