A Wave Read Free

name, without assuming any new one. I think it’s still there.
    It was as though I’d been left with the empty street
    A few seconds after the bus pulled out. A dollop of afternoon wind.
    Others tell you to take your attention off it
    For awhile, refocus the picture. Plan to entertain,
    To get out. (Do people really talk that way?)
    We could pretend that all that isn’t there never existed anyway.
    The great ideas? What good are they if they’re misplaced,
    In the wrong order, if you can’t remember one
    At the moment you’re so to speak mounting the guillotine
    Like Sydney Carton, and can’t think of anything to say?
    Or is this precisely material covered in a course
    Called Background of the Great Ideas, and therefore it isn’t necessary
    To say anything or even know anything? The breath of the moment
    Is breathed, we fall and still feel better. The phone rings,
    It’s a wrong number, and your heart is lighter,
    Not having to be faced with the same boring choices again
    Which doesn’t undermine a feeling for people in general and
    Especially in particular: you,
    In your deliberate distinctness, whom I love and gladly
    Agree to walk blindly into the night with,
    Your realness is real to me though I would never take any of it
    Just to see how it grows. A knowledge that people live close by is,
    I think, enough. And even if only first names are ever exchanged
    The people who own them seem rock-true and marvelously self-sufficient.

Thank You for Not Cooperating
    Down in the street there are ice-cream parlors to go to
    And the pavement is a nice, bluish slate-gray. People laugh a lot.
    Here you can see the stars. Two lovers are singing
    Separately, from the same rooftop: “Leave your change behind,
    Leave your clothes, and go. It is time now.
    It was time before too, but now it is really time.
    You will never have enjoyed storms so much
    As on these hot sticky evenings that are more like August
    Than September. Stay. A fake wind wills you to go
    And out there on the stormy river witness buses bound for Connecticut,
    And tree-business, and all that we think about when we stop thinking.
    The weather is perfect, the season unclear. Weep for your going
    But also expect to meet me in the near future, when I shall disclose
    New further adventures, and that you shall continue to think of me.”
    The wind dropped, and the lovers
    Sang no more, communicating each to each in the tedium
    Of self-expression, and the shore curled up and became liquid
    And so the celebrated lament began. And how shall we, people
    All unused to each other and to our own business, explain
    It to the shore if it is given to us
    To circulate there “in the near future” the why of our coming
    And why we were never here before? The counterproposals
    Of the guest-stranger impede our construing of ourselves as
    Person-objects, the ones we knew would get here
    Somehow, but we can remember as easily as the day we were born
    The maggots we passed on the way and how the day bled
    And the night too on hearing us, though we spoke only our childish
    Ideas and never tried to impress anybody even when somewhat older.

But What Is the Reader to Make of This?
    A lake of pain, an absence
    Leading to a flowering sea? Give it a quarter-turn
    And watch the centuries begin to collapse
    Through each other, like floors in a burning building,
    Until we get to this afternoon:
    Those delicious few words spread around like jam
    Don’t matter, nor does the shadow.
    We have lived blasphemously in history
    And nothing has hurt us or can.
    But beware of the monstrous tenderness, for out of it
    The same blunt archives loom. Facts seize hold of the web
    And leave it ash. Still, it is the personal,
    Interior life that gives us something to think about.
    The rest is only drama.
    Meanwhile the combinations of every extendable circumstance
    In our lives continue to blow against it like new leaves
    At the edge of a forest a battle rages in and out of
    For a whole day. It’s not the