CHANTS OF A LIFETIME : My My the Lines Don't Lie

51. CHANTS OF A LIFETIME:

1. MY MY THE LINES DON’T LIE-
I can’t walk a straight line although I’m learning I can’t speak a straight speech although I’m training I can’t understand a plumb nickel plug-ugly thing about circumstance and all the rest although every minute I go on I’m trying - reading Ann Sexton’s Poems of Love and Jingle Bell Jammies whenever they show I’m standing on a high hill at the apple orchard underneath a stormy sky black with lightning flashing but no rain to come or even in sight just the petrified darkness of the windy current that blows between ancient hills dotted with timbered houses and broken barns water-streams and golden icicle hedges swarming o’er the grass and the old old man who just sits there in his lawnside chair like some Adirondack God just a’looking out and he never says a word while I read and walk and sit about to read some more and WHATEVER I FIND I give back to him : "yet the Walsingham brothers are listening too and whatever it seems they can learn or at least understand they take with them and one way or another it’s their own cross to bear sluggards that they both are with two fathers in prison and a mother dead of poison potion somehow some kind of distillation no one ever know’d and anyway they both never was much good and ‘not being much good’ I guess is MOST CERTAINLY the opposite of good which is in the way I meant it you see – and you well what do you see yourself as anyway POET MAUDITE ? Ur Bad Boy Sir Egg ? with tales of sordid habits and defiant ‘epater les bourgeois’ gestures swirling around you brutish little bandit making yourself at home in the murkiest parts of the human mind AH WHAT! so you say I’ve heard ‘morality is a weakness of the brain’ AH WHAT! wouldn’t you just rather take up arms and fight the awful A-rabs anyway ? you mouth of darkness you" he finally says all that – it seems – to me while spitting his personal froth of tobacco juice down a certainly stained bib of overhauls and khaki JUST LIKE THAT and I’m certainly surprised and all EVEN QUITE GLAD to see him talk like this for it’s been so long and most of the time he just sits there as if forgetting but now it’s all rushing out of him at double-warp life speed the old guy’s making up for lost time and taking it out on me "cold and raw the north winds blow bleak in the morning early all the hills are covered with snow and winter’s now come fairly and the room is full of shadow I vaguely hear two children whispering sadly softly as heavy with sleep their heads are bowed beneath the long white curtain that trembles and rises together as one and these are the little ones the two I remember maybe me and my brother and give me a house at the side of the road and I’ll be a friend to all and other…" he’s (I notice) nodded off no worse for wear perhaps just tired and I bet he’s a’dreamin’ of his own drunken boat taking part in some distant and marathon float YET I LOOK ONWARD and forward ahead to see what some future betokens (or maybe I figure he’s really gone dead or maybe I’m really just hopin’) - and two days later I’m back in my cell in the little old jailhouse in some Hoboken or some other place where the harbor hasn’t been taken over by wild careening ferryboats filled with sportsmen and fishers of the deep running home to eat and where lines of children ribbed with sore eyes mean nothing more than great wild sessions of glee-club restorations and swimming-pool antics and the tall sheriff comes back to me and asks why I’m so belligerent and why I willingly work for the enemy and if I ‘ain’t still a Christian and God-fearing man like I shoulda’ stayed’ and if I’d rather remain an intellectual anarchist throwing daggers at the heart of the pope and his mother and I just hold out my hand and nod back as if I knew in a way what he was trying to say and instead I start telling him again about the old guy in the hills sitting on that chair and suddenly talking to me a blue streak but he doesn’t believe me that sheriff don’t - being so plain and poorly-spoken as to give himself away right off as some career lawman with a streak of luck and nothing more and running around as he was with badge #777 all to himself and if that was supposed to mean anything to me it didn’t and could he spare – I asked – "could he spare me some denatured alcohol?" and he said "nope just got instead some disarmored vehicle for you to ride in" and that’s the way things went which is for sure why I’d much rather had been right then in some classroom on the edge of town sitting down with some Nabakov frown or whatever came past the corner but instead I’m back at the apple orchard farmhand oasis where the two girls from the hilltop look down and the storm still rages and the sky still sets up dark and furious and she says "we’ve got nothing right now and we’re not really open again until next September 3rd when the apples are in and we’d welcome you back then" and I realize it’s apple-orchard time again every September and it’s their big break for the season to re-open when all the apples are ready - which orchard I see on yonder hillside some thirty acres of nothing but fat heavy trees doused plumb with nearly finished apples - and come ripe and fill bushels and baskets and are sauced and spiced and toasted in pastries for sale and the lowland folk from all around come crawling up to pay their money for the apples the apple paradise ORCHARD IN BLOOM and it’s probably just like some olden-days festival in every farm-town after farm-town with people and wagons and pumpkins and apples and all the fall season stuff piled up as high as it all can go and MY MY THE LINES DON’T LIE the cars are lined up for miles high and that old man in his wooden chair I’D BET just sits there looking out and reciting and telling peoples’ fortunes whether they’d asked or not and as daft as he is or as daft as he may be he’s never interfered with anything crucial and maybe that’s why THAT’S WHY people love him so "gentle old man so funny sometimes can’t remember a thing correctly but goes on all the time if he once gets started there’s no shutting him off but I really think he’s around the bend now these last seven or eight months have made a real difference but hey ! we just still call him Dad and talk back to him when and as we can but we keep him away from cars and we keep him away from money - (‘cause he’s toasted like an apple in honey)."