By the Numbers

by James Richardson

  Left nothing undone!

  *

  The woods decay,

  the woods decay and fall,

  and so do I, so yeah,

  I worry about stumbling

  through a dimensional flaw

  into an alternate universe,

  one all purple rays

  or a giant airport terminal,

  one that is light-years

  of the interior of a pear—

  worth seeing for a minute,

  if I could get back.

  But that’s the trick.

  There was a universe

  where my shoulder brushed the jamb

  of a small child’s room

  but I can’t get back.

  I remember

  really an ocean of roses,

  but I can’t get back.

  The light on his face

  changing to dead,

  and I can’t get back.

  Each second, the flicker

  between re-scans of a screen,

  and I can’t get back.

  *

  Now that my ears are iffy

  (you are?)

  more and more

  I hear doors slamming

  through my feet,

  trash rumbling off

  through my feet,

  stirring seeds,

  fall coming, skitter in the walls,

  through that airy

  unscratchable spot

  between my shoulders.

  Off the top of my head

  (higher than ears)

  what you say

  sounds dimmer than what you said,

  sounds like

  mail jammed in the slot,

  a dog left long alone, the wind,

  sounds like

  the sun climbing a stone stair,

  a stone’s slow sigh in the sun.

  Now that I can’t hear

  what you say, it means

  so much, now that I don’t hear

  exactly, it can mean

  anything, everything.

  It means what I hoped.

  It means what you hoped

  it meant.

  All of your secrets

  I know, I know, but whose—

  I’ve been in you

  and out of you,

  reading as you read, I’ve

  been you.

  I know everything,

  but your name, your name, your name…

  *

  Remember the joke about lifers

  (jokes, I didn’t delete!)

  who know the jokes by heart,

  so they just say 12,

  they just say 43

  and get laughs. Well:

  I just say 2, I say

  3rd season of the year,

  I say just 30 years, I say

  that quirk of gladness

  that’s been in her face since she was 7,

  without the run-up

  of deleted fields,

  the bird-crossed

  deleted pain and wonder

  as November twilight

  deletes deletes deletes.

  *

  My great poems are: deleted.

  What satisfaction, though,

  to know they were written!

  How magisterial

  they must have been.

  Faintly embarrassing their deleted

  global sweep,

  their wise but deleted

  moan on behalf of all,

  their poise delete delete

  so much more automatic than my own.

  Their great unanswerable last line,

  You know what I mean!

  So now the onset

  of the final simplicity

  that comes after great poems

  which in anyone who hadn’t

  written such great poems

  might just be senility!

  With the mountainous

  assurance of innocence

  so rare in these late days,

  with the mountainous freshness

  of the first time,

  I’ll vouchsafe to Millions

  that damburst of clichés

  I’ve been saving up for decades!

  That’s what I’ll DO!

  That’s what I’m doing!

  They’ll like me better,

  I’ll like them. I’ll be happy

  as all the other dumbfuck poets,

  astonished and glad

  to find that unexpectedly,

  all that occurs to me—

  every damn word—

  is true. It’s SO TRUE!!!

  *

  Now that I’m ready,

  I get to be,

  faster and faster,

  the Posterity that forgets me!

  O Reader, O Future

  even you

  are behind me!

  Delete delete delete!

  *

  [Did you hear? It was Keats

  and his gathering swallows.

  He wrote that manic

  Songs for Senility—

  and him not 60—

  and then and THEN…

  it was SO ironic!]

  Room Temperature

  That coffee you forgot to drink,

  this light, eight minutes from the sun,

  words I thought for a second

  the hottest ever written.

  IV. Small Hours

  Shore Town, Winter

  Now that it’s January

  in Victorian New Jersey,

  the aqua and magenta

  gingerbread of triple-deckers

  is past incongruous, way past forlorn,

  and all the way to the Grand Canyon’s

  weird silence,

  the loud absence

  of the forces of improbable scale and precision

  that must have made this

  (and what a job to paint it!)

  for their very own,

  then flip-flopped down the boardwalk

  and out of the galaxy,

  leaving the sea,

  pretty calm this evening,

  the tide trending in,

  the moon and sun, this winter twilight,

  just about equally dim.

