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"Manque de savoir-vivre extrème -- il survivait. Et manque de savoir-mourir -- il écrivait." -- Tristan Corbiere, Le Poète Contumace
Adam Freeman For Jim, Nancy, and Eliazar1. Adam is prone to dreaming, summer and winter, night and day, but now he dreams of amazing plenitude: a diverse richness of persons and splendid places he has never been, warehouses of furnishings in palatial halls, banquets of delectables, a Bodleian of books; of floating free above marveling crowds, breathing like a carp through pellucid pools; but what he returns to, in the gray light of another day, is hunger, thirst, a prospect of an enfilade of empty rooms. 2. It is four in the morning, Freeman says, and at four my custom is to turn from my aching shoulder and to lie and stare through the murky waters of the night to the upholstered ceiling covering me. 3. Freeman comes to with a title in his head: "The Idea of Order at Key West." He doubts the existence of Order or, for that matter, of Key West. He admires attempts at Order: a neatly-made bed, knives and forks in their proper places, lists of things to do, and supposes they can often almost be achieved, though True Order is surely an Alp not pushed up for his ambition or concern, but naggingly there, soaring above Switzerland, a country the existence of which also seems improbable. But what sets Adam off is Key. As a boy he knew a car mechanic named Waybon Key, who had married a Miss Ola Coker, whose daddy, old Mr. Coker, spent his winters sitting in a straight chair with a cowhide seat in Adam's daddy's general store, chewing tobacco and spitting gobs of "ambere" onto the side of the wood-burning stove. Freeman remembers the smell of frying tobacco-spit. His mind seems to strive for sequential order. Now, hoping to fit some odds and ends into their proper slots, he moves on to speculate on a newly-important category: is he a Senior Citizen or an Elderly Party or just an Old Fart? 4. Adam the uncertain still prays when he rises and when he retires, using, he hopes, a formula that mollifies, trusting in the power of certain arcane words, repeating under his breath, "Ire Father Hoo (Art in Heaven) . . . Hollowed Bee . . . Dumb King, come . . . Give us this day orderly bred. Deliver us from Eve ill. Ever endeavor. Ah, Men!" 5. While squeezing Crest onto his brush Adam knows how willingly he would give up everything he has except his folly to be wise. 6. Freeman moves in close on his image, checking nose, eyebrows, wild growth in the ears, and recalls those dead days, not particularly dear, when he stood before the glass and brushed thick waving hair fondly remembered and tied a Sulka tie he could not himself have afforded. He pulls some wrinkles taut, yields to gravity. He's clean and neat and smells of soap. Fort Freeman's ramparts, night and day, bristle with Adam's propped-up wounded troops. 7. "Vanity, not sanity, keeps me intact," wrote Sarah Kane. Freeman is quite aware she hanged herself. 8. Except when considering the alternative Freeman has a hard time accepting his age. He thinks feeling old inside as well might make him less resentful of the wattled geezer taking over his life-- not that he doesn't sift support from the pleasant observations of others, being told how nice his white hair looks and the teeth capped to stave off dentures, and just this week a person of twenty summers smiled and said, "You're a lovely old man." 9. With blended relief and dismay Adam admits he is neither ghost nor vampire: he reflects and is reflected. 10. Adam has a short list of necessary hopes, on which his powers of endurance depend: inherited riches from an eccentric total stranger; bright love forever after, passionate and sweet; another twenty-four hours of remaining unflattened by that constant threat, the plummeting Bosendorfer. 11. Coincidences are worthy of passing attention. While drinking his instant coffee Freeman notes, in the Times on the Web, on this day, January 21, in 1905, Christian Dior was born and, on January 21, 1924, Lenin died, each creator of a New Look. How would the world have been, Freeman wonders, if Lenin had led a French revolution and Dior had died in 1924, at nineteen, pins in his mouth, adjusting a Romanov hem; or, he goes on, Lenin as cruel French fashion dictator and Dior as . . . He pictures Dior with a shabby valise, waiting on a platform at the Finland Station. 12. Adam has a common American problem, never accepting the possibility that the right to the pursuit offers no guarantee of a rapturous capture. He decides he has panted in the chase too long for the good of his dignity and is inclined to sit under a tree and wait for bliss to drop into his lap like a wormy apple. 