by Lyn Hejinian
A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home
from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the
stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left, was purple — though
moments are no longer so colored. Somewhere, in the background, rooms share
a pattern of small roses. Pretty is as pretty does. In certain families, the meaning
of necessity is at one with the sentiment of pre-necessity. The better things
were gathered in a pen. The windows were narrowed by white gauze curtains
which were never loosened. Here I refer to irrelevance, that rigidity which never
intrudes. Hence, repetitions, free from all ambition. The shadow of the redwood
trees, she said, was oppressive. The plush must be worn away. On her walks she
stepped into people’s gardens to pinch off cuttings from their geraniums and
succulents. An occasional sunset is reflected on the windows. A little puddle is
overcast. If only you could touch, or, even, catch those gray great creatures. I was
afraid of my uncle with the wart on his nose, or of his jokes at our expense which
were beyond me, and I was shy of my aunt’s deafness who was his sister-inlaw
and who had years earlier fallen into the habit of nodding, agreeably. Wool
station. See lightning, wait for thunder. Quite mistakenly, as it happened. Long
time lines trail behind every idea, object, person, pet, vehicle, and event. The
afternoon happens, crowded and therefore endless. Thicker, she agreed. It was
a tic, she had the habit, and now she bobbed like my toy plastic bird on the edge
of its glass, dipping into and recoiling from the water. But a word is a bottomless
pit. It became magically pregnant and one day split open, giving birth to a stone
egg, about as big as a football. In May when the lizards emerge from the stones,
the stones turn gray, from green. When daylight moves, we delight in distance.
The waves rolled over our stomachs, like spring rain over an orchard slope.
Rubber bumpers on rubber cars. The resistance of sleeping to being asleep. In
every country is a word which attempts the sound of cats to match an inisolable
portrait in the clouds to a din in the air. But the constant noise is not an omen of
music to come. “Everything is a question of sleep,” says Cocteau, but he forgets
the shark, which does not. Anxiety is vigilant. Perhaps initially, even before
one can talk, restlessness is already conventional, establishing the incoherent
border which will later separate events from experience. Find a drawer that’s
not filled up. That we sleep plunges our work into the dark. The ball was lost in
a bank of myrtle. I was in a room with the particulars of which a later nostalgia
might be formed, an indulged childhood. They are sitting in wicker chairs, the
legs of which have sunk unevenly into the ground, so that each is sitting slightly
tilted and their postures make adjustment for that. The cows warm their own
barn. I look at them fast and it gives the illusion that they’re moving. An “oral
history” on paper. That morning this morning. I say it about the psyche because
it is not optional. The overtones are a denser shadow in the room characterized
by its habitual readiness, a form of charged waiting, a perpetual attendance,
of which I was thinking when I began the paragraph, “So much of childhood is
spent in a manner of waiting.”
- Share this Poem:
