Benign Neglect

Benign Neglect

I’ve gone and washed another paper

notebook, look will you, after swearing I’d never

do that again, that I’d check every

pocket, unbutton them if I had to,

or unzip.  But there it was, the small burp

of a sound it made after the drum was

quiet, all spun, and now under my thumb.

Maybe they (you know, the folks

in my notebook) are used

to me by now falling down in this kind

of drunk in a perfectly clean hallway

like I do with nothing much to show for it, a

wrinkle or two and a library card and the pages

mostly silent like thoughts stuck under the shell

and albumen sit blue and abandoned

when their robin mother or swallow

who knows which flies off when the cat

or when the hawk or when the owl...

The last notebook I’d left

to dry stupid me on top of a rolled up print,

a cheap Wyeth rerun of a girl in a bed

a poster I’d bought some fifteen years ago--it’s called Chambered

Nautilus and the girl sits looking out her

bedroom window.  It’s breezy but the window’s

closed so maybe there’s another window, you know,

at the foot of the bed, out of the frame,

and there’s a basket at her elbow and her knee’s

propped, her arms holding it up.  Innocuous,

almost discarded, the nautilus’s as absent as the second

window.  We’re supposed to wonder, maybe,

what the girl’s got on her mind (I’ve since been told

she’s his dying mother-in-law, so I guess we know)

(but imagine not knowing that, imagine how far

you can get not knowing precisely that) or what’s in

the wicker basket, why it’s cool enough for flannel

but too warm for that second blanket hanging

loose at the end of the bed, wool I suppose, or
maybe not, but in old houses it’s worth this, 

this benign intrusion. 

I like thinking for a while my wet notebook dried

quiet as lacquer, wanted for nothing while the pages, bloody

octopus ink blue, surfed their own merit, released now

and seeping, or sleeping, or, like the nautilus shell, quietly

hollowed out, not a prop so much as part

of the entire picture now, it’s meat long gone

and Wyeth too, buried on that point in Cushing,

far away from living

nautiluses.  What’s this got to do with my notebooks,

the first one, dry now and cracked at the jaw a forever grin

or leer (it depends on me I suppose) or the newer one still so

soaked I don’t want to open it, let it come to terms

with being soaked and spun bumping in the drum

with the day’s (yesterday’s) grit and blood?  Nothing

but this, sitting with another poet (her name's Jane) who says in her
flowering vetch:

                Each of the tragedies can be read

                as the tale of a single ripening self...

                To have stopped by the fig and eaten was not an error, then,

                but the reason for going.*

Jane Hirshfield