Poetry Selections
Page 2
The idea cruises
above us this afternoon, meeting
no resistance at all, circling...
From
—The History of the Wedge
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The idea cruises |
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Snaggle-Tooth, Maytag, Taylor Falls— long before we measured with our eyes the true size of each monstrosity, its name, downriver, was famous to us. It lay in wait, something to be slain while our raft, errant, eddied among glancing pinpricks of sun and every bend giving way to bend seemed a last reprieve. But common terror has a raw taste. It’s all banality, as when you stare straight into a bad cut— this sense of being slightly more awake than you might like. When the raft pitches sideways off a ledge, what you land on is less than its name. It’s a mechanism. None of the demented expressions that the fleshly water forms over that stone profile is more than another collision, a fleeting logic lost and forming, now lost in the melee. When the world is most serious, we approach it with wholly open eyes even as we start the plunge and the stone explanation. |
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In the brisk, pleasant voice of a surgeon introducing his choice operation the Air Force assured us how strictly professional it is. Armament, radius, objective: each word neutral as a steel tool rinsed and drawn clean from the Latin—a scalpel, sterilized needle. And we watched the latest knife: five General Dynamics F-15s like a five-card hand on the prowl curve out over downtown Topeka and cut, break east with a spurt, a sharp black smudge, and they’re off on a new vector, they are carving together; that whole hand is rolling over like one moving card revolving itself to flash all five spades at once, chased by the ragged mass of their roar, the heavy furniture they trundle behind them being hauled, torn over every rough floor in the sky, rolling over roofs, ripping and mending as the sixth svelte blade clicks into formation, completing this steadily traveling phalanx, and there in the hazy autumn sky we see this oldest formation of power, abstract force focused in one ghostly capital letter: The idea cruises above us this afternoon, meeting no resistance at all, circling as if looking for victims. Nothing up there to rape, but it can’t stop moving; it’s coming back low, flat over the field to shock it for kicks, the whole history of the wedge is bursting straight up in the sky, trailing white crepe- paper streamers in one, grand, Fourth-of-July finale, fanfare proclaiming its victory, Force flaunting itself, flexing its engines, crowing, deafening us with its form of laughter as it lets its whole tool hang out unsheathed, vertically, over 10,000 feet, shaking it, shoving it in our faces.
I like this low, comfortable kind of conversation which the rain’s been having with itself all day as it goes about its business, deftly assembling its tiny parts, confident, in no great hurry, discussing, perhaps, the different gutters it has seen, the taste of rust in New York, the rust in Chicago. Or perhaps comparing notes about the finer points of roofs, where best to creep to find flaws in asphalt shingles, or maybe it’s murmuring in rain-jargon over different grades of redwood, the rate they rot. No end of stories that it could be telling— the drudgery of cycling in a monsoon, monotony of equatorial assignments, the same steamy party each afternoon. Or maybe the gossip’s of some great typhoon, the melee of another grand convention. Or is it muttering about the way some thunderstorms rig their elections, the social life of rain in some bayou, as the rain keeps up its quiet shoptalk—the level, reassuring talk of people who are comfortable again, sure what they’re doing, graceful in their work, and accurate, serious in the way that rain is serious, given over to their task of touching the world.
You will wake up in your old seat behind Pete Bowerbank in 8th-period Driver ed. Tommy Conger will be there too, in back of you, squelching his Wrigley's breathing spearmint down your neck. And Lyle Smith, who had the loude3st artificial burp--- bulked against the side board, honking snores. You desk will be the same scarred tablet, prehistoric, with the purple fossils init--the blue rune that said Eat the Root, the one that read Bird Bites. Chuck Spino will have his comb out to lubricate his hair. it will be May, and as you wait in the lighted cave of Room 101--wait to evolve while Mr. McIntyre repeats Leave four car-lengths at forty miles an hour--- you will think and think of the little wet click Mary Devore's lips make as she smiles, imagine the voltage in her sweater, try to think how outdoors on the tight green diamond the throw from third to fist is easy---lilt, a flicker, bull's-eye. And McIntyre will go on, and the lukewarm New Jersey haze, like a light perfume, will stretch south, almost to the bridge, to Bayonne.
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