Untitled Poem, and: Seeing England

12 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW ROGER MITCHELL Does not seem like enough to have reached forty and be about to make a big wisdom with the mouth. Right now I want to know something. Not something about something but some thing, the lot, I want to know how many hairs grow on my head, exactly, or better yet, who had the most to eat yesterday, I want to know why BIC pens cost less in England, or if they do (enough of my brilliant guesses), I want to know what they're made of, down to the tiny ink-soaked ball, and where they get what it's made of, and for what wages, and what's left after the loggers or the drillers (or whoever they are) chop down the pink-veined forests of plastic (which is such a pretty image, it must be true—or beautiful), and what's left after the wages have done what they have to do. What is this world I live on top of? I want to know why I should have to want to know. It is not clear. Have I kept myself ignorant, studying for these twenty years? Have I not ever needed to know? What is the consequence of this, or die cause? The darkness is fine, but finally it is just dark. One moves so gracefully in it, or can, the stumbling is taken for honesty. Or, a new move. MITCHELL 13 SEEING ENGLAND How totally everything's changed, and how little it seems to matter. I can see where the hedgerows were, a strip in the field with a tree or two along it where the hay sputters or refuses to grow. The garden's a car park now. Shops in the vUlage dwindle to knickknacks and gifts as the chains collect in the neighboring towns. Neighbors are strangers in a new way now, will soon be mugging each other. Occasional graces display themselves, habits of speech, a pint bought for the senüe pensioner, the wUlow preserved on the lawn of the new semi-detached home, a limp reminder of water and cows that grazed in the front room, a horseshoe found in the garden. Whatever this place was to me when I first came to it is gone. Most of what it was in my head before, of course, was never there. Like Eliot in Russell Square. I stood there on my first morning, just after dawn, thinking he might drive up and read me a poem or tell me to drop in for tea. We walked all week, propping ourselves up with history, a living book. The bomb craters made us wonder, perUously near the real thing. We stared into one or two holes dumbly, imagining life there. For us England was like a toy, one that had all the parts, in scale, where tiny sheep cropped tiny fields, the trains really worked, the beer fizzed, 14 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW the streets had curbs, like the feelings, the eyes closed when you lay them down. A brightly painted collection of quaint customs, impartial laws, that one could take out and play with like a memory of childhood, the occasionally chipped paint being part of the quaintness, part of our hope that, like Pepsi, we needn't happen to everything. We haven't, of course. And we wont. In the meantime a pallor falls on everything, even England. Through which we see, more easily, real people doing real things. GARY MARGOLIS THE BAKER Beethoven opens the oven door where a bluebird hovers over his fresh pies, crying Fly away Maestro, fly away. He draws the steaming tray toward him, inhaling the hot apple air, testing the moist crust with his fork. The bird does not follow, but rests inside on an iron rack, blazing blue. All night the sky burns in his eyes. Toward dawn, everything glows turquoise, a city of feathers and fugues, a small blue flame at the back of the oven. Even now, in a new day, rolling dough and slicing fruit Beethoven sings, Fly away Maestro, fly away. ...