And the Time Is: Poems, 1958-2013

No Fanfares, No Handshakes, No Salutes

66 No Fanfares, No Handshakes, No Salutes If “life’s a dream with doubts about itself,” the dreaming never stops. Regretting what you did or did not do or always wished to do adds up to who you are . . . Piaf pretended she regretted nothing. One genius in his epitaph regretted only he was not “the man in whose embrace Mathilde Urbach swooned.” One emperor with no regrets in middle age regretted having no regrets. Translated, these examples say no life is long enough nor cosmopolitan enough nor anything enough. If you desire to see your son’s daughter’s son’s daughter, you want no less than anybody wants. Or if you thirst to visit everywhere in every hemisphere, you mimic old Batuta’s passion for the next horizon. Or if you hunger for the maximum, you’re Faust with all of Faust’s excesses to remember . . . 67 So much for dreams. If you want something to regret, why not regret you never once opposed some fluent undermen we manage to elect—the ideology or sociology or therapy that people eat as poetry—the arguments about theology whose final argument is who’s the boss—the righteous tribes for whom the Renaissance might just as well have never happened? Why did you never say that one good student’s worth a thousand senators? Or that one carpenter outskills the slitherings of advertisers, diplomats, and other oilers of the word? Between what you remember or presume, you’re in translation by whatever keeps translating April into May, decisions into consequences, fathers into sons, and you into whatever. I know the circumstance. I’m you, and both of us keep planning for tomorrow while we’re turning into yesterday. What else can we conclude except we live and die in place despite our dreams? 68 What is our bounty but the permanent impermanence of breath, a shared invisibility, a gift? What is our peace but stopping as we go and talking for a while of that, just that, translation to translation? ...