  When Matthew Arnold settled one elegiac hand

  on a pale shoulder, gesturing out

  over the Channel, he saw France

  quietly letting go its light.

  This is America, we see nothing

  but size, sky and ocean

  working on gray-green

  not much of anything,

  though in this later century

  we, also, hear the grating roar,

  mixed maybe with a syringe or two

  and indestructible packing, but never mind,

  the hiss and click

  of calciferous debris that Arnold heard

  Sophocles hear as human misery.

  Waves in themselves, turning to her

  he whispered (and I whisper),

  are huge but powerless.

  Their megatons

  collapsing on a single shell

  leave it unfazed,

  but hardness of touch, quickness of suspicion,

  the quickening step

  past pain:

  shells break, we break, each other.

  Ah love, etcetera.

  Weary of detail,

  Arnold’s particular deity

  has chilled out to think about the Big Picture,

  and on his darkling plain

  they’ve closed the stores,

  as if in a day or two

  his sun will go red giant

  and scrape the planet down to the stone.

  But the Sea of Faiths,

  in the broadest sense, is doing

  just fine, thank you. Endlessly it reproduces

  Taco Bells and Jiffy Lubes

  along our hardening arterials.

  Not a day goes by

  without the world record
ing

  zillions of world records,

  no day that our collective résumés

  fail to add a zillion lines,

  and those who declare

  for Higher Things enrich

  in desert compounds the uranium

  of Zeal’s white glare.

  Over and over,

  just when it seems we’re blessedly

  running out of gas,

  idiot saints

  figure out how to make money

  from going on just as before.

  Ah love, the news is old

  that the wind slides through carless lots

  and slaps flat on chainlink:

  more than a century,

  now, it’s been the end of the world,

  and this long, long twilight,

  this last Alas, has lost its power

  either to frighten or console.

  On a similar shore

  You and I are old, Ulysses crooned

  but then again

  ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

  We call it a day,

  heading for Parkway North,

  not too downcast to be lifted

  by a car absurdly loud with teens

  and a music that drowns ours

  as they pass us, entering

  this paused flick

  of dark hotels and meters on Expired

  hoping for solace and a Sign! a Sign!

  and sure, if anything is sure, to find

  both less and more than we have found

  on a winter Sunday

  in the flickering neon

  of this new old new old world

  that says No Vacancy and means

  We are empty, and we plan to stay that way.

  Tableau

  Remember the one about the two intellectuals

  walking the unwild woody trails

  just out of sight of the houses? There among postsymbolic deer

  unspooked by their conspicuous thrashing, they stumble

  over rocks and branches, arms out, almost touching,

  talking about, what else, poetry and their kids,

  and wildly happy. The sky like a page

  just turned to, your face just turned to me,

  just that.

  The way things broken off

  a little too soon can last forever.

  Postmortem Georgic

  If I die in June, the true end of our year,

  exchange the storms for screens and summon the technician

  to check the coolant pressure in the central air

  before the dog days when the black drive wavers

  and no bright metal can be touched, and then swap out the filters,

  and now that our little grove of maple, oak and hickory

  has shed into the gutters (oh deeper than you imagine)

  petals and dust and unfelt leaves, flush them out

  lest thunderheads that build in the searing afternoon,

  toppling, leave them weeping around you.

  Yes, if I die in summer you will be hard-pressed

  to keep the shrubs clipped back and the grass down

  till the heat browns it, and to counteract metastases

  of chickweed, black medic and poison ivy.

  Circle the house now with broad bands of pyrethrins

  to dam the streams of carpenter ants, and if they keep coming

  seek out their nests in stumps and the garden’s railroad ties,

  and kill them, if you have the heart (as I might not)

  to battle life, having so little left of your own.

  Trundle the recycling to the curb infallibly

  on alternate Mondays, or if in weekless summer you forget

  what day it is, do it any day and wait till it is taken

  as all things are. Repair the small appliances that faltered

  while you were drowned with work and could not bother,

  or let them go, since little these days is worth repairing,

  and service the car for journeys you have been putting off

  that you cannot put off longer, now the world grows old,

  or do not, and tell the world it must come to you.

  But after all, I would never die in summer. Say to our children

  as usual his mind has wandered, only this time so far

  he has not come perfectly back, and then think the click,

  a little too long, of setting your glass on the endtable

  in the twilit air you cannot tell from your skin, is the click

  of me also invisibly near you setting mine down.