13. Adam frequently thinks evil thoughts, most of which give him pleasure, mulling over, for example, a telepathic power that makes annoying jerks instantly vanish; eliminates nosey, nit-picking bureaucrats, muggers, squalling brats, the casually rude, droning bores, politicians, and Jehovah's Witnesses; randomly decimates crowds and totally removes ethnic groups arousing his prejudices-- naturally unreasonable, but all too real. But Freeman, to his confusion, had a Baptist father who cited moral fables. 14. His sweet little dogs have killed a sparrow Adam was nurturing, a fledgling with a broken wing. As he pities the ruffled feathers, the claws curled to show that it is dead, he cannot blame Jesse James and Pip, recognizing kindred instincts to destroy and to adore. 15. In the middle of a sunny, breezy morning Adam sees the wyrd of the gods as a diurnal event and wonders who, in the warm afternoon, will stroll through the newly-wet green woods and wonder at the golden chessmen scattered in the grass. 16. What did they talk about that evening? Martha for once with idle hands, no one hungry; Mary diffident, fearing to question; Lazarus thinking, "I died, and now I still must die." Freeman himself returned to life twenty years ago, after a long dying. If he could re-assemble his family out of time! Gather them into a single thought . . . Living, hungry, with urgent questions. 17. Two beggars, woman and man, live in the high, sub-tropical town where Freeman sojourns. In the mornings, by ten, the temperature usually rises to perfection. His roses--red, white, pink, and butter yellow-- bloom abundantly through nearly-unchanging seasons under the depth of blue that drowns thought. On his daily trip to the post office Freeman sees the beggars, both eyeless as Samson in Gaza, but considerably stronger, re-assembling the shattered temple. He moves past them stealthily, ever wary of the danger of masonry floating upward. 18. Adam sometimes wonders who handed him the God-damned apple, there being (he scans the orchard) no lady gardener to blame. He never intended to disobey, his very soul embracing the civil, and yet his rotting garnered crops spill from cellar baskets. Maybe he dealt directly with the serpent; back there everything wavered in a swampy miasma. He recollects someone very sweet, a clear and gentle offer; and the snake, if it was the snake, still keeps in touch. This morning's mail brought a note, as always wise and kind, from a sinuous love Adam's heel has failed to crush, reporting from another garden flowers, laden boughs. If Adam had an ax he'd chop down all the trees. 19. Freeman philosophizes: I receive bills and e-mails, phone calls and Christmas cards. Ergo sum. 20. For one blink under his straw hat Freeman, on the bench, sees in the honeyed light of prodigal sun on rosy stone a throng of figurines of ivory and bronze, torsos slenderly elemental in their attitudes. Returned to the blood-glazed darkness in a world of shades, he stares at grand tableaux-vivants of gods and goddesses, breathing Pentelic marble polychromed and gilt, and easily discerns himself among the frozen revelers. 21. Adam wants to deliver himself of a love poem, elegant and succinct, with reverberations, but is blocked after one couplet:Emblems of qualities that please: The narrow hinges of your knees.22. The seven lively virtues, Adam is consoled to realize, have been embodied in the ones he's loved-- one here, one there, but finally adding up. 23. Freeman dwells too much on losses. He's convinced it could shorten his life. Lost love is at the top of the list, followed, maybe, by the forced sale of a small, green 1750 Venetian console. In love the others have lost much more often than he has himself, he readily admits. That gives no more comfort than eating the turnips the starving Chinese child would have been so glad of. But, as usual, Freeman soon manages to clear his head and face the outside world with new resolve: he will win one more heart and be happy day and night. 24. Freeman forms a thought: a strass-set finch in a silver-plated cage. He is not quite content, but lets himself smile. He does not approve of all his achievements. 25. Freeman thinks of the months and months of dragging himself around like a sack holding a man bloody and gagged. Now he knows he moves with conscious gravity, a posture meant to mask defects of character. 26. Humbly Freeman has noticed at last an amazingly deep fault that explains a lot. Adam has been peering eagerly across the divide, stomach in knots, waiting for Freeman to plait a rope and toss it over. Freeman has fretted for Adam to catch up with the rest of the party. Now the tents are rotted, the biscuits full of weevils. Some of the men have died, others moved on. Freeman stares at the crevasse right under his nose. Catching sight of Adam, he rotates a forefinger at his temple, and before all this attention he blushes and shrugs. 