Aubergine
I am developing the bad habit of wanting
to discuss with my friends the stuff
philosophers entertain at odd hours, drinking
absinthe, over-
looking the Neva or in prison for
thinking, but my impulse occurs at a tony
restaurant, the atmosphere half-opium den,
half-tea-at-the-manor
named, so says the rehearsed maitre ‘d, after
the French word for eggplant, though I am
impartial to eggplant. So I bring up
time, how it seems to be
eluding me, not the fact of it
but the idea – I just can’t get it – and my friends,
who looked happy when we drove up, now look
weary, as though they’d just finished
a 15-mile training run or reached the first
base-camp with no sherpa
in sight. And I am trying to figure out
“confit” and “emulsion,” the parts
of animals I did not know,
animals I did not know were options
for consumption, which course
comes first, the rotation
of utensils, water – tap, bottled, bubbled
or senza gas – and we choose a wine more complex
than a soul, its nuances deserving several
doctoral dissertations
and probably a parade, a vintage
I try to taste with every part
of my tongue so it will not feel wasted
on me though so much effort implies
that I am an earnest swine sniffing
pearls and swigging the gems
clumsily from a goblet
the size of my prodigious snout. So my friend’s husband,
who finds me annoyingly
likable, says, well, if you must know,
Hesiod used natural phenomena – solstice and equinox –
to delineate periods of time and his wife, among my
dearest friends,
chips in, Thales of Miletus predicted
the eclipse that would terrify General Nicias
170 years later. Before I can say, huh? my husband gently
chides,
He was lucky. Anaxagoras was the first
to really understand that the earth blocked
the moon from the sun’s light and at this point,
our appetizers arrive, they are tiny, fragrant,
geometric, orbiting a bowl
of dipping sauce and I notice that plates
look a lot like moons, or clocks, and the waiter says,
yes, I’ve been thinking
about this – did you know Anaximander felt time
the great equalizer? And the suntanned head
of a Human Relations department at the table to our right proceeds
to break a wooden chair in half
over the Art Nouveau fountain,
pries off two slats from the back and demonstrates
the ancient gnomon, used to cast
shadows that could be measured
to gauge the passage of time. I have finished
my first two glasses of wine and am swirling
the third furiously in the bell
when the owner comes over,
about to thank us, I think, for spending
an entire paycheck at his establishment. Instead,
he pulls up a (metal) chair,
the kind you find littering Parisian
street cafes and elbows on
the table, confides,
Xenophon believed the ecliptic to be oblique and his wife says,
wasn’t he Socrates’ disciple? and everyone
nods so I nod like crazy. Fortunately,
our main courses are ready – did someone really
order a pig? – “Glazed pig!” says the chef,
who also ferries a fish from another
hemisphere and a platter of something entirely
brined and when I am sure the meal will resume
its cycle and talk will turn
to the kids’ foibles, a dabble of politics and local
theatre, the chef asks,
Is everything alright? and my companions laugh
and chorus,
Considering Euxodus’ flawed theory
of concentric spheres! That brings
the sous-chef out of the kitchen
and the pastry chef, visiting that evening,
from Biarritz, where, as it turns out,
she studies the plights of brown dwarf stars,
so the talk turns to Plato – of course!
– and his Theory of the Perfect Year – when all
of the celestial bodies reach
their starting point – whenever that is! –
chortles the busboy. And when the cop riding
his bike on the beach-beat comes in and says,
I couldn’t help
overhearing – how naïve to posit the velocity
of the earth and moon as constant! and gestures
for a menu, I think,
this has gotten out of hand.
But it’s not like I own time, the whole
restaurant singing its libretto, an overture
of flatware, silverware and crystal,
for all I know, the whole town is mumbling
in ancient Greek while some kid covers
aging rocker Mick moaning,
“Time Is On My Side” at a concert on the pier.
I can’t take these evenings
when I realize my subject, my obsession
so vague I can’t even articulate
a problem, is floating around in the air,
it’s oxygen with some nitrous
oxide thrown in so even breathing near it gives
a tremendous buzz.
