Hobbledehoy Would Say Something Grand

In his simplicity the hobbledehoy would say something grand, though it’s chilly
 
in the morning, with October at the door, and his feet are cold, and while the coastal forest rain
 
on the broken porch outside makes an appeal of some kind it would be a stretch to say
 
that it’s asking for anything grand, his feet are cold, but that’s all the suffering
 
or injustice he will give testimony of, nor will he offer the deceiving deception of a first person
 
account, yet he’ll remain resolutely in the flesh and not whither
 
into the formal desiccation the guardians would approve, nakedly, that’s the hobbledehoy’s sin
 
of foundation, that he would speak from a certain remove, but not the remove
 
the guardians would give license to, even worse
 
he would claim to be taking the far more honorable course, no matter
 
its height or extent, by nature the rain forest is modest, the cedar, spruce, fir and deer fern decently
 
spaced, as if in cultivated patterns, polymorphous and pluralist, it extends
 
far along the coast, but make no claims, as if from the sky
 
evaporated regulations that nothing grand can be said fall in rains of acidity onto everything growing, precipitating
 
legions of the sour, led by the guardians, who would rule as inadmissible not only the saying of anything grand but also anybody
 
who would say anything grand, especially the hobbledehoy, whom they suspect
 
of sincerity
 
impossible to say anything grand, even if he were not in a rain forest but in a desert or mountain
 
valley, the traditional sites of a lot of grandeur, error, crime and war, so thoroughly
 
has the saying of anything grand been undone, and yet
 
in the cool of morning, with October at the door and dew on the ground
 
he would persist in trying, his folding table pushed against the wall beneath the window, the rain forest
 
light passing easily through the glass, illuminating the room almost as if there were no
 
bamboo blinds, drawing his feet closer to the electric heater, he would
 
say something grand, though nothing grand can be said, and though he’s no more
 
than one of many haunted by this consensus of the guardians, which being so dominant, or at least in such
 
saturating solution, that it’s nearly impossible to speak against and yet
 
it’s almost a wonder, something almost grand in itself that nothing grand can be said
 
lacking the confidence to seriously lay any blame, he would offer an excuse, he would point to the shortage
 
of imaginary beings, and it’s true that without such beings there’s little hope
 
of saying anything grand, but this shortage is only
 
apparent, in the interstices of common practice they reproduce like gerbils, though officially denied, and so misunderstood
 
in search of anything grand the highways lose all direction, coil together like worms on a dish, unsigned, unflagged, yet somehow
 
the setting for the costume jewellery of cities, misnamed grand canyons, plateaus as flat as seas
 
navigated by winged fish under a swelled head of hyperbolic sky, so that everything appears
 
gigantic, overdone, overwhelming, infinite maybe, but none of it
 
grand, even as October like a stage mother
 
anxiously watches from the horizon, and in suspension hangs the harvest
 
the fragility and momentariness of the world had been already known for thousands of years when the guardians under the sad
 
heraldry of suspicion and in adolescent despair over the mutual internal contradiction and constant dissolution of dependent things, their nerves
 
frayed, on some dark night fell to saying that nothing grand could be said and yet
 
desperate or marginal hobbledehoys among or against the guardians, after seasons of mocking or fiddling with or by the grand, though they still
 
could not openly declare for it, adopted disguise, furtively courting the grand concealed behind obscure theory or bloated
 
genre, or hidden in plain sight in discrete corners for the few to neglect, falling at last as dust
 
and remainders in what shops remained, the hobbledehoy
 
is blessed or condemned to share this fallen if somewhat comical life and yet out of the same momentariness and fragility
 
with other unregenerate hobbledehoys would say something grand, though in his case not likely subtle
 
the guardians meanwhile by disallowing the saying of anything grand gave space and license to the endless saying
 
of grandeurs, with all the deflation, violence and diversion that followed, the fraudulent
 
evangelist at piano croons the assembly to tears, his high sweet tenor scaling up in grandeur the very proof
 
and demonstration in its seduction of the law that nothing grand can be said, while from other perches
 
other frauds would speak not in addition but by subtraction, by erasing or blotting
 
