Vita Nuova

They called him the Polka Dot Man

—so I also picked up the custom—

but what did he call himself?

This was Berkeley, the early nineties;

The Movement hadn’t completely died,

though threatened by tides of cappuccino foam and hair conditioner.

There were still protests, of course—communist, animal rights,

anti-apartheid, pro-Palestinian rallies, and rallies

against the Gulf War—

as before, as now.

But the merchants wanted Telegraph Avenue

—“the interface of town and gown”—

cleaned up, however not too clean:

property should be safe; customers should not

feel threatened—though a certain amount

of general non-standard behavior

was good for business—historical, identifying, in its own way

consumable. The Avenue felt the pressure,

social programs giving way to corporate crackdowns,

as UC executed its plan to retake People’s Park

by planting flowers and volleybally nets:

with their jockstrap arsenal,

frat boys would flush out the undesirables;

the police would intensify a routine

of breaking down the “free” bins

in which people left discarded clothes for the people in the park;

people would then rebuild the bins (though that wasn’t

part of the plan) and the police would tear them down

to find them later rebuilt.

                                        The situation, as they say, escalated.

And people—especially the people in the park—

eventually felt called to action

as if on a grid of legendary actions, where all the moves

were known, yet given life

in the new patterns unfolding.

Her name was Rosebud Abigail Denovo;

her parents named her Laura, but she broke

that custom, renamed herself, and fled

the institution. The cops thought she was

crazy. They knew she had a history,

or they didn’t know, that’s why they shot her,

or why they didn’t

not shoot her. (“There was no opportunity

to utilize the dog.”) Her friends didn’t think so,

(“Why didn’t they flush her out with gas?”)

that she was on the edge, though one friend found her

eating pieces of glass for breakfast,

upset he no longer wished

to make bombs.

                         But the best poet—he said,

“If she had broken into my home with a machete

I’d have shot her too.” He knew

better than anyone

how to make a rhyme

sound wholly natural,

and he kept the hell away

from graduate students.

In the end, her “excessive force”

lost to the cop’s, the confusion

of what happened

now part of the public record:

Denovo, Rosebud. Of the new, soon to flower

—in her desperation and despair,

her anger, her desire to belong

somewhere, her sense of being with others,

of belonging to her commitment, her steady

Pepsi-and-candy-bar diet, sleep deprived

and constantly harassed by the law,

by the streets she fled to and that led her

to the Park she fought for,

where she lived at the center

of a web, the strands of a practical ideal (let people be

in the Park) dissolving in the heat

of her senseless martrydom

as though a rose should shut and be bud again—

But this isn’t

a political poem, nor a Romantic dream.

Because the Polka Dot Man

paid no attention, as before, as then, in 1992;

he was a life-artist, or something, and his name—

the name that custom gave him—

was not a mystery, nor an allegory,

though he wore his origins

like a coat of arms: sweat suits with perfect

polka dots painted on them, upper body

and lower, polka dots of every color, every size.

He was lean, roughly handsome, with a squint

like Clint Eastwood; and he wore a sun visor

like Clint Eastwood on the golfing green, and sometimes

even carried an umbrella open against the sun,

its indisputable midday authority.

If it rained, he kept the umbrella closed

and stayed home, wherever that was.

Under the sun, though,

he would sometimes sleep in the plaza between Wheeler Hall and Dwinelle,

his body laid out in the warmth, on the hot stones,

with his head cool enough under the umbrella

he opened on the ground.

Awake, he’d pace

the square patterns of the inlaid plaza brickwork,

careful to keep on a course of straight lines

and ninety-degree angles, which he otherwise

improvised on the legendary grid—where to turn, when

to continue on the straight path

until it was time to turn.

So that his work, you could say,

was to wear a suit of circles

and trace a path of squares.

He carried himself erect, his dignified gait

crisp, militant even, expressing

delineated intention, but visibly open

to possibility as well. He had style

and something like a subject, a commitment,

his mode; yet one was never quite sure

how he would do it, what path he would choose,

as he chose it, for he did not

know himself. That was his pleasure

at the center of repose. He was never

seen anywhere other

than the plaza, at work

in the web of his tracings, or asleep.

He wouldn’t talk to anyone,

except girls; but from a distance

he appeared capable of great charm,

I could see he possessed what you’d call

a winning smile, of welcoming white teeth.

His program was working, no question,

but what was it?

This went on for years.

I was reading Robert Duncan

to open the chain of rhyme

in search of new structures,

a new correspondence for ancient responsibilities;

but I was like an open sheet

in a closed book, a human

faculty without sufficient will . . .

At some point I noticed his polka dots

were changing, opening up

from the center, as if from a gradually

increasing centrifugal force

felt within each dot, as if some kind

of internal revolution were gaining speed.

Each week, a new suit, with a new set of dots

opening further, swirling, spiraling,

as he edged week by week from the center of Sproul Plaza

towards the busy sidewalk crowded with hungry

students forming lines in front of food stalls,

circling around themselves, negotiating the crowd

they were a part of: as if he too

were at the center of a world represented

by a dot, and by virtue of some force, pulled

to the perimeter and yearning

beyond it: till the circles undid

themselves entirely, becoming sets of lines,

some even parallel lines

like equal signs

between shapes, or stories, the present

in correspondence with a future

he was working out, from the center, where he remained

isolated and in control, to the margin,

where people lived more fully

engaged with each other

in the customary happiness of eating modestly and joking around,

the bright colors and patterns of their clothes

all mixing together in the loose weave of the sidewalk.

(This must be a political poem.)

                                               Then

one day, he appeared in a blank suit,

white, without dots or swirls or lines, completely

erased of its former signs; he seemed tenuous

at first, confronting the open

sheet of his own being; then his posture

took the shape of interest, enjoyment, as he spent

the afternoon mingling in the crowded street

bordering the campus; and the next day

he disappeared, as if the rose

should pluck herself

and float away on the current.

No public record of such an act exists,

this private integration, a re-seeding

into the public campo we call the city, in which he calls himself

by the name he’s now known, though none of us

knew it, who saw him each week on his invented stage—