27. At fourteen Adam stole penny candy from his father's store and slipped it, in a brown paper bag, to a bony girl named Evelyn, though yielding first to a need to eat three pieces of the loot himself. He wonders now what scarlet crimes he'd not commit if they could win him what so far he's never had. 28. Freeman has almost believed new love for a man his age a near indecency; now, feeling the moving air, staring past a floating cloud into azure infinity, he thinks that life, not death, is what goes on and on. An e-mail message just received says, "Gracias, my friend, your photo likes me very much." 29. Freeman speaks to the dead, they being the family and friends he's best acquainted with. He's really not so old, he reassures himself, and then remembers he can even recollect men born two centuries back, before the Civil War, and often talked with them, when their old, rope-veined hands could rest on his shoulder, strong and delicate then as a bird's wing. 30. Adam was worrying about Hedy Lamarr the very day they found her dead in Orlando. Austria to "Ecstasy" to Hollywood to Disney World in eighty-six years and six husbands. With that face and his brain could she have been a little less litigious and handled her seven-million dollars better? Adam was always concerned about Ava Gardner's drinking and how Ginger Rogers felt when she was too old to dance. At age seven he pondered, What on earth is 20th Century Fox going to do in the year 2000? 31. Freeman is not proud of his interior decoration. The philosophy's not even as deep as an Aubusson and is full of holes. The scientific background resembles a white-on-white oil without a frame. He's read nearly everything and wonders if the cereal box text clashes madly with the Goethe. He does feel there's one thing he's done exactly right when he casts an eye on a grouping of his sorrows: black accents always brighten a room. He knows he really ought to fluff up the place with a few cutting-edge Deconstructionists, but lolls back instead into some comfortable old verses. He's sure, anyway, most of his public wouldn't know a Fortuny knock-off from a Foscolo. 32. For a long time Freeman has been concerned about God, whatever happened to Him, how He's faring. For years and years it was always nice to look up any time and there He sat, serious but smiling, wrapped in a set of sheets, needing the services of a competent barber, but keeping a steady hand on things. Freeman always gets a touch of heartache when he imagines the old grandfather now asking for handouts in a rough part of town and being jeered at by a gang of kids. 33. Civilization is the result of the cultivation of inhibition, Freeman once read somewhere. Now he surveys his vast, verdant acres and evaluates the benefits of crop rotation. 34. Freeman can milk a cow and parse Middle-English, handle his end of a cross-cut saw, read a score and make fried pies, translate verse from three languages, butcher a hog, drive mapless through several countries, tell a Louis XVI fauteuil from a Lay-z-boy, grow turnip greens, roller-skate. He smiles to himself, feeling cosy in the possession of valuable and useful talents. 35. Adam thinks he might tear the meat off the bones with his teeth and toss the greasy orts to the mastiffs under the table if his father would stop whispering of dental bills, the neck-breaking results of tree-climbing, and families ruined by inadequate coverage. 36. Freeman reflects on the waste of life spent laying out the dead past like a game of Solitaire even the most creative cheating can't win. 37. All his life Adam has imagined running away, altering his appearance, changing his name, abandoning the known for the not-yet-tiresome. How would it be to live forever or for at least a thousand years, moving with history? He considers the confusion in others, the sadness of leaving before they could no longer bear eternal youth. His comic-book hero is Plastic Man: power through power to change instantly into whoever might be expedient and fun. Freeman weighs the moral consequences of unlimited plasticity. 38. Adam starts making up a little rhyme--With you beside me on an old bedstead My arm pillowing your beautiful head Heavy with sleep and love My heart's blood by your mind and body fed--then breaks it off and turns on the radio. 