Pisa 13
Really begin. Hold nothing back. (But think about that man in
the cage.)
And take all the drugs. Worry about elegance. (But remember: Although
he can barely see the mountains, the sky's everywhere.)
My problem is that I can't find my way out of New England. I keep nodding
off. But it 's summer, so I've got plenty.
Enough to share. Enough thirst for everyone. All day we smoke PCP and
play Frisbee in meadows of green, green grass.
Bodies litter the stream-banks. (But even so, he's my emblem, my unfathomable
symbol.) I try driving south, and then west, but I always find myself
at Plymouth, near the unremarkable shore, not far from the tacky commercial
booths.
You go on your nerve, the man said, but going isn't the problem.
Where you wind up is the problem. And along the way, you must keep everyone
interested.
So I sit in a small room with one window, a computer, and a bookshelf.
I write whatever they tell me. I can feel my heart pounding in my chest.
I'm sure my life is being wasted. I don't know what comes next, maybe
nothing. You think it's easy, you try building an aesthetic on nothing.
Start at Plymouth, move in any direction, and you're back where you
started. It's like a bad dream. (You find plenty of seafood restaurants,
but what you long for is compression, elegance, a sense of movement.)
So I just read all the time, and some of the stuff is pretty strange,
I'll tell you. (The man in the cage, for example.) (- He thinks, I'll
simply walk out of here, and he does, but every fourth step, there are
the bars, so he turns back around, four more steps, bars again.
He can't decide whether they'll shoot him or hang him. He's trying
to do something important. He's a little crazy.
When I feel that crazy, I take some pills. You can get them anywhere.
Any sober god-fearing man can find them anywhere.)
It takes great strength to live in a cage. And beauty itself is difficult.
It's such hard work to select the sentences that will become beautiful.
I lie in bed and think about it all the time. Brenda thinks about it,
too. Many of us think about it.
That's what we do. Not faced with imminent hanging, we fret. Often
we think the whole world is dying.
After all, everything smells burnt. I really don't want to do this
anymore. And half my life still to go.
My whole life still to go. Great sorrow, and storms bubbling up near
Abilene. Not a bad place to go, all in all, but going there resolves
nothing.
After all, we like resolution. We think it's always important to finish
what you start. But I started so long ago.
And I never knew what I was doing. Nothing, then fetus, then me. It
all happened so fast.
There just isn't time to grieve it all. There's just a cage set up
on some plains near the mountains. And important work to be done.
Perhaps this is all the height of self-indulgence. After all, none
of it is magazine verse. That's what he told me - none of this is magazine
verse.
It is finished in beauty. If the mind is shapely, the art will be
shapely. Tell that to the man in the cage.
Summer hovers like a big dumb bird. The task of thought is to remove
things one by one. The task of the ages is to remove things one by one.
When just enough is removed, the piece is complete. A series of amputations.
Beginning with Langland, moving forward.
by Joe Ahearn