And then he remembered those puerile, unpolished, ramble-tongue and tongue-tied paragraphs, those scribblings, in his room, which he'd torn from the letter tablet and hidden in his paperback dictionary, and knew he could never write a book such as this, not in a lifetime or by himself, not without outside help, and never would.
"I seem to have lost you in my process of thumbing here," the poet said.
"No, no. Go on."
"You suddenly don't look so well."
"No, no, go ahead."
"Woman trouble?"
"Always."
"Common at your age. Don't fret about it. She'll come around. When I was in Oregon, just beginning to discover what would be my lifework, like you, I too had troubles, I must admit, with my wife of those days. I'd go off to work and imagine a truckload of spades piling into our bedroom, where she waited, and giving her exactly what she'd always really wanted in every way you can think of. The tragedy of it was it never failed to get me up, as they say now. That's no way to live, is it, boy? There were also other mismatchings, of course; I was too unsettled to be married, I was tippling too much, and the one woman I respected, other than my wife, slapped a paternity suit on me, and if a friend hadn't been having her at the same time, unbeknownst to me, and had the balls to come forward, she well might have won. I had a daughter I didn't want to leave, but had to, eventually, since women are always given custody in such cases, it seems. We were divorced when my daughter was three." He placed his fingertip on a line written across a page in a staggering hand. "This that I'm about to read, then, should be ready-made for miscreants such as we." And in his musical voice, read:
"Wind riven, a vision of day ringing
Within the confines of myself,
Where whores and hawkers cry
While folding blue pigeons rise,
White, in the wind, their undersides
Wine and emblems over my morning lament.
Configured windows through which I see
Features of you. Wings flap closed.
Hear the . . ."
He thumbed back a few pages and found some lines scrawled in red ink over a paragraph of minute penciling.
"O hear the cry of the old sea
Salt from out beyond Phoenix . . ."
Here he did some fast flipping in another direction and his squiggles of lines were like those characters you make into a movie inside a book by thumbing the edge of its pages in a quicksilvery screen of speed.
"As you called me, while I watch their flight.
My eyes satiny coloraturas singing a blues song
To the tune we strummed on one another that night.
"You hear that? Nice.
"This page against myself turns outward now, like you,
In praise of thighs white as white last century,
Winglike, hard, dew, which shed jeweled tears
Down their inward breadth, my selfless bone, the bed
Of ourselves. Lights seem stoved. Do you mourn . . ."
He started reading an address, said "Shit!" and went back to the beginning of the book and, as if by divination, found:
". . . mourn
The mercury tubes that money the night over with green
Beneath our balcony, my Juliet?
"That was her real name, by the way." He shook his head and smiled. " 'Money the night over with green.' Sheer, sheer—well, just damn good. But let me go on to another part. This seems slow." He paged forward a ways, looked disturbed, and then turned back. "Ah. Here.
"Now faces shift across my inner eye
And deaden this present —
"No, no, wait. Here. Look! You see this? This is an insertion."
Charles glanced at the word, in big block letters, on which his blue-rimmed fingertip was resting: SHIMMERING***
"My shimmering eye," he said. "Shimmering. Here, let me do that section through, without interruption, so you can get a better feel of it." Preparing to juggle the pages like a conjurer, which he did, he read:
"Now faces shift across my shimmering eye
And deaden this present distrust of you,
Lowering it through the grate of the past
To the firebox of a clattery red stairway.
Limbs flash on the landing there, a pubic patch,
The retreat of flesh, and eyes follow my eyes
Down into mine, my mine of me, and say. Stay.
But the orange chair, the open book, this one.
The torn woodcut of a naked woman signed Mary F,
The dying fern, aurelia, all of these menorrhagias
Left here in neglect, urge me to rise and climb
Up out of this foyer crowded with movables,
And none of them mine, parts of the city now,
Entangled in time immemorial as you.
As we turn again, two to two, winds ringing.
And part from our kiss.
"You hear how that comes in?
"Now to align this night
With Bethesda's long parlor cars of black remorse,
The—"
Another harried flipping.
"The soda for Mrs. Federman —
"No, no, wait. Here.
"In the ice of, in . ..
"Ach!" He seemed confused. One of his eyes was watering, and white spittle had formed in the corners of his mouth. He paused at a page covered with a rainbow collage of inks, and shook his head. "I'm afraid this isn't going to work. It's all in sections, you see, some polished, some fragmented, some needing to be discarded—and all different facets of the whole. Some, however, are parts of other poems, like the first snippet I read, and some of it, as you can see, is junk. Also, I'm getting the pieces mixed. But most of the parts fit now, and the rest will fit somewhere else, or so I'm hoping, when an end is found. What I should do, I guess, is read a piece complete in itself. Shit!
"I've worked hard to learn the sullen craft, and who knows? I thought I might hit it off somehow the way Pound did in that piece that goes 'Bitter breast-cares have I abided,/ Known on my keel many a care's hold,' " He sighed. "I've picked up my learning harum-scarum in libraries, bookstores, the street, and put a lot of time in in the worst sort of flophouse rooms, whine, whine. I've even been influenced by Ginsberg and, what's more, will admit it. Do you know why?"
