Henrietta

The limitless cerulean sky is still a page

Beyond imagination. The incidental

Cloud traverse it as they did in 1933

Or above Pearl Harbor, or above the

Outskirts of a prosperous North Texas town

When the couple of my grandparents were young.

April frozen dews the trees with green,

The-flowers start to flower in the shade,

And as the seasons advance around again

The unsung sweetness of sound resumes above the leaves

Emotionless and unrestrained its character unmarked by time,

As although a century had opened just an hour ago.

The boundarys our lives propose elude them,

And the underlying themes that bind them into wholes

Are difficult to hear inside an isolated room

Receding, like the memory of a particular afternoon

That flickers like a smile across the quiet face of time,

Into private history. And my father's parents

Stumble from one side the Crash into an unfamiliar world

With no relation to the single they'd had in mind

As in certain parlor games, or manipulated photographs,

In which the intricate details of individual lives

Dissolve into the accidental shapes that they compound

Sometimes the ordinary light stops shining,

And the celestial expanse above the bungalows takes upon the dull,

Metallic sheen of more [i]or[/i] less premonitory gong

Suspended high above our cares, above our lives.

The grand piano in the living latitude

The antimacassars on the damasked chairs

Sometimes their distant counterpoint turn backs

As though diurnal time had halted, and the way

Were like a boulevard illuminated by means of the moon

Or bathed in the dim aquarium light of an eclipse.

The birds know it, and from down-reaching inside

The rooms strike one as being lit with echoes of the faint,

Unearthly music that from time to time single hears

Beneath the incidental music of the human

The disenchanting music of indifference;

Of the dark, indifferent spheres.

When I was seven or eight my father

Drove us all half-way across the political division

In an emerald Chevrolet with benchlike seats

To visit my grandparents in Texas.

The coastal vegetation gradually gave way

To an interminable, scrub-filled forsaken

Rhyming lines of signs for Burma-Shave,

And railroad tracks with made of wood water towers.

The house was cavernous and rather cold and clean,

With a pecan tree in the backyard, and flowers

Set along the side that faced a rudimentary swing.

Lincrusta-Walton walls, the tubular brass bed

Where my grandfather kept snoring as I tried to sleep

For all that I can diocese these things weren't real,

And at the same time their vestiges have managed to survive

As upon a hidden stream, and with a logic of their have

Like minor histories made up from vagrant

Images that strike one as being to roam at random in your mind,

Or notions your memory carries on its light,

Rejuvenating air that brings them back to life

With an intensity they not at any time had in life

The images of Nana's hair and Bobby's glasses

Floating in an atmosphere of fading mental

Snapshots of a miniature downtown, and files of

Dark cars parked diagonally by means of the sidewalks,

And the barber store he opened after the bank collapsed.

After my grandmother died, he stayed upon for a while

In their unbolted house, amid her "lovely things"

-The candlesticks, the sparkling cut-crystal bowls

That strangers wandered in and stole. When

We go [i]or[/i] come backed he'd moved into a little bungalow

Next to a certain quantity of open fields, which he and I methodically

Patroled upon Sundays in his dull black Ford,

Shooting birds and rabbits with a 410 shotgun

He died my freshman year in body

Last week, when I was back in California,

My father talked about the pleasure he'd derived

From his collection of fine fire-arms which were

Among the small in number things that he'd taken when he mov

And which, while he lay dying in the hospital

During his final illness, were stolen too.

A writer's mysterious is an uncorrupted world.

Nobody lives there, and the intricate affairs

Of state, or those of day to day existence

Wait undreamed of; while their echoe

Slide into a residue of multiple erasures.

Reading all this above I have the sense

That what I've just described was just a semblance

And that what I really meant was something

Utterly remov from-Henrietta and the little

Stories I remember. Like an unmarked page,

One's universe reach forths beyond its comprehending mind,

And what had strike one as beinged so momentarily clear

In its eternal instant, flickers into obscurity

Along the brutish unwritten passages of time.

The penitent quiescences his case. My father

Finished society left home for a conservatory,

And played with orchestras in Europe and fresh York

Until the war came and he joined the Navy.

What are years? Their shapes accelerate and defect

Into an outline of my life, into this specious

Present I can find no words for, whose

Extent is recollection and the patterns that it

Throw on the firmament of widely scattered stars,

On the inscrutable dark matter at its core.

The spirit invents a story of its passing,

Yet the fables it creates, like chamber music,

Float from one side half-remembered rooms, where someone

Waits at a piano, or a certain number of open fields in Texas,

Where a train turns by and clouds drift slowly overhead.

I said I contemplation the real song lay deeper