John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

As well a lion as an ass)

Very well then,

let us go visit the insane.

We mount the stamped-out steps of the city bus

with humility, knowing our gall,

and more or less pure of heart as three old Jews

(a balding, middle-aged man and his two thin sons,

pedants in plastic spectacles, each one bearing,

timidly, his meaningless, cheap token).

A growl, a belch of gasoline,

and deathless Aphrodite stirs on her way,

descends to the city limits, drawn down not

in a chariot pulled by sparrows, grandiose gold

sinking aslant the burnt-out factory chimneys, the heavy air

trembling at the heart to the pulse of countless wingbeats,

but laboring stop by stop, as she always comes.

(Now in this season for me

there is no rest;

out of the lead-cold sky,

a Thracian north wind blowing,

dark and pitiless …)

In the hallway, a shuffle of attendants,

a lady reading a magazine, who is well

except in that at night there are Indians on her roof,

a minor irritation: it throws off her sewing.

(Let us beware of these innocent distractions.)

She comes in view,

the one to whom we throw our love

like coins into a pit. She will not see back.

The tall red-headed boy who looks like her

smiles kindly, old, sick-hearted before his time,

addresses her as “Mother.” The younger stares.

He knows where it’s at, reality:

Her face is modeling clay, her eyes are stones,

her nightgown hangs like dusk on her winter skin.

(Stones, too, can speak their secret names.

My lips are stricken to silence, underneath

my skin the tenuous flame suffuses;

nothing shows in front of my eyes, my ears are

muted in thunder.)

Und sie schwiegen weil die Scheidewände

weggenommen sind aus ihrem Sinn,

und die Stunden, da man sie verstände,

heben an und gehen hin.

All that is not for us. We keep

our vigil, heads bowed, waiting

for a sign that the trance is done,

knowing we may be wrong in waiting.

It may be, we know, that the tomb we watch

is empty, in which case we are fools.

But we are resigned. We do not ask

to be treated with dignity. There is no rest.

Some tale of an Irish saint …

And so at dusk he watched her in her garden,

touching her roses, hands more light than dew,

and where her fingers passed, the blooms would awaken

shimmering like grass the moon shines through.

the choice of the blooms she clipped and threw in the air,

and there they floated, weightless, at twelve feet,

and formed a crucifix. And he in fear

retreated from the place. He could not compete.

Well, so.

He no longer knew, then, where his sons were, or Kathleen. God’s holy fire had reduced, as it sometimes will, to a burning house. He’d come flying home as soon as he’d heard that she’d escaped, and he’d known from fifteen blocks away, by the glow in the sky, what it was he would find, though he’d fought belief until the image was there in front of him, past contradiction: the windows of his house were full of wheeling fire. It was not to save anyone that he went in; it was to die. But he was overcome too quickly, too close to the door — something exploded — and so they’d drawn him out, burning. He could not hunt them after that, imprisoned as he was in the hospital; but his brothers-in-law knew where they were, though they wouldn’t admit it. Every gesture gave them away. “You’re not well, old boy,” they said. He understood. Virtuous love. “All in good time,” they said. He understood.

It was not impossible that he was mad. He had earned it, if he was. It felt like the rage of a madman, at times. Kathleen’s three brothers stood around his bed like dangerous angels, one on the left side, one on the right, one leaning on his elbows at the foot, penning him in. His anger made the room crackle like burning boards, but the three brothers, deaf to the fire around them, went on setting out their words of consolation and counsel like spear-headed pikes of an iron fence. He lived by regulations. He must not think, worry, feel. Those were the rules. At certain times he must eat. He must not smoke.

“They’re not my rules,” he said. “Where are my sons?”

“Dead,” they told him at last.

He did not believe them. He knew well enough where his sons were. With the old man. The old man had tried from the beginning to shackle them. Not satisfied with having produced a psychotic daughter and three neurotic sons, he had to destroy his daughter’s sons as well. Except that he too worked for love, of course. Not virtuous but tyrannical. But love, however twisted. (Nothing passes belief when a god’s intention wills it.) So once old Paxton had tried to shackle Kathleen, but they had outwitted him, healthy love overwhelming sick, if only for the moment. They had eloped, and the old man’s rage could not touch them — howled around them, burnt up walls, melted the very steel of the furnace that held them; but they were serene, watched over by shadows from a seven-times-mightier deity. For the moment. While Kathleen held all the threads in hand the brothers were more loyal to her than to their father. They lied to him (timidly, mouths no doubt shaking), feebly and, in view of their feebleness, bravely blocking the old devil’s cruel pursuit. But the father had ruled for a long time, and for all her arrogance Kathleen, too, was weak. One by one she had allowed the threads to slip; their courage had collapsed, and now it was to him, Taggert Hodge, that they timidly lied, lips trembling. He must steal back his sons, as he had stolen them back before. And so he had bided his time, watching the lying brothers, listening to the crackle of their funeral fire around them, and had obeyed, for the moment, their laws.

Jadis, si je me souviens, bien, ma vie était un festin …

He had come to Batavia, and had looked, incredulous, at the graves of his sons. Around the slopes of the cemetery where the graves lay, flower-strewn, there was an iron fence, and beyond the fence a deafening sound of fire. He lay in the grass sobbing.

He saw (jadis, si je me souviens Ben) his brother Ben, who did not know him. It was not surprising, all in all. He was much changed. They passed without a word, Ben politely lowering his eyes as if it were an everyday affair to meet a man brought back from the dead, a face half-rotted in the grave. Ah, Ben! Once loved. Fat, gentle, confident. Ben.

Keep walking, former brother.

Go through the Lydian land, past the tomb of Alyattes,

the grave of Gyges and the pillar of Megastrys,

the monument of Atys, son of Alyattes,

big chief, and point your paunch against the sun’s setting.

Taggert had stood with his hands in his pockets, head bowed, staring at the sidewalk, trying to make out whether or not he still had it in him to love his second-eldest brother. Coming out of the cracks in the sidewalk around him he saw — or at any rate powerfully imagined he saw — fire.

“Then I have gone mad,” he said.

But it was not necessarily true. A memory too terrible to bear may fill the mind without unhinging it. He did not believe the fire, merely saw it. When he began to believe it, that would be something else.

His brother was out of sight now, and a blow of anguish came. He thought, standing with his hands in his pockets, his monstrous face drawn up in a squint, “I love him then. Good.” He raised his right hand to scratch at his beard and trudged back toward the center of town, winking to himself as he walked and saying to himself, over and over, “Good.” He understood that the winking, the muttering, would seem madness to an outsider. It made him smile. The flames of the sun licked down at him, and all the trees were parched. An illusion, he understood.