39. Freeman carefully lays the phone in its cradle. Who will speak for him now? Calling for advice on an impending suit, he's told his lawyer died this morning, that tomorrow, trials over, judgment rendered, a plump, dead advocate some years his junior will take his place in the panteón. Angry at being on the losing side, Freeman accuses the innocent telephone and pictures a brown man, no guiltier than most, in solitary now for ever and a day. 40. Freeman has long experience with misery. The sunlight falling on the leaves of a tall avocado tree outside his kitchen window warms his heart. For a few moments, slicing a tomato at the sink, he wonders of what elements is joy composed. At seventeen, on a mountain above a river in late April, a breeze blowing through sunshine, he picked purple irises before a ruined Victorian house and gave them to a short, plump girl with tiny blue eyes. And once in Italy, on the Ides of March, he felt the same moving flood of bliss while pulling crabgrass from terrace gravel. Topping a rise on a highway in northern Spain, he felt his soul grow grand before an endless view north, south, east, west, of vast brown winter fields. Recalling the tenderest kiss he ever got or gave, he lives an ancient summer time as brief as it was sweet. 41. Noting the latest astronomical break-through while catching up with the past few days of the Times, Freeman stares into the depths of his creamless coffee, striving to envision what the devil black holes actually are. "At last!" he breathes, at the advent of understanding and vindication he is aware his intelligence deserves, skimming the latest news in re cosmic darkness. 42. Freeman has been reading on the Internet the ads for unclaimed hearts. It's interesting how often the most desperate seem prepared to scorn what fails to meet quite narrow specificities. He crafts his own sure-fire appeal:Human being crammed with unimportant facts, having considerable and varied neediness and a way with spaghetti alla carbonara, seeks anyone with more than one joke who is willing to stay on once in a while after the bedtime cocoa.43. Freeman thinks of eyes blue as distance, eyes the dark enticement of night, of himself born with riven soul. He nods to tone-deaf Adam, age fifteen, still, after so long, entrusted with keeping the heart-strings tuned. 44. Adam went to his nap ailing and now wakes up with a drippy nose and a raspy throat. He inhales deeply, mouth open, then whispers hoarsely to the chilly shadows, "So where's that chicken soup?" 45. A slim young blackamoor in purple doublet and green, woolen hose, a ruby in his ear, a gibbering monkey at his heels, clawing his shoulder a scarlet macaw squawking Levantine obscenities, offers a silver salver heaped with florins, emeralds, and pearls. Adam, floating alone day after day in a featureless sky of tepid, thin, unfathomed blue, dreams of an island with a banyan tree and a spring, where under crystal rocks and golden sand he knows he'll find a map where X for Love will mark the treasure trove buried for him alone to find. 46. Adam gently replaces the telephone after a welcome but unexpected call urging him to contain his soul in patience and calmly await a possible blessing. He knows the comfort of shared hope, pleased at hearing a clear echo. He thinks what he feels is the need to love. Someone quite possibly may need to love him. He gives the universe a more benevolent regard. He is a little surprised and reassured at the pornographic kaleidoscope in his head working as well as it ever did. 47. By tea-time Freeman is ready to upbraid Adam again for eating all the cookies, artificially lemon, for not fulfilling his early promise (terms of promise left unspecified). Where are the children, the children's children? Down that prospect there's nothing to admire, just detritus like a gutted teddy-bear in a teenager's room. Where are the former lovers, gracefully aging? On which Cayman island is the money stashed? Where are the medals, the trophies, the ribbons? Freeman fills one microwave-resistant cup with filtered water and drops in a tea-bag, puts it in the oven, set for three minutes, turns on the TV, decides he must ignore Adam, goes into his brown study, and waits for the bell. 48. Freeman feels pretty rotten--probably a touch of flu. Always prompt to righteous complaint, he sends an e-mail to a friend not much younger, who replies kindly, "Take good care of yourself. We love you a lot and want you around for a long time to come." Freeman's spirits drop, an elevator with a snapped cable. For the first time he sees himself as delicate and elderly, terribly temporary, at an age when a little thing gone wrong can break an increasingly fragile thread. His friend, he thinks, had better read up on cholesterol and the enlarged prostate, about both of which he's pretty damn dumb. 49. Freeman looks back along a broad white road dwindling into dark infinity, where soft sad bundles, fallen refugees, sprawl where they fell, the riches gathered by even the meanest life in the hard ruts spilled and fading in the sun. With all his heart he wants to believe that somewhere something is retrieved. 