We listen. We listen as if musical crabs are tracing a
giant sine wave across the dark mud flats.
We watch it as if a rotted rowboat, its oars like two hands
at prayer, is signaling a gesture
of permanence towards the sky. The grass
has turned from gray to blue to green.
The tide washes in. A bell is rung.
It’s as if the merry-go-round has turned it’s calliope on.
What Lao-tse has said is true.
The earth is a bellows. Use it.
The grasslands bellow and glow.

For your eyes’ glint, green is not of land, but of
Anselm’s famous assumption that greatness
resides in existence—like salt water in the sea, say,
or fantasy’s strange struggle with what is,
after all, simply a child at the edge of the ocean.

Idle eyes can be like a crown
you wear to mock the idylls of a king.
They can be a story of a wedded existence—
its laurels, its pride—here on this island, where we
can be as a bride saying her nuptial vows.

Or they can reveal only the darkest of shadows,
that which there is  none greater than, more like
a crowded movie theatre than an empty cave
and when its monuments are an illusion…
why, we should not be able to see at all.

That which there is none greater than—
like the breaking crests of the waves forever,
some from the setting sun, some from his rising,
and some from the place of his midday beams,
and some from the northern mountains of night…*

…must necessarily exist. And so
the swell of water becomes a rising of the evening air.
Poetry resides in its existence.
My name is Anselm.
Child, please find me my chair.

He has The Stones of Venice to read, he has his umbrella in case of a sudden downpour, and he has his spyglasses, a neat pair that folds up and fits comfortably in a side pocket. In his novel, Marcel rather forgets to mention how often he kept a pair of opera glasses on his person; how often he used them, peeking across the low hills at lovers in the woods, spying on strangers and casual friends, intimate friends and at times his own lovers. You learn to forgive the great artist his little peccadilloes…and he would tell you he was studying the landscape, the birds, the wind in the willows,  that sort of thing…but Marcel had a bit of the voyeur in him, even at an early age.

In Search of Lost Time tells the incident this way. Marcel has walked out to Montjouvain, the house which was once owned by M. Vinteuil and is now occupied by his daughter, Mademoiselle Vinteuil. M. Vinteuil had recently passed away and his daughter is in deep mourning. Marcel portrays himself as nonchalant about visiting the area: he was fond of the reflections in the small pond next to the house; it was hot; he finds a shady spot on the hill above the house…oh, just with a view into the sitting room window, that’s all…and falls into a deep sleep. No one is around; the countryside is sepulchral.

Thus for Marcel the world is a kind of bedroom; he awakes in time to see Mlle. Vinteuil (insofar as he recognized her) a mere inches away, though in fact in the privacy of her own home, dressed in deep mourning. We had not gone to see her, my mother had not wanted to because of a virtue of hers which alone limited the effects of her goodness; her sense of decency; but she pitied her deeply.

He awakes into a preternatural world of slippery pronouns and antecedents: the world inside the window is open to his consciousness. Mlle. Vinteuil’s friend returns; the scene that follows is cinematic and suffused with a weird intuitive omniscience—for not only does Marcel see too much, he knows too much. We enter a labyrinth.

Imagine a film. It would stage the scene as if for an old Charlie Chaplin silent, not really black-and-white, but tinted, not really silent, but orchestrated: Marcel is peering through his opera glasses, hidden in the pine trees. Fade and cut to an old-fashioned, Victorian interior. There is too much furniture for such a small space. A young woman is pacing about, fussing with a picture. An older woman comes into the room; they embrace in silence; the young woman breaks free, moving to the window. The camera freezes, holds our attention: she is about to close our access to this world.

Subtitle: “No, leave them open, I’m hot.”

As if their steps are choreographed, they move around the room, circling each other. The camera circles the circling women, coming closer as they move together. They embrace again. The older woman kisses Mlle. Vinteuil on the neck; she opens a button. The camera very close here; the two women are fragile, sensual, sexual—just for a brief moment.  Mlle. Vinteuil breaks free, but falls back on the couch; in a semi-predatory way the older woman hovers over the supine figure.

Subtitle: “Oh that picture of my father is looking at us.”

This said softly by Mlle. Vinteuil as the two women and the camera focus on an old M. Vinteuil, shabby and sorrowful. The camera blurs on the picture and clears again on Marcel—who is in fact the person doing the looking. Marcel is deep in thought, but what are those thoughts?

Out of an instinctive generosity and involuntary courtesy she did not speak the premeditated words that she had felt were indispensible to the full realization of her desire. And time and again, deep inside her, a timid and supplicant virgin entreated and forced back a rough and swaggering brawler.

Her scrupulous and sensitive heart did not know what words ought to come to her spontaneously to suit the scene that her senses demanded. She faced far away from her true moral nature as she could to find a language that would fit the depraved girl she wanted to be, but the words she thought that girl would have uttered sincerely seemed false on her own lips.

Now choose:

Marcel is asleep and has dreamt these thoughts he attributes to Mlle. Vinteuil.

Marcel, deeply homosexual himself, is able to enter imaginatively into the situation of Mlle Vinteuil, articulating thoughts she doesn’t quite know she has.

Marcel is an imaginative boy; he’s projecting things that aren’t really there.

Marcel is making reasonable inferences based on the behavior of Mlle. Vinteuil.

There is another realm: the realm of the ‘mind’, the realm of ‘the spirits’, the realm of Geist. Marcel is in touch with it.

The camera watches as Marcel falls back into a sound sleep, a young girl in his arms. He chooses Geist.

How I do love you,
Little Betty Bo Peep.
How I do care about
your lovely, lonely sheep.
And you too Miss Muffett,
that such a king should play bo-peep,
and go to fools
while grapes hang frozen on
your vines. I might
have explained the clouds to you.
I might have found the great breath.
Do you see this?
Look on her: look, her lips.
St. Lucy’s gown forever fits.

If Polyhymnia could be like the sleigh
we got for last year’s Christmas day,
not so  hot for winter’s snow,  but good once spring’s
trapeze and high wire act started up…

If Polyhymnia could be a spider moved
up from creation’s mold to sewing skirts
for dandelions… Polyhymnia, who likes shedding gowns
for scales, who never sings, who never clowns,

who never tempts the winter’s night with a serenade—
Polyhymnia, disinterested, disinterred, delayed.

If Polyhymnia, then nothing is transitory,
just the vast ebbing out of what always flows away.

As Polyhymnia is, there is no sentence here,
just the quiet susurration in her lips.       

Of Polyhymnia, her stone lips breathe silence,
for espousal has always been a poem to awake to.

For ancient, aimless, almost airless Polyhymnia,
the courtier of our language,

the world is made up for us. Always.