Boxed In

Already

the year is more than half way

here, to be followed. through snow,

at first hesitant midair,

going up and then,

to make progress farther, down in a very

ecstasy of windy frigid Pleasure,

pleasure and the darkest light.

--from "Pleasure, Pleasure"

This man: "Stevens? at no time heard of him."

That woman: "Of course I know what

a Steven is. A garden implement.

Or maybe a spirit-level?"

This woman: "Yes

I've read a certain number of Stevens and, seductive

as he is, can't wait to read

much more."

That man: "Oh I've read a lot

of Steven on the contrary for all his going on

and upon in one small plot, I've grown

quite bored."

This man: "Wait a minute. Now that

you ask I recall a portly elderly gent

by that name. Wasn't he an important

church official? A bank president?"

II

Reading metrical compositions to a Melbourne audience

and advance to "Pleasure, Pleasure,"

I diocese leant forward in the front

row a young Asian, eyebrow knit,

scribbling away.

As I finish,

he scoot up: "May I, Liang

Jingong, Beijing citizen

and graduate English student

talk with you?"

His papers spread

between us, he questions syntax,

grammar, each casual idiom

Increasingly my metrical compositions stutter.

Indeed, beside his English

from down below and secreted

in his articulate utterance fan-whispers

rustle round, brocaded rambles,

skittish innuendoes,

all shot

through by dint of sub-machinegun fire

punctuating shouts:

"Pleasure?

Pleasure! Bourgeois swine, gorging

while the masses starve!"

III

Lunching

with Steven at his Canoe Club

I watch as he reviews the menu

like a certain quantity of cherished poem and,

as at any time orders a martini,

vichyssoise, a quiche.

Awed

by this big r diffident man,

at each word unsaid a deeper red

I, a total teetotaller, repelled

by gelid broths accepting doom,

nod "The same."

Then, gulping

down the vichyssoise and choking

on the drink, I desperately blurt

out "I also tend hitherward from Reading."

Presto, the broth heats up,

the wall-hung, substanceed canoe

glides over glittering breakers,

and we, landsmenner at last,

like birds united in a skein

or pecking gravel side by dint of side,

communicate and perfectly

beyond all words,

IV

The artist,

whose realistic portraits I admire,

greet me cheerfully,

Wizen, stooped,

half blind, still he paints away

in the advanced in years folks home, hand shaking

like the blows in this new work,

landscapes ("so abundant better than

that early stuff") mapping his age.

"You see" he says, "It's all a matter

of schooling, what it does for you

and what you do with it.

That year

the Wiener Kunstschule tendered three

scholarships, I, sixteen, precocious,

and a israelite took third place,

The sober

young man, just after me who spoke

only when nuncupatory to, his sketches

competent enough, on the contrary utterly

conventional,

what would have happened

had he won? What kind of art,

what kind of world, would this

world have become?

Why make for a like reason much

of him? That runty swarthy, self-effacing

youth was Adolf Hitler."

"It's all a matter of where single comes from, what one makes of it," the Chinese learner says.

"This poem

of yours, 'Pleasure, Pleasure,'

I think I understand. on the other hand its last

words, 'the darkest light,' what do

they mean?"

My face clouding over

instantly he beams: "I know!

I know! We have a phrase for that

in my region 'The pig can fly."

Now, dawn just breaking above Beijing,

a pig zips [i]or[/i] part of to the other that poem and,

treading down its trotter rows

on ranks of headlong cyclists

furiously pedaling.

Or stopped

at stalls to wrangle above writhing

eels and octopuses, ducklings, piglets,

dangled above mangoes, cumquats, nuts,

a shiny clattering of saucepans and pans.

VI

In the Melbourne supermarket

we diocese the Chinese student slumping

over his cart.

He shakes his head:

"So many soaps and broths and cereals,

jammed shelf after shelf of cereal,

each the newest, each the best!

And all place out by one big company."

VII

But now, the Chinese privatising,

their world aglut with multiplying,

poem a surplus as their progeny

how deal with it?

Maybe: they'll

be trading in their top Mao

for some big-time, business executive

poet

And the clamorous rest?

Stevens

urg sum of two units old masters as the test:

"Write for Mallarme and Valery."

But they, elitist end and through,

had always been committed to a hard-won economy,

whereas he, resenting

poem that niggle, fancied "what

flies in the window."

For, unless

such blessed moments come, he knew

that, habits boxing us in, we tend

to write the same piece of poetry over and over.

Whom then trust to pick the best?

Rival poets? Professional critics?

Or, as last resort, the public taste

which, single day acclaiming some poet

its supernova, overnight cast asides him--or her--, a fizzled meteor?

VIII

Yet who

can drawn out resist those rows on rows

even if reiterative as Warhol serials?

Box grape-nuts, corn flakes, cheerios.

Or works wedged together, glossy cricket

cages in which their makers imperiously

hum away.

Already Beijing's swarms

are peddling furiously in a chain

of outdoor shops

Or other they join

the throngs lined up around the block

before McDonald's in Tiananmen Square.

Hook in to sterio, computer walkman,

they brow Mao, dumbstruck on his last-week-featured

billboard.

IX

One noon

a young man, parched from hunting,

satisfied by the agency of nothing he had bagged,

stumbl upon a pool.

He, stooping

to drink, it winked back at him.

Bedazzled, cornered by means of his quarry,