Charles shrugged.
"You certainly rely a great deal on body English, don't you? All right, I'll tell you why: because I keep an open mind." He winked at Charles in a purposeful way. "You should, too," he said, and his silvery lashes clung. "The old sea salt! Well! This piece complete in itself! I keep re-refining all my earlier things, hoping to fit them into this book, and since I don't have a copy of what I'm thinking of here, I'll have to try my battered memory." He put fingers over his eyelids, and said in his reading voice, but with a new soft, slow, still edge, heart cams turning on a central shaft:
“ 'Watch the wind, Melinda, watch the wind!' —
Shaking the earth's surface, sea, leaves, and air,
The wind's going everywhere except where it's been —
I call across the lawn as though you'd just sinned.
The grass stems you tossed high are in our hostess's
dark hair.
"I suppose your generation would take those stems as other than from a lawn, but so be it.
" 'Watch the wind, Melinda, watch the wind!'
'O the fairest elements are weather and a child's
whims,'
Our hostess's eyes say, as more stems fly beyond her
and her bright stare.
The wind's going everywhere except where it's been.
"Be still, be you, Melinda, I want to say, then nothing
You do is unmannerly or on a whim. And look at her
hair!
Watch the wind, Melinda, watch the wind,'
Returns to me in our hostess's voice, and her words
begin
A villanelle that none of us knew was there.
The wind's going eve
rywhere except where it's been
And chills me, a father who'd make your round world
square.
When at your age, four, I too was free, fair-haired and
fair.
So watch the wind, Melinda, watch the wind;
The wind's going everywhere except where it's been.
"I'm not sure I've rhymed that quatrain right, but I believe variants exist. I should stop at the library and check on that. Is 'hostess' too impersonal for you?"
Charles shrugged.
"The only other appellation I could think of was 'pretty lady,' and that seemed too butchified and general a term, though I like the sound of it. Pretty lady. Actually, she's a beautiful woman who has a husband who's her match. They lived almost smack on Cannon Beach, where Haystack Rock stands like the point of a fallen star. Oregon. They always had faith in me, in spite of my incorrigibleness then, and, what's more, were always kind to my daughter and wife. Thank you to them, then. I wrote this after a picnic in their back yard. "What's that?" my daughter asked about the caviar, and the host said 'Fish eggs.' Unflappable head on straight. A good heart. A year after the picnic I left for New York and haven't seen Melinda since.
"I never thought I'd be able to leave her, but when I was about to—she was five—we went for a walk along that same Cannon Beach. I sat against a rock, looking over the ocean, wondering where to begin and whose sake this was for, and lit up a cigarette and looked over at her and saw she'd pulled up a wild rose from somewhere and was puffing on it. I realized my cellular influence on her in that instant and vowed never to smoke again. I haven't quite kept up, but do well now. Anyway, I carried that image for thirty years, intending to work it into my larger poem as a sort of cautionary tale, but touching, too, dealing as it did with that day, my daughter, and her influence on me. And then one night a few years ago I was sitting in a White Rose bar, or a reasonable facsimile of one, tanked up on cheap stuff and full of their free sour food and feeling sorry for myself, when up on the television screen, on came a vignette about a boy walking in the woods with his dad. No dialogue. Nature sounds. Every sorry, sad-eyed SOB in that bar stopped and looked up. The father sat against a tree and lit a cigarette and the boy picked up a stick and stuck it in his mouth, and I thought, 'Holy Jesus! There's my moment! They've stolen it! All they did was substitute the stick for a rose and a boy for my girl!' How does that grab you?"
"Pretty weird."
"You better by damn bet you it was weird, my boy. And the gist of it was to get you to quit smoking. How life had come down on its knees for TV! Some vacuum-brained advertising huckster had sucked in the current of my thought and done that to it. It makes you wish you could work in a lead-lined room! But you can't keep yourself from thinking when you walk the streets, or I can't, and then the bastards'll steal from you left and right! They'll suck it out up from you through the TV! They'll take it out the air conditioners! What can a man do?"
"I have no idea."
"Hum," the poet said. "You can hum popular songs. They interfere with the brain currents and also set up activity with whoever else is humming what you are. Also, keep inserting and revising; it mixes them up. But I've told you too much already. I have to go." He slammed his notebook shut and stared at the counter a moment. "Then again, how would you like me to read something else?"
"Sure."
"Well, I hope your memory is less than photographic. This is a facet I wrote when I was wobbling toward madness, and I've been reluctant to look back on it." He opened to a middle page. The faggot prude.
"For the wind brings scents of the city tonight,
Accents of sea, leaves, appeasement, and traffic oil —
A wind splintering the intricate jewels of children's
eyes."
His body tensed, the air around him became charged
with imbalance, and Charles grew afraid for them both; he closed the notebook, put a hand over his eyes, took out a pencil, turned the book over, and opened its back cover. The last page was blank. He looked at Charles and there was a communion as their separate selves intermingled, and then, dropping the tone he used when he recited, he said, "True. But what can blow the wind away?
