On Self-Isolation Due To Shyness

We can't all be polymaths. For some, this causes great, if not significant pain. For the early, pre-Platonic,
that is, un-condemned poets, this wasn't even an issue. The trees, the hulks of stone, the burgeoning beginnings
of cities, were so many irradiations of innocence. Just think of the names of the forms of quiet, the removal
of mouths, the poets. The pigeons that were once poets. Learned as wings when they're batting the air
as wildly as balance, and there's suddenly a slight, completely unsymbolic lifting, and the ones
no one can imagine
are free, above, and high again. In Lexington, Kentucky, if a traveler should ever stop there, there are
two addresses. The rest are hypothetical. And lovely--that much should be added. But secondary
nonetheless to two overlapping habits of pulse, artery, capillary to vein, to heart artery. One of them
was never known. Went by Guy. The other, Ralph Eugene, was for many years a next door
neighbor and
friend. Mind you, the face has been taken off to relay this. To tell this. To bridge the manner
difference
distance, relaying and telling. In the 1960's, there was probably a year, maybe even a summer
night,
overstuffed with conversational bourbon, someone with an opinion about Homer walking in, and wouldn't
you know, it was Homer. The blind were always making the wrong appointments, was the lesson. Guy and
Bonnie (divergence from biography, more than likely) were shocked to their very skin; but Ralph, and this
speaks miles to the mysticism of his eye, his left eye, the right a darker color, was already reaching for
his camera, when the old cooch began, almost against his will, like an epileptic cinched body and
kite,
reciting the roil of blood into craggy verse, mid-Cantos. Someone in that town that night was
joining in,
putting out his eyes. With an issue of Vanity Fair, rolled to a point. Pain clarifies the rain, was
what this
probably meant, the gush in epigram without regret. Cicadas. Heaven Hill. The pre-born
and now
halfway to cousin dead man's corner, imagining with zinnias under his nose
the two-way traffic between them.
When he was done, huffing, the old corpse sat down. Made himself "at home". After a wide fifteen minutes
of which, Guy, wanting to create silence, a silence of kind more significant, punned incredibly with balls
to spare: in the far provinces where you're at, old songster, you'll be chagrined to know
your name is
slang for struck projectiles sailed over a wall. The good news is the wall is a circle. Like a coliseum, which
was Rome. Which knew enough to thieve a thing or two from the culture that was just the
perfect
accident to grow you. A fungus of song, of incredible song, of mismanaged and much translated and what the
learned called narrative art. But you and I, brother--or should I call you son, you look so fresh against my
young--we're the shoes of bandits. And Ralph, though he's never read you, is a photograph
of exactly
how he feels, reading you. The pages in the future expand and happen at once, but look at
that, not
all at once. That fantasy slap, All, whatever happened to that. A panoramic attack against
the frightful
exactitude of death. Said again, death. Die, dead, dying. Conjugate and relent. [At this point,
Bonnie
was shuffling through stacks of paper on the porch. The neighbor's minah bird was cashing
slashes. Magnolia,
though blunt dark, was fact. Could be heard, leaves lizard-swift and leather, transfixed
to shift
where the breeze went. Cleaved, westwardly. Click, said the camera. Quoted by what was
and wasn't
air.] Rising from its caneback without cancer.