2.09.2011

from Nancy

So the dark descends
earlier now and the watches
tell a tale of time
gone different for the winter and I
sit here, quiet
for the moment on the fringe
of hectic weather. There will be
invitations to the houses
of friends for dinner and the strange
sauce of what remains unknown
in behaviors and the soup
of the ideas that warm
in the brains of everyone.
And I will say again
let it come through to me.
There is nothing to know
inside ourselves, I think,
and thinking it forms
these rooms and a few drops
of conversation and the rain and sun
which one can too
casually reject, or utter
in the language of misunderstanding
that multiplies like a maze--
what you or we, or who or he
will not tolerate, as if the sound
of any shouting can be followed
by silence. Everything happens
at least again and again when
one wishes it even
while denying that, so it becomes
easy to be some version
that packages in prearranged
boxes that soon have
everyone moving away. The city
is also on my hands
and when the rooftops stretch
towards the lake and my differing
desire turns me strongly in my moods
of this choice of who to be
I wonder if it was with us, ever,
to say much of the bewildering
streets of this stupendous dream
made real as glass on the curb
and the woman who wanders
in a bright green coat and stares in windows.
And so the genres
came to be in speaking
how someone would stand next to.
To change the scene was also a business
and who, in what way,
was the audience each word could talk to?
I could take a drive in the country
and watch the leaves and the houses
of other lives and get a phone call
that reminded me of pain
that I could suddently feel in old
and useless patterns. How could you know
what would not be again.
Odd to feel these negotiations
as the measure of success.
I am happy as my hands.
This vision, if it's there in words,
is quiet, momentary, as the act
of making a sky
is as immediate as the burdens
that become so by avoiding them--it so
easily
can go each way.
Someone came to speak to me
and I tried to be home to what I could hear of them.
It was about the air that way
or, instead, it was the air,
whatever leaned against
the greeting in the voice.
You went on from there
with the whole world in it
and all there was no way
to hold. I remember it
now, and make it
in a story again.
Tell us that one, someone said,
face pressed
against the windows of winter.
Tell us so we hear it, because
today it's dark so early.


Standard Time

by Mark Wallace

from the anthology The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry 1993-1994 edited by Douglas Messerli

originally printed in O-blek: Writing from the New Coast



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