Friday, May 22, 2020

THE RAGE FOR ORDER AT CAFÉ GANESH
(With Apology to Wallace Stevens)

Clear heads we must have had still,
stumbling out of a winter night
into that sudden din—
all those strangers sitting at their ease
under the same roof. I imagined
soft, warm lighting, even though
I couldn’t see it.

We had been drawn together, us four,
by the slow, stubborn love of words,
the slow fever in the brain
that sets us raging at the broken world,
to call it to order.

Ah, but the world was stronger that night.
It beckoned to us through the PA system
in the voice of a Bob Marley,
begging us, commanding us to gather ourselves
up into a dance
around a central point without a name
in any book of words.

And we just sat there, sentences left unfinished,
our faces relaxing into slow mirth,
as the faces of men do who think too much;
the place where each of us ended
and everything else began
slowly becoming imprecise, confused
as the wine and music mingled.

Pale Wallace Stevens, so beautifully sober,
composing verses in your Sunday best,
tell us: how could we learn to phrase the broken world
and set it singing, except
from such unmoorings? From where this rage for clarity
and pure, unruffled air
if not out of last night’s dishevelment?

 - Jacques Coetzee

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