The Pattern More Complicated
I have my places, now, in every city.
The Wyndham Hotel. The Sutton Coffee Shop.
East Arlington. Cafe de la Mairie.
Circuits of habit, of self-comforting
for past desperation, of — meaning, even,
it takes half a lifetime's moving on
to lay down on the globe.
Arriving at the Wyndham, familiar soot-sting
of Midtown, some indeterminate change of season,
I set myself down and make my phone calls. I
am a man who sets himself down and makes his phone calls,
assuredly, though the bellboy has left the room.
Stiff lampshades watch me, and faded horsey pictures.
When I address the postcards to young women —
those I never had, those I lost in months or days —
I see their faces, not to see Someone
laughing, over my shoulder, at the List.
And most of them not born yet when — when —
I dream
often of the house in Haverford, now it's sold.
I drive past to look at it once more, but something —
sky-high windbreak woven against my gaze,
green, indestructible . . .
Before Dick and Marcia
moved out, new workmen, tearing up the kitchen,
discovered the wall of the old farmhouse, ending
at the pantry . . .
I keep thinking, we lost it, though I,
of course, had nothing to do with that divorce.
Like coffee stains on old fabric, heat-curdles on old wood,
it whispers, our generation can't keep things. They kept it,
Alfred and Isabel, whatever else they lost —
heart, lungs, esophagus; Alfred known at last
more for his dirty jokes and inappropriate
confidences, than anything else, except his parties . . .
But still a house in the old sense, grands seigneurs,
with a sweep of white newels down to the front door,
where we knocked, younglings, and were given sherry.
Jonny and I, and Dick, and Joel . . . I
could still walk that torn-up kitchen and find anything,
tumblers, tall stool to sit on, warmth-fields of several ghosts;
screen door, dog yapping to be let in or out.
Loss woven unnoticed into the whole pattern . . .
The last time I talked with Isabel, she could hardly
sit up at all, but we sat under the grape arbor
in the Eastern summer night — windless, stagnant, full —
and talked of how the dead go on, an ancestress' recipes,
family turns of voice . . . a thought ingrained in her
as the farmhouse walls embedded in the pantry's.
Trouble was, I'd known we'd have that conversation
as long ago, at least, as my early visits back.
It had nothing to do with just how much had gone wrong.
I loved her, but time had exhausted it,
too soon.
What do you do when you walk into
a new restaurant in San Francisco and meet C.,
whom you brought to that house in your mind, unseen companion,
since even (especially) impossible love makes
you see things twice, see for the absent other?
Thirty years. You don't recognize her,
her husband, the headmaster, recognizes you.
You're with a younger woman, it looks worse —
or better — than it is, but you can't explain.
She has multiple sclerosis. The beautiful proportion
of her eyes and nose is there, but contracted, somehow,
seen through the wrong end of the telescope.
Living in L.A. now. The headmaster's house
built for a short man, little squat pillars.
Finally started to write. Alone all day,
and the kids kept saying, "Mom, write that down!"
"What do you write about?" "Me. Don't you write about you?"
I'm sitting — the restaurant is so full — at her feet
on a small step, a posture
which seems oddly permanent — spring evening,
the two stone steps, the Haverford library . . .
And it's only when I get home I realize "Nancy,"
who died suddenly of an aneurism last year,
isn't the squat Nancy, the confidante,
but the wild one, with the dark glasses, the special car.
When I'm in the great house in Haverford, I'm lying
in bed, alone but thinking about the others . . .
One of my visits from Cambridge. It's early summer,
the room has no shades, I've never been anywhere
with so many birds, so all my thoughts are Eros,
that brimful Eros, straining through perfect images
like all the birdsong in the world, that start to vanish
after twenty-five . . .
Or it's at night, I've left the party early —
I can't stand, even then, to have such a hangover twice —
but sleep holds off, and I'm holding, reinterpreting
them all in my mind, as the timbres of their voices
drift from downstairs . . . I think I go back to this easily
because time seems already past, so infinitely
arrangeable . . . C. and I? Starting writing so late,
diffidently . . . not to have had to smash a marriage
to feel the brimfulness release, suffuse . . .
Wherever
they went that night — friends, a hotel room — I so equally
wanted and didn't want her to stand apart where
rain stung a window . . . (Last scene of "The Dead.")
In my dreams the lost places grow enormous,
childhood apartments with tapestries for wallpaper
and chapel-alcoves, climbed to through ship's rigging;
or installations, worlds of airy fibre
that need to be thought in, and anchored, from outer space . . .
The vertigo Proust speaks of, the amazing
foreshortenings at the base. (Did Cal die
less than ten years after my father?)
But also his sense of a cathedral growing —
new shadows, amplitudes, as the arches close
and the fleche sharpens . . . (Did Jonny and I
address a multitude, ringing Buddhist bells?)
It's never quite mine, though — at best some enigmatic
ungiving other self’s; or else I'm given
a little room to write in, off the kitchen.
The view out my window, at the Wyndham,
is like those archaeologies of my life,
strata whose lights and colorations are
unthinkable to each other. Men in yarmulkes
stand past dusk at long tables, tinkering small machines.
Mornings, one floor down, a secretary
bustles in with coffee and sits facing the airshaft,
by her potted plant. One day
the boss calls her out; she comes back and just sits there, glum.
I watch her not just because she's pretty, or reminds me
how my student once worked a job like that, in New York —
the delight of strange detail, and then the loneliness —
but something else, that for a moment makes
the "change" or "happiness" that was all we wanted, younger,
quite immaterial. Life, beyond my knowing.
-- Alan Williamson
