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--The former President lost his temper. Loss of content in our public life. Only forms remain, intonation, affect.Why did you  yell in my mom’s house? Radhika asks our neighbor. --She sounded like she does when her hands shake. She does not want to be there. Bryant calls to ask about her things. A tape on osteoperosis. No. Foundations of Economics (from the 1930s). No. The Soviet shelf. No. The Nazi shelf. No. The Greeks, the Moslems. No. The speech and drama shelf. No. Encyclopedias, no. Check reigsters back to 1964. No. Harry Truman, no. Mrs. Ike, no. --Was her reading too intense? -- Grief is excess of sound. Anger is excess of form. Sadness can lack, or still exceed. Excess is overtone, the note beyond the note you sound. Without the tone, there is no object.Did I kill Bin Laden? No. But I tried. --My task is to inventory sentences, place them in order, box them up and ship them in a container. They are a sturdy furniture, haphazard art. They are boxes of papers, bills, pieces of a dissertation. A computer shopper magazine (discard). Titles whose aura was a life, or two, or three. The house is now full of light. A girl wanders through the rooms, trying keys at the windows. My mother knows none of this. --My father might be in the garden, or the scarecrow that wears his hat. Let him wander the house this last, inspect the plumbing, lights, air conditioning, the rows of beans, sort through medals, papers, release them as excess. posted by Susan at 12:44 PM 0 comments

an introductory lecture This morning we shall spend a few minutes Upon the study of symbolism, which is basic To the nature of money. I show you this nickel. Icons and cryptograms are written all over The nickel: one side shows a hunchbacked bison Bending his head and curling his tail to accommodate The circular nature of money. Over him arches UNITED STATES OF AMERICA , and, squinched in Between that and his rump, E PLURIBUS UNUM , A Roman reminiscence that appears to mean An indeterminately large number of things All of which are the same. Under the bison A straight line giving him a ground to stand on Reads FIVE CENTS . And on the other side of our nickel There is the profile of a man with long hair And a couple of feathers in the hair; we know Somehow that he is an American Indian, and He wears the number nineteen-thirty-six. Right in front of his eyes the word LIBERTY , bent To conform with the curve of the rim, appears To be falling out of the sky Y first; the Indian Keeps his eyes downcast and does not notice this; To notice it, indeed, would be shortsighted of him. So much for the iconography of one of our nickels, Which is now becoming a rarity and something of A collectors’ item: for as a matter of fact There is almost nothing you can buy with a nickel, The representative American Indian was destroyed A hundred years or so ago, and his descendants’ Relations with liberty are maintained with reservations, Or primitive concentration camps; while the bison, Except for a few examples kept in cages, Is now extinct. Something like that, I think, Is what Keats must have meant in his celebrated Ode on a Grecian Urn. Notice, in conclusion, A number of circumstances sometimes overlooked Even by experts: (a) Indian and bison, Confined to obverse and reverse of the coin, Can never see each other; (b) they are looking In opposite directions, the bison past The Indian’s feathers, the Indian past The bison’s tail; (c) they are upside down To one another; (d) the bison has a human face Somewhat resembling that of Jupiter Ammon. I hope that our studies today will have shown you Something of the import of symbolism With respect to the understanding of what is symbolized.

Somewhere, people must still do things like fetch water from wells in buckets, then pour it out for those animals that, long domesticated, would likely perish before figuring out how to get for themselves. That dog, for example, whose refusal to leave my side I mistook, as a child, for loyalty — when all along it was just blind ... What is it about vulnerability that can make the hand draw back, sometimes, and can sometimes seem the catalyst for rendering the hand into sheer force, destructive?Don’t you see how you’ve burnt almost all of it, all the tenderness, away

We used to play, long before we bought real houses. A roll of the dice could send a girl to jail. The money was pink, blue, gold, as well as green, and we could own a whole railroad or speculate in hotels where others dreaded staying: the cost was extortionary. At last one person would own everything, every teaspoon in the dining car, every spike driven into the planks by immigrants, every crooked mayor. But then, with only the clothes on our backs, we ran outside, laughing.

