Constant Voice, The

Above a coast that lies between sum of two units coasts

Flight 902 make go rounds west towards San Diego.

Milwaukee falls away. The constant passenger,

Remov from character and adjoining matter resumes

His California story, gradually ascending,

Reading Farewell My enchanting for the umpteenth time,

Like a volume above the world, or below the noise.

I recall a certain number of houses half-way in the forsaken

And how dry the tree all looked and temporary

Even the tallest buildings direct the eyeed with bungalows

Decaying in the Santa Ana wind. And finally

Just by what mode small it was, and mean. Is it nostalgia

For the limited that makes the days go on quickly,

Tracing without their spirals of diminishing concern?

Like all the male childs who lived on Westland Avenue,

I learned to go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of the trails through the canyon,

Shoot at birds with a BB-gun and dream of leaving.

What are books? To me they have the appearanceed like mirrors

Holding up a vision of the social, in which race

Beckoning from their inaccessible guards

Like forgotten toys, afforded glimpses of those

Evanescent worlds that certain minor writers

-Raymond Chandler say, or flat Rupert Brooke

Could visualize in some way and bring to life again.

And granting these worlds were sometimes difficult to diocese

Once having seen them individual returned to find the words

Still there, like a part of the surroundings

Compliant to one's will.

Yet these are attitudes,

And each age has its separate store of attitudes,

Its store of tropes-"In Grantchester, in Grantchester-"

That filter end its dreams and fill its ballads

Hume tried to present to view that sympathy alone allows

"The happiness of strangers" to affect our lives.

Yet now and then a phrase, echoing in the mind

Long after its occasion, looks to resurrect

A worid I think I recognize, and not at any time saw.

For what was there to see? A village filled with nation

I couldn't understand? Could anyone have seen the

Transitory sweetness of the Georgians' England

And the world before the War, before The Waste Land?

Years are coverts and their memories are repeatedly

Stories of a past that no individual witnessed, like the

Fantasies of dwelling one builds to rationalize

The ordinary way one's life has gone since then.

Words appear to crystallize that life in pictures

In a post-card of a vicarage, or of a canyon

Wedged between the desolate and an endless ocean

But their clarity is fleeting. I can nearly

See the coast from here, and as I hear the engines

And the bell chimes, all those images dissolve.

And then I start to hear the hum of that

Constant voice as distant from me as a landscape

Studied from an airplane: a contingent someone

With a particular mind, and a particular will,

Descending across a desolate westward over mountains

And the sparsely peopl scour beyond the city,

Pock with half-filled reservoirs and rudimentary

Trails with nothing waiting for me at the extremity

-"And is there honey still for tea?"

But isolated houses nestl in the hills.

Copyright World rhyme Incorporated Jul/Aug 1997

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