PIRANESI’S KEYHOLE

PIRANESI’S KEYHOLE

PIRANESI’S KEYHOLE

I think they may be adequate for now,
With summer finally in full swing
As imperceptibly the days begin to shrink.
Each spring I wonder what I'll find
When I return to them again—this year it was a war
That wasn't actually a war, a lie made visible—
And how blind intuitions might be built up into facts
That someone else might think to feel and read.
The signs are everywhere, implicit in the sky,
The trees, the houses on the street I walk along to work
(The walking is the work), when something that I see
Or half-remember gets repeated from inside,
Finds its measure, and in settling inward settles into place.
They're how I wander through a day, wondering at its
Spaciousness, finding in its anonymity
These traces of my name, in its impersonality
These ways to see myself—hearing in the syllables of the
Leaves the lyrics of a song; seeing in the clouds
A human face, another lie made visible.

Word by word and war by war—
What makes one possible sustains the other too:
The urge to change, the power to deceive,
To fabricate a version of the world
Not as it is, but as someone imagines it to be.
The aim is not to say what happened
But to forge a monument by force, deploying
All the subtlety and weapons of the will,
And leaving something broken in its wake: the simple truth
As it appeared in school each day; the simple self
That wrote it down, before it all became a wilderness
Where what's still left of them still wander,
Looking for each other, through a mutual memory
Of something irrecoverable beneath these
Shifting sands of spoken and unspoken words.
I used to think there was a different way,
A less insistent one, accepting what it finds
Without revising it, without the specious clarity
And authority of art, and its pervasive
Atmosphere of will. But that turned out to be a style too,
A sweeter one perhaps, yet just as artificial in the end.
The point is general, not confined to art: to make
Is to destroy; to act is to replace what would have been
With something signed, that bears a name. When I was a boy
I thought a life just happened, or was there to find.
Wars were aberrations. Poems were another generation's.
I didn't realize you made it up, you made them up,
And that the self was not an object but an act,
A sequence of decisions bound together by a noun
But with the feel of a fact. I wonder where that leaves me—
Hanging on a whim, on what I write? I hope not.
What the urge to dominate the world, the place, the page
Eventually becomes is just a human figure
On a summer afternoon, smiling at what happens,
Anxious for the future and the slope of age.
I think I'm done for now. It remains to save the file,
Close the notebook, and let evening come.