In Place Of A Curse
At the next vacancy for God, if I am elected,
I shall forgive last the delicately wounded
who, having been slugged no harder than anyone else,
never got up again, neither to fight back,
nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration.
They who are wholly broken, and they in whom
mercy is understanding, I shall embrace at once
and lead to pillows in heaven. But they who are
the meek by trade, baiting the best of their betters
with extortions of a mock-helplessness,
I shall take last to love, and never wholly.
Let them all in Heaven - I abolish Hell -
but let it be read over them as they enter:
"Beware the calculations of the meek, who gambled nothing
gave nothing, and could never recieve enough."
Keeping
Put a dog in a bottle. It won't bark.
Not long. A scuba diver can't. He'll
swim up to the cork and try knifing it.
He has about thirty minutes to knife through.
Sometimes, for the strongest, that's enough.
If, therefore, you really mean
to keep things bottled, do not fill to the top.
It may be better to use no liquids at all.
Some ferment and blow the cork.
Any of them makes the bottle heavy
and the act of bottling up is itself
heavy enough. Suppose you were to spend
all your nights for years building a ghost ship
or a replica of your nervous system
inside the bottle, then filled with water:
unless you used some nonbiodegradable
plastic junk, the thing would waterlog
and turn to bloat. If it didn't disintegrate
it would run, leaving you a dirty bottle.
It is nuisance enough to carry the thing around
without having to watch it go dirty.
Not that you can manage without one.
You have yours. I have mine. We all
have something to put into it. Does it matter
what? We aren't given much choice.
Often, as I sense it, we have nothing to do
with actually doing it. We look,
and there is the bottle with things in it —
the dog, for example, that stopped barking
instantly its forty years ago
but starts again unstopped the instant we look
and remember there is the bottle, and what's in it.
Washing Your Feet
Washing your feet is hard when you get fat.
In lither times the act was unstrained and pleasurable.
You spread the toes for signs of athlete's foot.
You used creams, and rubbing alcohol, and you powdered.
You bent over, all in order, and did everything.
Mary Magdalene made a prayer meeting of it.
She, of course, was washing not her feet but God's.
Degas painted ladies washing their own feet.
Somehow they also seem to be washing God's feet.
To touch any body anywhere should be ritual.
To touch one's own body anywhere should be ritual.
Fat makes the ritual wheezy and a bit ridiculous.
Ritual and its idea should breathe easy.
They are memorial, meditative, immortal.
Toenails keep growing after one is dead.
Washing my feet, I think of immortal toenails.
What are they doing on these ten crimped polyps?
I reach to wash them and being to wheeze.
I wish I could paint like Degas or believe like Mary.
It is sad to be naked and to lack talent.
It is sad to be fat and to have dirty feet.
Kranzfeldt
Kranzfeldt, the housepainter,
fell off more wagons in his time
than Texas has horses for.
His time up, he proceeded
to fall off the staging
at the Westmore, or fell off
without procedure, fracturing
more than would mend. Still
purposeful, he sent for whiskey
in the hope of dying closer
to the good of wanting. Fechner
the imbecile, left wet promises
but came back with Father Zingler
of the Society of Dry Reasons,
who offered a handful of dust.
I doubt I'll need all of God
for what happens next, but bring me
what's drinkable: I promise it thirst.
Differences
Choose your own difference between surgery
and knifing. Both cut. One
thinks to rejoin. Can something be made
of this difference? Defend your answer.
Now think of a surgery without intention:
here the scalpels, there the body.
Everyone is some doctor. You, too,
may as well be employed. Cut.
Is this something like a soft version
of a machine built to do nothing?
We are experimenting in the new art:
by contradicting purpose we explore.
possibly nothing, but explore,
possibly a reality, possibly a way
of inventing what a reality might be
had we some way of inventing it.
The first incision is hardest, but look
closely: you will find it already made,
inherent. Put the alarm clock inside it
and stitch. You now have a TV commercial
someone could be born to or die of.
And you? Are you my murderer
or my healer? You do know. Why else
did you set the alarm without being told?
Remember, however: distinctions
are never made wholly for their own sake.
You are doomed to decide not only
what you do but what you have done.
Yes, we chose what was already open,
putting into it what came to hand.
We must still take what attitude we can
toward what will already have been done
by the time we have time to think about it.
Were we successful killers or failed
surgeons? We will come to that difference.
And what difference will it make?
Requisitioning
I needed 800 dozen golf balls.
I got 1700 basketball hoops.
- from an advertisement by Western Electric
There are no imperfect answers from perfect data.
Spec numbers, state of Inventory-Now,
urgency of requirement as crosshatched
from orders outstanding, credit substantiation,
promised delivery plus days of grace,
seasonal-demand configuration
adjusted for such variables as weather,
shifts in population, inductive events
(the sales effect, for example, of opening day
of the baseball season), duration of induction,
disposable income, demographic doctrine
— all must be weighed where all things balance true.
The answers are beyond us, not the method.
We describe our need, submitting it as we know it,
laboring always for the perfect input.