The only relics left are those long spangled seconds our school clock chipped out when you crossed the social hall and we found each other alive, by our glances never to accept our town's ways, torture for advancement, nor ever again be prisoners by choice. Now I learn you died serving among the natives of Garden City, Kansas, part of a Peace Corps before governments thought of it. Ruth, over the horizon your friends eat foreign chaff and have addresses like titles, but for you the crows and hawks patrol the old river. May they never forsake you, nor you need monuments other than this I make, and the one I hear clocks chip in that world we found.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. Their irregular branches, like broken arms backlit from MRI dye, offset by yearning. They take form in ways only experts can decipher. The light is blue. The observation of the alien doctor flickers in his iris, furnace gaslight burning like a pagan memorial. The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, I pity their need for idolatry. It bares itself only to the void of me, Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility. I am unable to convince them otherwise. I hear them mew and compete as if for a rough teat's clear nutrition. Foolish rule of the organic, uncultured and out of control. I am mum and tidy as a nun in comparison. Though capable of devastation are my desires which punish the landscape with recrimination, uprooting the hedges. They swallow fire, speak in four languages, and love no one. I shudder with pride as they push themselves back to their origin, to the scraped-out bottom of a uterine nothing; this hard loneliness, skull-solid, pushed back into vagueness until it succumbs as if overwhelmed by barbiturates. Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place Separated from my house by a row of headstones. Its green vapors trigger an olfactory déjà vu like a recurrent nightmare. I envy the buried faces finally freed from worry and ailment, from the pressure to remain always forward-thinking. I picture their release, the prostrate bodies floating up as if levitated. What peace, what stillness was shoveled onto their pine box beds where darkness then dropped, all at once, final as an execution. I simply cannot see where there is to get to. The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. I identify with its nausea. It meets me in the mirror uninvited, this face beneath my face, restless and unwilling. It formulates inside me like a kicking fetus and refuses to be ignored. It haunts and threatens like a past trauma. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; mute as a mug shot, it is quiet, like someone suffocated who suddenly stops struggling. I recognize in its warm death the expression of the starving With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. Against me a force, not stronger or more intelligent, but more adaptable to poor weather like dandelions. I can feel it whittle me down to horse feed pellets. I'm being winnowed out of the earth's circulation, with a pairing incremental as this winter's passing. Twice on Sunday the bells startle the sky— Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection. I'm forced to listen to the liturgical lecturing, truant student of a catechism I loathe. At the end, they soberly bong out their names; Myths and ideals I could never bring myself to believe in, my prayers, the self-flagellation of unrequited love. The yew tree points up like a New England steeple. It has a Gothic shape. It used to remind me of home. The eyes lift after it and find the moon. Once fragile as rice paper, it hangs static and tough like a noose signifying more hardship ahead— interrogating flashlight that hurts my eyes. Now no home exists—just an empty bed, a pile of mangled sheets atop a dark wood floor, like snow atop the frozen mud tracks of hoof and wheel. The moon is my mother.She is not sweet like Mary. She licks her white feathers and stares back with one eye vicious as a swan about to bite. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. I watch, my leg caught in the truth of my life where beyond human emotion I've traveled at this point. How I would like to believe in tenderness— in those symbolic unions that elicit sweet concepts: mother and child, father and daughter, husband and wife. The face of the effigy, gentled by candles, its cheekbones flushed with an afterworld favoritism Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes; hair waving, mouth parted in mid-speech like drowned Ophelia. I have fallen a long way. I lie at the bottom, smashed like a dinner plate against kitchen tile, china chips and jagged bits. I lie at the bottom, shattered and dangerous, looking up with a baby's stunned engrossment. I'm moving closer to Pluto and Mars. Clouds are flowering blue and mystical over the face of the stars,— It will not be quick. Death drinks me in, slow as syrup. Inside the church, the saints will be all blue. They've ascended into heaven's oxygen-deprived morgue. Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews, Their hands and faces stiff with holiness, mannequins perennially enacting the nativity in a wax museum. The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild as one dying of cancer. She begs for relief, but her pillow-muffled shrieks disperse with the other sounds and shadows of the night. We are left alone, her cadaver face, gaunt and grim, prescient of mine. And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence. Sylvia Plath, "The Moon and the Yew Tree," Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1961)

Lovers holding pits in their mouths make vows and delight in each other till the underwater infant periscopes his parents and is born an uninvited guest knocks at my door, determined to go deep into the interior of things the trees applaud wait a minute, the full moon and this plan are making me nervous my hand fluttering over the obscure implications of the letter let me sit in the dark a while longer, like sitting on a friend's heart the city a burning deck on the frozen sea can it be saved? it must be saved the faucet drip-drop drip-drop mourns the reservoir

The moon now rises to her absolute rule, And the husbandman and hunter Acknowledge her for their mistress. Asters and golden reign in the fields And the life everlasting withers not. The fields are reaped and shorn of their pride But an inward verdure still crowns them; The thistle scatters its down on the pool And yellow leaves clothe the river— And nought disturbs the serious life of men. But behind the sheaves and under the sod There lurks a ripe fruit which the reapers have not gathered, The true harvest of the year—the boreal fruit Which it bears forever, With fondness annually watering and maturing it. But man never severs the stalk Which bears this palatable fruit.

Drunken laughter escapes Behind the fence woven With honeysuckle, up to where I stand. Daddy’s running-buddy, Carson, is beside him. In the time It takes to turn & watch a woman Tiptoe & pull a sheer blouse off The clothesline, to see her sun-lit Dress ride up peasant legs Like the last image of mercy, three Are drinking from the Mason jar. That’s the oak we planted The day before I left town, As if father & son Needed staking down to earth. If anything could now plumb Distance, that tree comes close, Recounting lost friends As they turn into mist. The woman stands in a kitchen Folding a man’s trousers— Her chin tucked to hold The cuffs straight. I’m lonely as those storytellers In my father’s backyard I shall join soon. Alone As they are, tilting back heads To let the burning ease down. The names of women melt In their mouths like hot mints, As if we didn’t know Old Man Pagget’s Stoopdown is doctored with Slivers of Red Devil Lye.

We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides; The spirit bloweth and is still, In mystery our soul abides. But tasks in hours of insight will'd Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd. With aching hands and bleeding feet We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish 'twere done. Not till the hours of light return, All we have built do we discern. Then, when the clouds are off the soul, When thou dost bask in Nature's eye, Ask, how she view'd thy self-control, Thy struggling, task'd morality— Nature, whose free, light, cheerful air, Oft made thee, in thy gloom, despair. And she, whose censure thou dost dread, Whose eye thou wast afraid to seek, See, on her face a glow is spread, A strong emotion on her cheek! "Ah, child!" she cries, "that strife divine, Whence was it, for it is not mine? "There is no effort on my brow— I do not strive, I do not weep; I rush with the swift spheres and glow In joy, and when I will, I sleep. Yet that severe, that earnest air, I saw, I felt it once—but where? "I knew not yet the gauge of time, Nor wore the manacles of space; I felt it in some other clime, I saw it in some other place. 'Twas when the heavenly house I trod, And lay upon the breast of God."