a prior word in what might once have been grand, or sarcastically
 
in something less than grand, as if subtraction as sacrifice was not already
 
perpetual, the breath into word and the word into breath, as the Vedas had shown before time, the hobbledehoy
 
can find nothing grand in what is already said, however violated, distorted or subverted but only in what would be said, after forty days
 
and nights following the hyperbole of pillars of smoke and flame across the desert too much confusion has been sown, too many dim
 
nations have been evoked for more than a few to imagine even the lingering possibility of anything grand and yet
 
this is the hobbledehoy’s double predestination, that he would say something grand, that nothing grand
 
can be said, and yet
 
once he penetrated to an inland valley, and from the balcony
 
of a local project for the impoverished he watched the surrounding deforested hills, the sky above broken
 
into layers of pink and orange by prisms formed of cloud and sudden wind, on the sidewalk below people
 
pushed shopping carts of empty bottles, small appliances and splintered board, in the morning
 
after a mission breakfast they searched for or called for missing children, or they dealt in stolen
 
goods, scalped tickets, herbs or tinctures, each of their calls or searches
 
or pitches teetered on the edge of saying something grand, but in a private language mutually incommensurate with infinite others, struck
 
dumb in the ears of others, made not only of words but of bricks, bar fights, air, cloud, staggers, strides, departures and returns, each suggesting
 
something in some way grand, from his balcony
 
the hobbledehoy would join the others, paint something of this sky or this street, gesturing toward
 
something grand, and maybe sell his paintings on weekends in the park, in the archaeological
 
remains of the grand there are lessons, even monuments to the saying of the grand and to the belief that the grand can be said, the hobbledehoy
 
would never say that the grand has never been said, only that it always remains
 
to be said, there was a midnight
 
when he as if floated in a row boat on a lake black with starless sky at the foot of a threatening mass, a cliff side, under which
 
he thought that here at last was a basis for saying something grand, though terribly dark, but almost
 
before he could think to speak the sky began to lighten the lake and the lake answered with lightening blue, undramatic
 
encircling cedars projected their long green reflections from the periphery in preparation for noon when the lake would glimmer
 
and sunlight penetrate even to the forest floor, when nobody would need
 
even to speak, much less say anything grand, under black capes
 
or in coffee house leather the guardians in training sort and index everything they dimly know, virtually
 
connect with apprentice screen writers, annalists and diarists, all trending in the general direction but never
 
arriving at saying anything grand, whether in sweep of outline or mass
 
of detail, while in the margins the stutterers, the feeble, the lazy or tongue-tied, the hobbledehoys, cobble
 
their sentences, monotonously repeat that nothing
 
grand can be said, yet demand that somebody somewhere somehow some day say
 
something grand, he would compress
 
the chronicle with the crudest of instruments, the stub of a pencil held in bent fingers, for however
 
crooked the writing hope is sustained through the sentence for however long it runs, there’s a clarifying
 
of cloudy rivers, an ordering of elements, a distribution of particulates from southern to northern
 
poles along what appears to be stable lines of force, but liable to sudden
 
shifts in sense, to the appearance of a dark or starry shape, a goat in flight
 
from the stake, from sacrifice, who leaps and darts but as quickly tires, begins
 
to falter, its legs weakening, their rhythm breaking, so that as sacrifice it staggers, trips, lurches
 
falls, drops in a heap
from his common position on Indra’s Net of hobbledehoys he is naturally as mutually reflective as the rest, as fearful as the rest, with no better
 
prospects or counsel, staring into the rain forest expanse, which like every other place setting of the world puts into doubt
 
the saying of anything grand and yet
 
every morning the sun cracks the egg of the sky or lurks behind its albumen of cloud, or probes with light
 
the breaks, every day
 
unpacks itself from its hidden store, its magician’s trunk or top hat, surely there’s a mystery
 
in the idea that nothing grand can be said, on this morning
 
like so many others, blinking into awareness, still drowsy, the hobbledehoy is led to imagine that something grand
 
can be said, this awareness is like the first ever blinked into, and if there is nothing
 