50. No man is tempted by each and every sin. Does shunning the unenticing redound to one's credit? Adam is not lured by Alice or Tweedledee, is unlikely to blow out his brains in the casino garden or poison Pomeranians or kick tiresome old ladies. Are stars awarded for virtues of omission? Adam puts down C.S. Lewis and eats a few peanuts. On consideration, he thinks it only right and fair. 51. Adam is eating his dinner of cold gravy and chicken in front of CNN. Since he often does three things at once, he is also making some discriminations. Nash is the poet, Coward the playwright, and Saki the writer of fiction, no question, hands down. He dismisses painters, sculptors, and all the composers except for Porter, Gershwin, and Berlin. He's relieved now that he will never read "The Anatomy of Melancholy" or "The Faery Queene" or any more Hardy or Dostoevsky. Adam would like to wear top hat, white tie and tails, and tap-dance through every single blessèd day. He firmly believes "Heureux sont les debonairs," as Jesus proclaimed in the Douay version. Adam couldn't have phrased it better himself. 52. Spirit and flesh in Freeman's history are oil and water, and sometimes he yearns to yield to the way things are, if he could have some peace allowing the soul its space, the flesh all the embraces it desires. He is unsure if he should laugh or weep that even the Milky Way is made of stars shining in a hotbed of gas and dust. 53. At odd moments Adam wonders what he should destroy before he dies-- old letters, snapshots, diaries, computer "history" . . . but his conclusion is always the same: let ego win and the survivors be delighted or appalled. 54. Adam presumed an aptitude for sanctity. Perceiving how even the best manage their lives as petty criminals, Freeman repents the uncommitted mortal sin, the unexploded bomb, the pest contained, for lying love no knife cold through the tongue. 55. Adam knows he is tired in his very bones of being the world's oldest adolescent, always the one who loves and offers more and gets the short end. He thinks each time has to be the last. He really can't bear up any longer under the weight of what isn't there, except, of course, it's all too crushingly there. And he goes on bearing it. It's the keeping on that sustains him. His heart freezes into a painful knot, understanding--clear as the bell, no longer insistent, ringing in his bosom--what the upshot will be when he can no longer answer the inquiring smile. 56. Adam remembers lots of old jokes, breathes in deeply and tells them to himself, whispering, "Fleas," thinking, "The dying moan of distant violins," saying, "The triumphant twang," wondering if the younger generation has ever heard bedsprings. 57. Risen from lake shallows toward the end of day, a flight of egrets whiter against the deep blue sky than silver in the sun, beats through the cooling air. Supine on his terrace, in bright blue shirt on a field of bone-white vinyl, somewhat smudged, Freeman whispers to Pip and Jesse James, "There go my nine-and-twenty swans." 58. Freeman sterilizes a needle in a match flame, as his mother did, and gingerly pokes a splinter from his age-freckled hand. A finger traces the life-line and crossing, branching tracks. Once every pig-trail led to Samarkand. 59. At six o'clock, as the news ends, Freeman's mind flashes back to a woman in his home town who'd made a marriage her parents got annulled, gone to Hollywood to be a movie star, and wound up where she'd started from, the Baptist church choir, singing solos in a wobbly, loud soprano. Whenever a high-school play required a plaster-cracking female scream, she supplied it from the wings. Freeman imagines his own throat full of that scream. 60. The sky is blue and gray, with a spreading stain like blood, as Freeman, driving slowly down the road, has one of his miniscule enlightenments and knows why he has lived his life in countries, including the U.S.A., not his own. His true native land is an undiscovered heart. Searching the world has turned up several likely isles for two inhabitants, but every time he plants his flag the immigration rate declines. Once, when he thought he had a country up and running, a civil war burned everything. 61. Sunset, and Freeman knows the sky behind him full of flaming swords. Naked, except for the clothes on his back, he turns his face toward a portal swinging open on the night. 62. Sometimes Adam marvels how he's made it through the evenings so long with no recreationals except cookies and ice cream. Since he's read the books and heard the music and has joined in on his share of laugh-tracks and been everywhere and met everybody, had more than his share of a few things, if less than a sufficiency of some others, he's grateful he can await, without multiple sarcasms, after killing off the years as well as he could, the foregone collision with the chariot with wings. 