back at the waldorf

i started this a bit ago but it got lost. here it is. this isn't stevens' best poem. it's just part of a story. there's a nice website at the bottom. visit. it's funny.

Arrival at the Waldorf

Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.

You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say "The world in a verse,

A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,"
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.
-Wallace Stevens

okay, i know the poem isn't really about what i'm getting ready to say, but wallace stevens is dead, so what's he going to do about it? a friend gave me this poem nearly 18 years ago. made me memorize it because how else do you give someone a poem if you don't want them losing it? and i know the poem is about the struggle between the real world and the world of image or language and how no matter how beautiful language is, you have to be in the world. really of it. and that can be so much less or so much more depending. so i know all that, but every time i come back to the city from away, the poem slips into my head like a tiny celebration even though the poem is a lament of sorts, or at least a tired realization. you know how maybe you like a song and it makes you feel happy and you don't think about the fact that the lyrics aren't so great or at least aren't what you feel. you just like the tune. so the first part always feels like a welcome, especially. home from guatemala. back at the waldorf, this arrival in the wild country of the soul, all approaches gone, being completely there. maybe because i am never completely anywhere. and especially now, because i have been tromping around in that alien, point-blank, green and actual- well, not guatemala, but arkville. and we do come back to the waldorf, or to within a few blocks of it. to new york city. and always before i've just given myself those first few lines in my head, glad to be home.

but this time the whole poem unspooled and although i already knew it, really, it finally settled in. there's the real world where you live and do. then there's the pile of language you swim through (carruth's bucket of language-minnows), but it's not real. it's symbolic. representative. it's a movie set where you can move around all the parts and make them what you want. a rock here. a tree there. already i was thinking about the last time anyone saw an eagle floating over this island and where i would put one in my poem, in my own bucket of minnows. the dirty seagulls eating trash and fighting over broken crab legs. i thought about the green and actual while driving through nothing but not green.

and in the sunsety light we drove across the brooklyn bridge and i saw it. the first waterfall. i had heard but did not believe. nothing like the cataracts leaping and singing all through everywhere i'd just been. it was massive. like stone. like someone turned on the largest faucet in the world. falling from one even point straight down into the hudson. flat. lit up with lights. lit up with lights. and at first my heart sank because this is what old wallace was so worried about, maybe. that we'd always be willing to settle for fakery, for charlatans. for words. i'm sure he had plenty else on his mind and hideous fake waterfalls lit up at a cost of millions of bucks was maybe not even something he could imagine back when he was writing about the waldorf. world war 2 was heating up at the time, you know. other fish to fry.

but i kept looking and i kept wanting to look. off the bridge and onto the b.q.e. i spotted another. then another. symbolic. representative. finally, "look!" you should never tell the driver to look out into the hudson while he's driving the b.q.e. on a sunday evening. "there are four! four waterfalls!" sort of like "it's an eagle. eagle eagle eagle." i am fickle. i am easy to impress. i am simple and pretty lights and falling water make me feel happy just like pretty words, how they sit next to each other and pretend to be something. i buy it. i buy it every time. and you say, "the world in a verse..."

i think about old wallace, working with numbers-law, insurance, banking- scribbling poetry when he could, holding everyone at bay. he'd be horrified by the idea of those ridiculous waterfalls, too. just like me he'd see them coming over the brooklyn bridge and he'd start railing. in my mind he's got a cane and he's waving it, although i'm not sure there'd be room for that in a car. still, he would. and he'd use all sorts of salty language, lament how far we've fallen as human beings to create such a joke. and as his car neared the brooklyn side the monstrous cascade would disappear beneath the bridge and he'd be straining to look back and see just a little bit more.

www.newyorkcitywaterfalls.com/index.html