A Sequence by Alex Wong

Three Abstract Fantasies

going in fear

1.

I’m living from the wrong end now, regret
My future,
and I know
Tomorrow
they always dreamed about tomorrow.

I’m trying to love back only certain flowers
Of a multiple history; trying to make them
Sound again
in the moments of their opening,
Never to happen again but in this
Momentary repair.

So I
run into everything: all things
Proceeding through a hot tube of becoming:
Meet it
budding away from spilt decay
And face it down: pushing it back toward
The orchard of what was not available.

I see how every episode perceived
Put circumstance to work
as ordering law
On indeterminate things: so the fact of failure
As to the tacitly desired
Arranges lack
that did exist before:

Dreams are rebuilt to fit the trim, the fabric;
Scale themselves, up-tier themselves,
With newly-known-to-be-impossible names.

I’m going over some event,
starting from the back;
Starting before the point of realized pain.
Now it hurts better
and I’m going slowly.

You were how people came to think of you.
So like you—so like you,
so to devolve
Eventually, and ever, into you.

I film myself asleep,
hoping and wishing:
Not too much longer at the fair, and I
Have leave to read myself different again.

And life occurred in the eighteenth century,
Immensely! and does again today!
Lying on the birth bed
morning after morning.
It’s enough to make me sweat.

2.

Fantastic plans: I’m being made again
Of nothing.
Nothing less would quite become me.

And since
some little monster
Keeps house
about my present

(Forever disappointed;—
nonetheless,
A confident brute in some respects),
and wants
All of it
first
put back like it is already
(Only more so),—

It seems I shall not get
completely random,
But, au contraire, I’m themed
in every detail:
Forced to an end of being I again.

I’m taken through this long, extremely
Interesting plot, which has become
Pretend already in the telling. It’s all
Ideally sure.
Today is spendable only
For its tomorrow,
only
Don’t make me say so.

3.

It’s mostly sound—
what survived under the floor.
Mostly sound as far as I can tell.
But suppose I’d been keeping another music, more
Impertinently massive, bodied out;

A music absolutely otherwise:

And cavernously roomy;
and I were now

Discovering another singing line
Through things left unrelated—in the fine

Uppermost air,
Not down below,—

And here,
Tonight,
Applied in full!

Alex Wong has published two collections of poems with Carcanet Press, the more recent of which was Shadow and Refrain (2021). His poems and translations have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, and he also writes and teaches literary criticism.