"Ah!" he cried, causing several customers to look up. "Ah!" he cried again, and two of the winos, attuned to impending catastrophe, the authority of the sober world, police, possible implication, more unpleasantness and remorse, got up and left the restaurant as inconspicuously as they could.
"There!" the poet said. "See that? What do you think of that?"
Charles started to say he thought it was a nice line.
"But don't you see, don't you feel? Here, here, let me do that again." He went backward in the book. "Now listen.
"For the wind brings scents of the city tonight,
Accents of sea, leaves, appeasement, and traffic oil —
A wind splintering the intricate jewels of children's
eyes.
But as their irises rearrange in brighter shades . . .
"Or something of the sort.
". . . they say,
'Father of Light! What can blow the wind away?'
"Don't you see? That's it! That's the final facet, the climax of my piece. That's the end!"
On the last page he scribbled down the lines, then buttoned up his pea coat, tossed some change onto the counter, and with the stalking stride of a small man hurried out the steamed-up door. The regular customers were staring at Charles, or rather at the stool beside him where the aura of the poet still lingered, some with amusement, some with vexation and disapproval, others with disgust, a scattering of response so individual it was as if they'd heard and understood exactly the last stanza the poet read, and were waiting for the air to settle and resume itself.
Charles's food had gone cold, but he ate with an appetite for once. He'd go to Rockefeller Plaza and watch the ice skaters there, skirts twirling above white thighs, he'd promenade with the shoppers down Fifth and Park and Fifty-seventh Street, he'd make a visit to St. Pat's and pray at the statue of Jude again, he'd find where the carousel was in Central Park, he'd walk Brooklyn Bridge, he'd go into Chinatown and see if they celebrated Christmas there, and he'd buy gifts for his father and Marie and the rest and send them off airmail, with letters, too.
The door swung in, admitting a chill, and the poet, with a blue stocking cap pulled down around his ears, was coming around the counter with a changed countenance. Charles remembered what he'd said about not letting anybody see his poems, and felt afraid again. The poet stopped next to him, looking anxious and constrained, and finally said, “You must forgive me. In my excitement I forgot you." He took the notebook from under his arm and got out his pencil. "What is your name, please?" His tone was formal and cold.
"Charles."
"Charles what?"
"Klein."
"Spelled the same as the store?"
"Yes," Charles said.
"The address is irrelevant." The poet put away the pencil and notebook. "You, young man, whether you know it or not, are a true listener, and that's a rare gift. I was led on, I was inspired, and from that came the line that caused these facets to fuse into a single jewel. I'm going to recopy this book and the others I have at home in their proper order, in a good hand, and deliver them to a reputable publisher. The volume they'll make up, which will be out next year sometime, will be entitled What Can Blow the Wind Away? I sense in you an interest beyond mere curiosity, and you seem forthright and patient, a rarity among the New Yorkers I've met, perhaps a poet in your own right, in spirit if not in practice." He reached up and fumbled with his collar as if to cover his throat, and said, "When my book appears, it will be dedicated to you."
He was almost outside before Charles recovered and started rising and said, "Wait," which came out in a cry of pain because his thighs, caught under the counter, reseated him with a shock. He spun his stool around and ran outdoors, and saw the poet stepping over a mound of snow a plow had piled along the curb.
> "Wait," Charles said, and came up behind him and took his arm, and then the restaurant door creaked open and a voice called, "Hey, boy, you going to pay?," as the snow under him collapsed and his foot plunged into the icy underground current of the gutter, swaying him like undertow, and he grabbed tighter to the poet for balance and felt, through coat and sweater and clothes, the bone of his arm, fleshless and frail, thin as bird bone. The poet turned on him with wide eyes. Charles undid his foot with a sucking sound, his soaked ankle aching in the cold air, and stepped back onto the sidewalk, thigh and chest muscles trembling, and called to the waiter, "I’ll be right in, sir!" Dark building with its entrance at an angle to the curb. The sway the water gave him. To the poet, he said, "I'm sorry. Really. Could we meet some other time? I'm really confused."
The poet looked distant and wary, encroached upon, on the defensive. "Well, I don't know. Why do you ask?" "You could read more of your poems." "I feel uneasy reading in public."
"You could come up to my room if you like. It's pretty ugly, but it's private."
"I thought you said you didn't have a place.”
“I'm ashamed of it."
"Do you have a tape recorder or any other such device there?" "No."
"Because I wouldn't read in the presence of one." "Could we meet tomorrow, then, about the same time, say, in the restaurant here, and then go up?"
"I don't know. I'm going to be busy trying to get my notebooks into the proper sequence now. I can't promise you." He sighed and lowered his eyes; lashes clung. "I'm already afraid some of the facets will clash, or that the ending won't be satisfactory still. I’ve had these inspirations before, not quite as strong as tonight, never this near the end of it, but I’ve had them, and they sometimes fail. We'll see."
Beyond the Bedroom Wall Page 57
