Falling Water

I drove to Oak Park, took two tours,

And looked at some of the houses.

I took the long way back along the lake.

The place that I came home to—a cavernous

Apartment on the East Side of Milwaukee—

Seems basically a part of that tradition,

With the same admixture of expansion and restraint:

The space takes off, yet leaves behind a nagging

Feeling of confinement, with the disconcerting sense

That while the superficial conflicts got resolved,

The underlying tensions brought to equilibrium,

It isn’t yet a place in which I feel that I can live.

Imagine someone reading. Contemplate a man

Oblivious to his settings, and then a distant person

Standing in an ordinary room, hemmed in by limitations,

Yet possessed by the illusion of an individual life

That blooms within its own mysterious enclosure,

In a solitary space in which the soul can breathe

And where the heart can stay—not by discovering it,

But by creating it, by giving it a self-sustaining

Atmosphere of depth, both in the architecture,

And in the unconstructed life that it contains.

In a late and very brief remark, Freud speculates

That space is the projection of a “psychic apparatus”

Which remains almost entirely oblivious to itself;

And Wright extols “that primitive sense of shelter”

Which can turn a house into a refuge from despair.

I wish that time could bring the future back again

And let me see things as they used to seem to me

Before I found myself alone, in an emancipated state—

Alone and free and filled with cares about tomorrow.

There used to be a logic in the way time passed

That made it flow directly towards an underlying space

Where all the minor, individual lives converged.

The moments borrowed their perceptions from the past

And bathed the future in a soft, familiar light

I remembered from home, and which has faded.

And the voices get supplanted by the rain,

The nights seem colder, and the angel in the mind

That used to sing to me beneath the wide suburban sky

Turns into dreamwork and dissolves into the air,

While in its place a kind of monument appears,

Magnificent in isolation, compromised by proximity

And standing in a small and singular expanse—

As though the years had been a pretext for reflection,

And my life had been a phase of disenchantment—

As the faces that I cherished gradually withdraw,

The reassuring settings slowly melt away,

And what remains is just a sense of getting older.

In a variation of the parable, the pure of heart

Descend into a kingdom that they never wanted

And refused to see. The homely notions of the good,

The quaint ideas of perfection swept away like

Adolescent fictions as the real forms of life

Deteriorate with manically increasing speed,

The kind man wakes into a quiet dream of shelter,

And the serenity it brings—not in reflection,

But in the paralyzing fear of being mistaken,

Of losing everything, of acquiescing in the

Obvious approach (the house shaped like a box;

The life that can’t accommodate another’s)—

As the heart shrinks down to tiny, local things.

Why can’t the more expansive ecstasies come true?

I met you more than thirty years ago, in 1958,

In Mrs. Wolford’s eighth grade history class.

All moments weigh the same, and matter equally;

Yet those that time brings back create the fables

Of a happy or unsatisfying life, of minutes

Passing on the way to either peace or disappointment—

Like a paper calendar on which it’s always autumn

And we’re back in school again; or a hazy afternoon

Near the beginning of October, with the World Series

Playing quietly on the radio, and the windows open,

And the California sunlight filling up the room.

When I survey the mural stretched across the years

—Across my heart—I notice mostly small, neglected

Parts of no importance to the whole design, but which,

In their obscurity, seem more permanent and real.

I see the desks and auditorium, suffused with

Yellow light connoting earnestness and hope that

Still remains there, in a space pervaded by a

Soft and supple ache too deep to contemplate—

As though the future weren’t real, and the present

Were amorphous, with nothing to hold on to,

And the past were there forever. And the art

That time inflicts upon its subjects can’t

Eradicate the lines sketched out in childhood,

Which harden into shapes as it recedes.

I wish I knew a way of looking at the world

That didn’t find it wanting, or of looking at my

Life that didn’t always see a half-completed

Structure made of years and filled with images

And gestures emblematic of the past, like Gatsby’s

Light, or Proust’s imbalance on the stones.

I wish there were a place where I could stay

And leave the world alone—an enormous stadium

Where I could wander back and forth across a field

Replete with all the incidents and small details

That gave the days their textures, that bound the

Minutes into something solid, and that linked them

All together in a way that used to seem eternal.

We used to go to dances in my family’s ancient

Cadillac, which blew up late one summer evening

Climbing up the hill outside Del Mar. And later

I can see us steaming off the cover of the Beatles’

Baby-butcher album at your house in Mission Bay;

And three years later listening to the Velvet

Underground performing in a roller skating rink.

Years aren’t texts, or anything like texts;

And yet I often think of 1968 that way, as though

That single year contained the rhythms of the rest,

As what began in hope and eagerness concluded in

Intractable confusion, as the wedding turned into a

Puzzling fiasco over poor John Godfrey’s hair.