The Circuits then decide. We may think, at first,
they ignore our need. In time we understand
they scan that total universe of data
that is not visible to us at our stations.
We think we need 800 dozen golf balls:
good faith has been tendered, the customer confirmed,
we get back 1700 basketball hoops
and the customer phones for redemption: rains
have flooded the courses, the play has moved indoors,
gyms are under construction everywhere:
the need is for 3000 basketball hoops
with nets, backboards, brackets.
We absolve him
and send up the conversion. We get back
5000 pairs of water skis — regular, slalom,
trick, a few with hydroplanes. — Of course!
the flooding has been calculated. Seepage
has warped the gym floors. Cancel basketball.
We learn to answer as we are willed to answer
where all our needs are known before we know them
and ministered to our good.
There are, to be sure,
those 1700 basketball hoops, now surplus,
but before we can remainder them, Public Works
sends in an order for them as mooring rings.
That, too, as we see backwards, was foreseen.
There in the total universe of data
all things are parts and harmonies of one plan
that calls us to Itself, demanding only
our faith and our vocation to describe
fallibly, but labouring for perfection,
the need that shall be given perfect answers.
Encounter
"We," said my young radical neighbor, smashing my window,
"speak the essential conscience of mankind."
"If it comes to no more than small breakage," I said, "speak away.
But tell me, isn't smashing some fun for its own sake."
"We will not be dismissed as frivolous," he said,
grabbing my crowbar and starting to climb to the roof.
"You are seriously taken," I said, raising my shotgun.
"Please weigh seriously how close the range is."
"Fascist!" he said, climbing down. "Or are you a liberal
trying to fake me with no shells in that thing?"
"I'm a lamb at windows, a lion on roofs," I told him.
"You'll more or less have to guess for yourself what's loaded
until you decide to call what may be a bluff.
Meanwhile, you are also my neighbor's son:
if you'll drop that crowbar and help me pick up this glass,
I could squeeze a ham-on-rye from my tax structure,
and coffee to wash it down while we sit and talk
about my need of windows and yours to smash them."
"Not with a lumpen-liberal pseudo-fascist!"
he sneered, and jumped the fence to his own yard.
There's that about essential consciences:
given young legs, they have no trouble at fences.
Memo: Preliminary Draft Of A Prayer To God The Father
Sir, it is raining tonight in Towson, Maryland.
It rained all the way from Atlanta, the road steaming
slicks and blindnesses, almost enough to slow for.
Thank you for the expensive car, its weight and sure tread
that make it reasonable to go reasonably fast.
My wife is in Missouri. She flew there yesterday
because her parents are eighty, terminal,
and no longer sure of what they were always sure of.
Thank you for airline tickets, rental cars,
the basic credit cards, a checking balance.
We doubt they can live much longer and not well.
I, too, have learned to love them. Thank you
for the wet roads to mercy on which I buy
the daughter home to the last of mother and father.
I wish I had such destinations left me.
I phoned my son at home tonight, the younger.
He has been busted for pot again. His fourth time.
There is, however, a lawyer, a reliable fixer.
He will cost me only another three days on this road.
Thank you for the road, the bad lunches, and the pleasant ladies.
I phoned my older son in Boston. He has wrecked his car
and has not learned to walk. His apartment, you see,
is almost a mile from school. He will miss classes.
Thank you for the classes he will not miss
if I ask my agent to book me a tour in April.
I phoned my daughter in New York. She is happy
but needs more voice lessons, and a piano.
She could make do with her guitar, but less well.
Thank you for everything she is dreaming of dreaming
and for the unanswered letter from California
I will answer yes when I get home. The lessons
will come from pocket money. The piano
is waiting there in Claremont in February.
Thank you for Claremont and choices and for this daughter
and for the road I go well enough as things go.
I mean, sir, it does lead on, and I thank you.
It is not what I imagined. It may be better.
Better, certainly, than what I remember from starting.
At times, I confess, it is slightly depressing. The ladies
who are only slightly brittle and slightly silly,
but on any reasonable scale bright and admirable,
depress me slightly. But so do my own bad habits
when I am left to them freely. I do not complain:
I describe. I am grateful but imperfect and, therefore,
imperfectly grateful. It is all good enough
and I thank you, sir. If you are ever in Towson,
I can recommend the high level mediocrity
of the Quality Inn Motel just off the Beltway.
It is only slightly embalmed. It is clean and quiet.
With the TV on you do not hear the rain.
A Man Came Tuesday
A man came Tuesday.
Wanted what I didn't owe yet.
"By Friday you will. Pay now
and I'll discount 10%." That
made sense . . . would have . . .
except. . . . "Anything off
for good intentions?" I asked.
"I," he said, "am not
the Parole Board. I'm your
nonnegotiable future
came to a take it or leave it."
"If I had the price of a choice."
"Exactly." "But if I had,
I'd have a different future."
"That," he said, "is what I'm trying
to get you to." "Who the devil
are you?" He shrugged:
"I have no contract with the truth
but I like to be persuasive —
what are you prepared to believe?"