grand to be said at this moment then maybe it’s true that nothing grand can be said and yet
 
there’s always another blinking into day, each one as fortuitous and encouraging as the last and yet
 
his mind is heavy and his thoughts are stones, the wingspan of world is vast but brittle, ready to break, dis-aggregate
 
and dissipate into the ground of its former enchantments and yet
 
if anybody anywhere is to say something grand it must be somebody as deluded
 
as the hobbledehoy, somebody
 
ignorant enough to overcome the strictures of the guardians and the legions of the sour who would condemn
 
his license even to speak, somebody
 
who would ignore all of what are called best practices, all the stairways of elementary algorithms that walk
 
everybody up the day, the ways of saying whose purport is that nothing grand can be said, for the world
 
is elaborated through these regimes of practice and craft, divided into giant though delicate venues where the grand
 
is so well emulated or parodied into grandeur that nothing grand can be imagined, a yawning lack
 
so extraordinary as to provide an almost magical substitute and yet
 
surely what is grand bubbles up in quanta and qualia on all sides, surely the ground is there for the grand to be said and yet
 
with these manufactured songs said to be immortal, these enormous yet opaque spectacles with privatized gods still thought
 
to be transparent, or at least porous, these infinite
 
mirrors, these endless resources and means, every word however it arises
 
is apt to the purpose left to it of saying that nothing grand can be said and yet
 
there are the seeds, the gestures, the popping into being of what might be grand in marginal spaces, but ruled
 
out of court, or adopted by the court and so vitiated from the start, the spirits
 
of river deltas, impoverished hills, remote mountain valleys or maybe even rain forests where the grand
 
like a nocturnal creature might venture out and yet
 
like any night creature it has few defenses other than stealth, is vulnerable to capture, to being counted, discounted, refitted, refined, repackaged, distributed and lost
 
in refraction, genre, means of production and recombination, so that fixed in replication and grandeur the grand remains eternally unsaid and yet
 
the morning remains, about which the hobbledehoy can say a lot of things, but still cannot say
 
what rises in the east, can only offer a return to the start
 
of his words and days, the old books and recitations on village corners, in the farmyards
 
and on the hills, in marble halls and mead halls, to the magicians
 
and divinities still extant though blurred by new technologies, but when Dawn
 
arrives she finds no thread to take up in her weaving fingers so that she can with purpose
 
begin again, she can’t help but be
 
a point of inflection, but looks lost, her empty hands down at her sides, waiting at the bus stop in a white tunic with uncollected
 
burnished red hair rolling down over her shoulders, no bus will pass her by, in a moment she’ll be gone, with her green eyes
 
newly opened she might be one to say something grand, if anything grand could be said, in clock time
 
the days continue to pass, devoid of all sanction, expanding in overwhelming detail, every hour
 
requiring new senses, new faculties, categories and systems just to keep the inventories in balance, with generous
 
hours, unlimited parking, the warehouses swell and fracture, but however unending remains
 
on the near side of anything grand and yet
 
October is still at the door, or slips away without warning down Main Street as it runs through Mount Pleasant, as if in protest
 
against the hobbledehoy’s disarray, and with all the shopkeepers, bag ladies and shopping cart guys
 
taking its side, always restless, October wanders
 
into the coastal forest, up though a coastal mountain pass, meanders along the tree line, between
 
wood and rock, on a treacherous hiking trail it hangs on for a word
 
of anything grand, drifting off to troubled sleep, anxious
 
about the danger to October, the hobbledehoy dreams of something grand buried in a popular song or grandiose script, but what seemed
 
grand in the drowsiness of night in the morning falls back into the indeterminate and remote, like Hiranyagarbha
 
or Brahma at the end of an age, the next day may be transparent, bursting with light, or it may be
 
slow, sluggish, achy and dull, but the lunatic possibility
 
of saying something grand will be equally remote, equally nearby, October
 
is at the door with the harvest in red, green, orange and yellow, in smoke and mist, in foundational blue, the tree of harvest
 
is rooted in both ground and sky, weightless but heavily weighted, with October
 
it recedes upward, nearly out of reach, while dipping downward toward the furrowed Earth.