The waiter is naming constellations, my friend ponders
the creation of the calendar to the cop
quoting Ecclesiastes and the owner looks
content as a pasha, reclining
to show the wealth of the situation, so when I say
my, would you look at the time
and we have to pay the sitter,
they look at me kindly, squinting
as though I were growing smaller, or bigger – I eye
my wine, have the clocks all struck
thirteen? – or distant, how the imagination
might fathom
someone you once knew and grew
away from, someone who managed
to stay quite still while doing
a great imitation of progress, someone
baffled by how, where and why
the evening went and what
could be done to get it back.
At some – and this is crucial – point
in the not-distant future, you
will hear the symbol of a train,
and trust the train to exist because
ontology – the study of
being – has wormed its way into
our psyches – and then I begin
to lose your attention, as
the universal syllabus
tells us that whistle or bellow,
plaintive or obtrusive, freighted
with meaning, patterned
after the mating call of ancient
predators, demands you return
to some departure you never
reconciled, and you must stay there
until someone picks you up in
a paneled stationwagon with
no safety restraints, manual
windows and a sooty ashtray
holding a deuce of unfiltered butts.
Remember when you learned about
symbolism? There were those hills
and Hemingway’s girl was pregnant,
Hawthorne’s scarlet letter marking
Hester’s (not the preacher’s) sin and
it became clear, one tedious day,
that in literature things stood in
for other things, and the downtrodden
teacher with hope in her secondary
school heart brought up, metonymy,
synecdoche, more specific
substitutions of one for another
but you needed no extra credit
and so ignored her desires as
so many others had, she of the
perfect cursive and knee-length
lesson-plans. Now you wonder
what a train whistle is and what
it does to your memory, what
it stands for, why it makes you wistful –
you didn’t even grow up near
a train, you’ve never taken a ride
longer than from Manhattan’s
Lower to Upper East Sides, or
the El from Chicago & State
to Evanston, you’ve never taken
the trip from northern California
to Washington along the coast
that everyone says is so beautiful
and you are just romantic
enough to think that beauty can
change your life though you don’t tell
your friends that – that’s not common
parlance even at a gallery, where
you can’t find what you were raised to
think of as beauty because art
is about information and
energy and politics, these days,
as though it wasn’t when painters
had wealthy patrons who told them
what to paint and the painters said,
jump how high? The Doppler Effect
makes a train whistle seem higher
in pitch as it approaches and
sound waves bunch out and lower when
it recedes as they stretch out.
It’s no tune or even a riff,
More a fragment of some 20th
century work that insists on
no story and incremental
repetition thrown in the symphony’s
repertoire when conductors tire
of Wagner & Vivaldi and
you are glad this is only one
program a year – I don’t blame you,
I get tired of confusion in
a stiff chair and wading in
a pool of abstraction – what is
memory without specifics?
My mother told detailed stories
of woe and grudge and rare
victory over those who wronged her –
she took three trains from Detroit to
Edmonton, Alberta, to be
with my father in the 2nd
World War and they lived where you could
be outside for minutes a day,
it was so damn cold – she hoarded
cigs for her husband while he flew
cargo to Alaska and the well-
off family that housed them was
snobby, ungenerous and if
I met one of their children today
in one of those cafes with metal
chairs I would snub him because in
that way I am like my mother,
loathe as I am to admit it,
I cannot let go of anything,
I do not forget, this is one
of my great gifts. Surely you have
a train story, surely someone
in your family has a train story.
My Austrian friend says trains will
always means death in his argot
but I cannot allow that, I
have only my own arsenal
of associations with death
and cannot afford another’s,
though his is buoyed by history,
on an epic scale and mine are
local losses, meaningful to
me and blessedly, no grander.
Haven’t you stumbled across some
shard of memory that will not
let you go, affiliated
with the echoing northbound caw
or beauty or your mother or
war or Canada – why haven’t
you taken that vaunted trip we
discussed? What else haven’t you done,
will you never do? – and you are
tempted to sit there and dwell,
to let such thoughts riddle your sleep
and this is one of your great gifts,
friends, lovers, family agree,
it makes you the best of
company, divides you from almost
everyone else everyone knows
and for that, for you, I am beyond
grateful, and if you will, I will
ignore – transform – forgive? –
the lonely note of the train – can
you? – I can, I think I can,
I think I can. I can.
BIO: Patricia Seyburn has published two books of poems: Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998). She is a professor at Cal State Long Beach and co-editor of POOL: A Journal of Poetry, based in Los Angeles.