The parts were real, and yet the dense and living

Whole they once composed seems broken now, its

Voice reduced to disembodied terms that speak to me

More distantly each day, until the tangled years

Are finally drained of feeling, and collapse into a

Sequence of the places where we lived: your parents’

House in Kensington, and mine above the canyon:

Then the flat by Sears in Cambridge, where we

Moved when we got married, and the third floor

Of the house on Francis Avenue, near Harvard Square;

The big apartment in Milwaukee where we lived the

Year that John was born, and last of all the

House in Whitefish Bay, where you live now

And all those years came inexplicably undone

In mid-July. The sequence ended late last year.

Suppose we use a lifetime as a measure of the world

As it exists for one. Then half of mine has ended,

While the fragment which has recently come to be

Contains no vantage point from which to see it whole.

I think that people are the sum of their illusions,

That the cares that make them difficult to see

Are eased by distance, with their errors blending

In an intricate harmony, their truths abiding

In a subtle “spark” or psyche (each incomparable,

Yet each the same as all the others) and their

Disparate careers all joined together in a tangled

Moral vision whose intense, meandering design

Seems lightened by a pure simplicity of feeling,

As in grief, or in the pathos of a life

Cut off by loneliness, indifference or hate,

Because the most important thing is human happiness—

Not in the sense of private satisfactions, but of

Lives that realize themselves in ordinary terms

And with the quiet inconsistencies that make them real.

The whole transcends its tensions, like the intimate

Reflections on the day that came at evening, whose

Significance was usually overlooked, or misunderstood,

Because the facts were almost always unexceptional.

Two years ago we took our son to Paris. Last night

I picked him up and took him to a Lou Reed show,

And then took him home. I look at all the houses as I

Walk down Hackett Avenue to work. I teach my classes,

Visit friends, cook introspective meals for myself,

Yet in the end the minutes don’t add up. What’s lost

Is the perception of the world as something good

And held in common; as a place to be perfected

In the kinds of everyday divisions and encounters

That endowed it with integrity and structure,

And that merged its private moments with the past.

What broke it into pieces? What transformed the

Flaws that gave it feeling into objects of a deep and

Smoldering resentment—like coming home too early,

Or walking too far ahead of you on the rue Jacob?

I wish that life could be a window on the sun,

Instead of just this porch where I can stand and

Contemplate the wires that lace the parking lot

And feel it moving towards some unknown resolution.

The Guggenheim Museum just reopened. Tonight I

Watched a segment of the news on PBS—narrated by a

Woman we met years ago at Bob’s—that showed how

Most of Wright’s interior had been restored,

And how the ramp ascends in spirals towards the sky.

I like the houses better—they flow in all directions,

Merging with the scenery and embodying a milder,

More domestic notion of perfection, on a human scale

That doesn’t overwhelm the life that it encloses.

Isn’t there a way to feel at home within the

Confines of this bland, accommodating structure

Made of souvenirs and emblems, like the hammock

Hanging in the backyard of an undistinguished

Prairie School house in Whitefish Bay—the lineal,

Reduced descendant of the “Flameproof” Wright house

Just a block or two away from where I live now?

I usually walk along the street on Sunday,

Musing on how beautiful it seems, how aspects of it

Recapitulate the Oak Park house and studio, with

Open spaces buried in a labyrinthine interior,

And with the entrance half-concealed on the side—

A characteristic feature of his plans that made it

Difficult to find, although the hope was that in

Trying to get inside, the visitor’s eye would come to

Linger over subtleties he might have failed to see—

In much the way that in the course of getting older,

And trying to reconstruct the paths that led me here,

I found myself pulled backwards through these old,

Uncertain passages, distracted by the details,

And meeting only barriers to understanding why the

Years unfolded as they did, and why my life

Turned out the way it has—like his signature

“Pathway of Discovery,” with each diversion

Adding to the integrity of the whole.

There is this sweep life has that makes the

Accidents of time and place seem small.

Everything alters, and the personal concerns

That love could hold together for a little while

Decay, and then the world seems strange again,

And meaningless and free. I miss the primitive

Confusions, and the secret way things came to me

Each evening, and the pain. I still wonder

Where the tears went, standing in my room each day

And quietly inhabiting a calm, suspended state

Enveloped by the emptiness that scares and thrills me,

With the background noise cascading out of nothing

Like a song that makes the days go by, a song

Incorporating everything—not into what it says,

But simply in the way it touches me, a single

Image of dispersal, the inexhaustible perception

Of contingency and transience and isolation.

