At Yeats's Tower, and: In Which a Man Plays Debussy for a Blind Eighty-Four-Year-Old Female Elephant, and: Elsewhere

At Yeats's Tower

My wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing…. I … offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences. "No," was the answer, "we have come to give you metaphors for poetry."

—w. b. yeats, a vision

Climbing and climbing the winding stairI saw my father coming down from the tower,dead now twenty years, his goatee gone whiteblending with his collar. His raw follyin coming back to me to give me metaphorsfor poetry left me wonderingabout such otherworldly faith in a man who,when I asked him if he believed in anythingafter we were dead, simply wrinkled uphis nose and said, No, why would there be?At that moment I wanted somehow to savehim from fading completely out of memory—but as he passed me on the stair he saidnothing, and for all I know, nothing was whathe saw as he went by and kept descending.

Descending to where? To the parking lotat the bottom of the tower? Down a stairway the livingcan't see, a stairway that makes its way downunder the stream bed and the cow drinkingin its own reflection? White shirt, brown jacket,dark brown slacks, he seemed enclosed in hishabitual isolation, tucking a meaninginto a glance that bears no explanation,his half-seen face behind his newspaper making him unreachable, his shyness and gentlenessand stillness as thickly walled in as thesehumid stone stairs weeping in the cracks.

Instead of painful and by now useless reckonings,I would have pointed out to him a letterin a vitrine, like the relic of a martyr, Yeats'sslashing handwriting insisting to the estate agentthat the spring flood and damp make the winding stairslippery, the stones chilly if not tubercular,so would a hundred-pound reduction in pricenot be in order? My father would have understoodabout the money, having joined the Paupers Investment Club(aptly named, my mother said), which invested ina scheme that could make played out gold minesprofitable again by molecular extractionof gold from tailings, like Rumpelstiltskinspinning straw into gold. The CEO abscondedwith the Paupers' money and my father,for him at least, lost big-time. I can see my fatherstudying on the brochure the confident facethat he now knew was nothing but a mask—though Yeats would have insisted that all of uswear masks, so wouldn't it be better to choosethe mask you wear? And since the choice is yours,why not choose the mask the very opposite of allyou fear you are? As if the CEO, wanting to bebold but suspecting he was timid, so persistedin his mask it became his face which, despitehis crime, at least had the virtue of being legible.

My father would never have said so, but he wouldhave thought this was silly, consistentwith Yeats's whispered nickname, Silly Willie:anyone who wore a mask was out to fool the world as my father had been fooled, so whatdid it matter if it was mask or face smilingits pixilated smile from a brochure?And if my father were to steal Yeats's metaphors,he might have said that the rough beast in ourfaces, slouching to die in each other's eyes,knows nothing of masks—that in its teeth and furit's all the face there is because, Silly Willie,isn't it true that no matter how long youwear them, masks don't grieve, only faces do?

In Which a Man Plays Debussy for a Blind Eighty-Four-Year-Old Female Elephant

I read today how when a poet was going mad,hearing voices under his bed, his friend hida speaking tube inside the wall and would whisper"encouraging suggestions" that the poetshouldn't kill himself—should wait till afterbreakfast when sun and sausages...