  If I die in autumn, exchange the screens for storms,

  and set traps baited with nut butters

  along the perimeter of the basement

  and foam-caulk all exterior cracks and seams

  to foil the mice, checking also the chimney cap

  and the screening of the vents to keep out flying squirrels,

  native to these woods, though many do not believe in them

  with their huge black eyes all pupil, and their rustling above us,

  and summon the servicer of the big hollow furnaces,

  for when the cold like empty boxcars rumbles in

  and the heat is creaking in the aluminum ducts

  you will be cold, coldbones, without me,

  listening awake to, what is it, the wind,

  mysterious disk accesses, creatures flowing in the walls?

  Turn the clocks back, slide fresh batteries into smoke detectors,

  and reset the timed lights, for the days grow shorter

  and you will be driving home in earlier and earlier sunset

  and the day will hurt you with its unexpected darknesses,

  like the young husband who could not speak his mind,

  and now, before the year begins in earnest,

  weed out your files, discarding a third of all you have

  as the trees will, since leaves, also made for a single year,

  grow shabby and slow, and heavy snows would collect in them

  cracking limbs off and splitting even the thick trunk,

  and travel light, for all you carry you will carry alone.

  And when all the leaves are down, even the reluctant oaks,

  blow them into the woods, or call someone to blow them,

  and then, only then, scoop out the gutters

  once again, lest they clog and freeze, sagging with ice-mass,

  or call someone to do it. Then drain the mower and park it,

  or sell it since you will not want to keep it up

  or let the gas sour and the valves gum, since you will not sell it,

  and think that of all seasons this is the one I would never miss,

  and say to our children he is out for one of his long walks

  and the leaves are streaming through his eyes and heart and hair.

  If I die in winter, when there is little to do

  but wait till winter is over, keep watch on the upstairs windows,

  and if they ghost with mist, turn the humidifiers down

  lest the paint peel and the sills rot out.

  Restock the pantry with beans, onions, and root vegetables,

  and the soups you love, salty and fat and thick,

  for green leaves and the glare of fruits would hurt the soul

  which wishes now to eat darkly and be deep in the ground.

  Wind the hoses, draining them first, in coils,

  squeeze clockwise the indoor shutoff

  and open the outdoor faucets wide, letting the last water out

  lest in a coldsnap some pipe snap.

  Now broadcast salt preventively on the drive,

  for it is steep, and mornings slick, and snow frequent,

  or sleep in and wait till the sun has worked on it,

  since in a few hours the sun will work on it,

  or a few days or weeks, for what is time now,

  and how can I urge them on y
ou now, these endless tasks,

  who am not sure in my own mind if they were life

  or what kept me from our life. Then tell our children

  I have gone to lie in the abstract earth,

  breathing stones like sky, restless as always

  to fit the huge, sharp planet into my too-small heart.

  If I die in the spring, that fruitless season,

  scour the markets for the grapes and nectarines

  of the other hemisphere, for it is always harvest somewhere,

  but stay wary through the middle of March

  when wet, heavy snowstorms still may strike, only then

  stowing the shovels and bringing out brooms and seeds.

  Squeegee the windows till they squeak with clarity

  and lime the lawn against sour rains, and if now, already,

  carpenter ants are trailing over the sea-blue carpet

  defenses have failed and they have nested in the house,

  so listen in the walls for a noise like crackling cellophane—

  I can tell you where, in the beams between floors

  where the slow leak of the shower has spread dampness—

  and drill there and spread fatal powders

  or do not, since though they chew a house down,

  they chew slowly, slowly, slowly and the house

  will fall when it falls, and not before your fall.

  Start the dehumidifier, lest books demoted to the basement

  rot there, or let them, since those we will never read again,

  set the clocks forward, and once more change the batteries

  in the smoke detectors, or do not, and when the fire insurance

  comes due in April, imagine, at least, that you might let it go,

  for how in this late cold can we argue against fire?

  Yes, if there is justice, though I have said there is none,

  I will die in the spring, this season I love least

  of beginning all over, I of no patience,

  when hope is a door left unlatched in a high wind

  banging and banging itself to pieces.