It brings them back to me. I have the inwardness

I think I must have wanted, and the quietude,

The solitary temper, and this space where I can

Linger with the silence curling all around me

Like the sound of pure passage, waiting here

Surrounded by the furniture, the books and lists

And all these other emblems of the floating world,

The prints of raindrops that begin as mist, that fall

Discreetly through the atmosphere, and disappear.

And then I feel them in the air, in a reserved,

More earthly music filled with voices reassembling

In a wellspring of remembrance, talking to me again,

And finding shelter in the same evasive movements

I can feel in my own life, cloaked in a quiet

Dignity that keeps away the dread of getting old,

And fading out of other people’s consciousness,

And dying –with its deepest insecurities and fears

Concealed by their own protective colorations,

As the mind secretes its shell and calls it home.

It has the texture of an uncreated substance,

Hovering between the settings it had come to love

And some unformulated state I can’t imagine—

Waiting for the telephone to ring, obsessed with

Ways to occupy these wide, unstructured hours,

And playing records by myself, and waking up alone.

All things are disparate, yet subject to the same

Intense, eradicating wills of time and personality,

Like waves demolishing the walls love seemed to build

Between our lives and emptiness, the certainty they

Seemed to have just two or three short years ago,

Before the anger spread its poison over everything.

I think about the way our visions locked together

In a nightmare play of nervousness and language,

Living day to day inside the concentrated

Force of that relentless argument, whose words

Swept over us in formless torrents of anxiety, two

People clinging to their versions of their lives

Almost like children—living out each other’s

Intermittent fantasies, that fed upon themselves

As though infected by some vile, concentrated hatred;

Who then woke up and planned that evening’s dinner.

It’s all memories now, and distance. Miles away

The cat is sleeping on the driveway, John’s in school,

And sunlight filters through a curtain in the kitchen.

Nothing really changes—the external world intrudes

And then withdraws, and then becomes continuous again.

I went downtown today and got a lamp with pendant

Lanterns made of opalescent art glass—part, I guess,

Of what this morning’s paper called the “Wright craze.”

I like the easy way the days go by, the parts of aging

That have come to seem familiar, and the uneventful

Calm that seems to settle on the house at night.

Each morning brings the mirror’s reassuring face,

As though the years had left the same enduring person

Simplified and changed—no longer vaguely desperate,

No longer torn, yet still impatient with himself

And still restless; but drained of intricacy and rage,

Like a mild paradox—uninteresting in its own right,

Yet existing for the sake of something stranger.

Now and then our life comes over me, in brief,

Involuntary glimpses of that world that blossom

Unexpectedly, in fleeting moments of regret

That come before the ache, the pang that gathers

Sharply, like an indrawn breath—a strange and

Thoughtful kind of pain, as though a steel

Band had somehow snapped inside my heart.

I don’t know. But what I do know is that

None of it is ever going to come to me again.

Why did I think a person only distantly like me

Might finally represent my life? What aspects

Of my attitudes, my cast of mind, my inconclusive

Way of tossing questions at the world had I

Supposed might realize another person’s fantasies

And turn her into someone else—who gradually became

A separate part of me, and argued with the very

Words I would have used, and looked at me through

Eyes I’d looked at as though gazing at myself?

I guess we only realize ourselves in dreams,

Or in these self-reflexive reveries sustaining

All the charms that contemplation holds—until the

Long enchantment of the soul with what it sees

Is lifted, and it startles at a space alight with

Objects of its infantile gaze, like people in a mall.

I saw her just the other day. I felt a kind of

Comfort at her face, one tinctured with bemusement

At the strange and guarded person she’d become—

Attractive, vaguely friendly, brisk (too brisk),

But no one I could think might represent my life.

Why did I even try to see myself in what’s outside?

The strangeness pushes it away, propels the vision

Back upon itself, into these regions filled with

Shapes that I can wander through and never see,

As though their image were inherently unreal.

The houses on a street, the quiet backyard shade,

The room restored to life with bric-a-brac—

I started by revisiting these things, then slowly

Reconceiving them as forms of loss made visible

That balanced sympathy and space inside an

Abstract edifice combining reaches of the past

With all these speculations, all this artful

Preening of the heart. I sit here at my desk,

Perplexed and puzzled, teasing out a tangled

Skein of years we wove together, and trying to

Combine the fragments of those years into a poem.

Who cares if life—if someone’s actual life—is

Finally insignificant and small? There’s still a

Splendor in the way it flowers once and fades

And leaves a carapace behind. There isn’t time to

Linger over why it happened, or attempt to make its

Mystery come to life again and last, like someone

Still embracing the confused perceptions of himself

Embedded in the past, as though eternity lay there—

For heaven’s a delusion, and eternity is in the details,

And this tiny, insubstantial life is all there is.

