howard's end

I'm restless just watching you cheat. I'd swish that skirt, swish that tea, unbutton that boot, that hat. Umbrellas are sacred--follow them through rain, across puddles dimpling with newer drops. Into the alleyways seek gamblers, prostitutes, the low life that flowers your own. The wilderness should be kept still in wallpaper, paperweights, weighted tassles. There is a house in the country, up a road haloed by trees, purpled by the bluebells you will walk through. Follow the curved twists, the dustmounts high behind the automobile, look out for the maid on her bicycle. Clip-clop, I could not find it, I saw only the fence and stopped there. A bookcase inside learning to creak, you can hide beneath the sword in a stranger's fireplace, undo your hair in an upstairs room, push open a window and put out your hand, palm-up, to a mellowed sky, to check there for weather.

There is something about Howard's End that changes all syntax, undoes all poetry, that puts you splash into the mudsoak of Victorian England grappling with its reins. The unavoidable wall for me--the brick wall of all my interior nightmares--is my inability to understand that other people exist. But it is possible to watch this movie and to believe that all people, all their pasts, existed. Here, something recalls the Dickenson poem about the sponge and the ocean, about the brain's inability to comprehend a world outside itself. Watching Howard's End, though, I find a humid sort of evidence that the past exists, that the people then were the same, that their foibles and their pipe dreams were as twisted as my own. Staircases twist like nautilus. High collars hum against the folds of neck. As Barbara Kruger once stenciled: I cannot look at you and breathe at the same time.