63. Adam opened Life one day and fell in love with a rising, swelling curve, seduced by the bow of the Normandie when she was being stripped for war. Freeman has wondered if that memory persists as one of a pure brave beauty dead. No, he decides, what still survives is a boy possessed, a ravished eye. 64. Freeman really misses kisses, having had few important ones for far too long. He knows the great and good ones are unforgettable and considers the memory of kisses from the one or two he really loved may be worse than a past of kisses altogether bereft. He thinks like this when bored and tired and about to trundle off to bed. He says to the dogs, pointing them toward the big, padded basket they share, relishing the pathos, the soldiering-on of it, "I'd like to have a really good kiss again before I die." 65. After too much late-night computer Solitaire, Freeman, his old sanguinity pumping slow, as always checks for mail and finds a message he has waited years to hear again: "I'll see you soon, my love." It almost seems like one of those newspaper squibs about a postcard mailed in 1952 and finally delivered to the right address. He feels like the old maid in the ancient joke, who after looking under her bed for forty years discovers a pair of legs and says, "Well! Finally!" 66. Adam goes out into the chilly, January night to watch the shadow of the Earth, jaw unhinged, slowly ingest the moon. He remembers his father telling him about an Arkansas boy in France in 1917, who looked up to the sky and said, "I see the moon and Pappy sees the moon. But I cain't see Pappy. And Pappy cain't see me." 67. After the eclipse, peering into midnight, Freeman strives to see the stars as the warm light of Heaven glinting through chinks in the icy Pantheon. But the Great Chain is shattered past all reforging. He breathes deep and falls through the infinite silence whispering, "Calm now, just be calm," and for this moment, unbelief suspending, strains to hear the harmonies of the celestial chimes. 68. What can I offer Man or God, Freeman ponders: a modest spray of yellow griefs? the savor of hopes ritually slain? He snorts, observing his half-hearted prostrations while specifying his requirements to be libertine and anchorite, comfy and splendiferous, the perfectly-mated Yin and Yang, both imperious dong and the ding. 69. Young Adam's head rioted with specimens of sin: playing cards, alcohol, fishing on Sunday. His father's single warning to him, man to man, was, "A woman who smokes will do anything." Later, Freeman knew he was not the good son; he was the prodigal, longing to go home. He absolved himself then of sins committed for love. He begs forgiveness now for his rebel angels, errant words. 70. Freeman thinks of an old, sad man, master of his muse, who knew Erato does not kiss nor fame's fingers seek a hand. But he and a young woman fell into a strange bliss so blessed and sustained he prolonged a tedious dying, bound far too fast by happiness to let death lead him on. Freeman is an old, sad man, master of two dogs, a man who needs a kiss, a man with dangling hands. Now it is late. He sits on the side of his bed, hoping to calm his soul yearning for sleep without dreams. "Please," he says. 71. Adam turns off the bedside lamp and studies the lunar light infusing the trailing branches of the pepper tree. He whispers, "Thank you," and lies back, grateful for feather pillows and ironed white cotton sheets. Sliding toward sleep and another day of perfect weather, he thinks perhaps he's found a good country for an old man. His dead shelter under the arch of his memory. He charts new voyages and considers work he wants to do. He even knows that if he lets it come he can have once more--for the last time, surely--love. Long ago, the nocturne was of katydids and mockingbirds and the fading scratch of tires on a gravel road; later, sirens screaming on an asphalt avenue above a subway tremolo; or a scooter sputtering below an obbligato by a nightingale; and now Adam's night music is a lullaby of barking dogs, a cock-a-doodle-doo at one a.m., and a serenade of brazen trumpet and guitars. 72. Under the moon, its ancient gray stains, new lovers clutched in doorways make old promises. In the shadowy room, alone in his double bed, Freeman considers what may be possible still; and one more time, with hopes for another chance, he moves into the maze whose denizens wait only for him. © Carl Selph San Miguel de Allende January-November 2000
The poem on this page is copyrighted by Carl Selph, all rights reserved, and appears here by permission. Photo credit: Carl Selph.
Carl Selph Poetry Index Original Writing Page
Compass image from Myst © 1993 Cyan, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