—And that would be enough, but for the reoccurring

Dreams I often have of you. Sometimes at night

The banished unrealities return, as though a room

Suffused with light and poetry took shape around me.

Pictures line the walls. It’s early summer.

Somewhere in Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel,

Reflecting on his years with “Albertine”—with X—

Suggests that love is just a consciousness of distance,

Of the separation of two lives in time and space.

I think the same estrangement’s mirrored in each life,

In how it seems both adequate and incomplete—part

Day-to-day existence, part imaginary construct

Beckoning at night, and sighing through my dreams

Like some disconsolate chimera, or the subject

Of a lonely, terrifying sadness; or the isolation

Of a quiet winter evening, when the house feels empty,

And silence intervenes. But in the wonderful

Enclosure opening in my heart, I seem to recognize

Our voices lilting in the yard, inflected by the

Rhythms of a song whose words are seamless

And whose lines are never-ending. I can almost

See the contours of your face, and sense the

Presence of the trees, and reimagine all of us

Together in a deep, abiding happiness, as if the

Three of us inhabited a fragile, made-up world

That seemed to be so permanent, so real.

I have this fantasy: It’s early in the evening.

You and I are sitting in the backyard, talking.

Friends arrive, then drinks and dinner, conversation…

The lovely summer twilight lasts forever…

What’s the use?

What purpose do these speculations serve? What

Mild enchantments do these meditations leave?

They’re just the murmurs of an age, of middle age,

That help to pass the time that they retrieve

Before subsiding, leaving everything unchanged.

Each of us at times has felt the future fade,

Or seen the compass of his life diminished,

Or realized some tangible illusion was unreal.

Driving down to Evanston last week, I suddenly

Remembered driving down that road eight years ago,

So caught up in some story I’d just finished

That I’d missed the way the countryside was changing—

How in place of trees there now were office towers

And theme parks, parts of a confusingly panoply of

Barns and discount malls transfiguring a landscape

Filled with high, receding clouds and rows of flimsy

Houses in what used to be a field. I thought of

Other people’s lives, and how impossible it seemed

To grasp them on the model of my own—as little

Mirrors of infinity—or sense their forms of

Happiness, or in their minor personal upheavals

Feel the sweep of time reduced to human scale

And see its abstract argument made visible.

I thought of overarching dreams of plenitude—

How life lacks shape until it’s given one by love,

And how each soul is both a kingdom in itself

And part of some incorporating whole that

Feels and has a face and lets it live forever.

All of these seemed true, and cancelled one another,

Leaving just the feeling of an unseen presence

Tracing out the contours of a world erased,

Like music tracing out the contours of the mind—

For life has the form of a winding curve in space

And in its wake the human figure disappears.

Look at our surroundings—where a previous age

Could visualize a landscape we see borders,

Yet I think the underlying vision is the same:

A person positing a world that he can see

And can’t contain, and vexed by other people.

Everything is possible; some of it seemed real

Or nearly real, yet in the end it spoke to me alone,

In phrases echoing the isolation of a meager

Ledge above a waterfall, or rolling across a vast,

Expanding plain on which there’s always room,

But only room for one. It starts and ends

Inside an ordinary room, while in the interim

Brimming with illusions, filled with commonplace

Delights that make the days go by, with simple

Arguments and fears, and with the nervous

Inkling of some vague, utopian conceit

Transforming both the landscape and our lives,

Until we look around and find ourselves at home,

But in a wholly different world. And even those

Catastrophes that seemed to alter everything

Seem fleeting, grounded in a natural order

All of us are subject to, and ought to celebrate.

—Yet why? That things are temporary doesn’t

Render them unreal, unworthy of regretting.

It’s not as though the past had never happened:

All those years were real, and their loss was real,

And it is sad—I don’t know what else to call it.

I’m glad that both of us seem happy. Yet what

Troubles me is just the way what used to be a world

Turned out, in retrospect, to be a state of mind,

And no more tangible than that. And now it’s gone,

And in its place I find the image of a process

Of inexorable decay, or of some great unraveling

That drags the houses forward into emptiness

And backwards into pictures of the intervening days

Love pieced together out of nothing. And I’m

Certain that this austere vision finally is true,

And yet it strikes me as too meager to believe.

It comes from much too high above the world

And seems to me too hopeless, too extreme—

But then I found myself one winter afternoon

Remembering a quiet morning in a classroom

And inventing everything again, in ordinary

Terms that seemed to comprehend a childish

Dream of love, and then the loss of love,

And all the intricate years between.

Source: North Point North: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2002)