1269 Arts and sciences poems

I A cave with arms at the mouth. Our hero is blind: everything he hears he sees. Hear! Gold light sifts to his ear. A roar. The seas beaten—his duodenum, colon, blind intestine and appendix, destined for heat, they blush. II William's cabbage heart shook. He dragged himself from the dirt. If he could rest his ears he could see ginkgos in his city. The pretty boy I mean & Will, who were both aging with their senses curbed until they knew New York City by the root & crack. III As if there is a fig tree rooted in heaven & each of its leaves knows all the rules. 8:45 a.m. hum: he saw the boy had fallen into a manhole & the fig tree had fallen into a manhole & neither could be the sound of hands splitting gold hands landed up the breadth of William's back. God bleeding me a kind of blooded cry my lady makes me a heron or my leg for a stump the cursed in loam my venomous thumbs my His guts an a-readied muck. IV If your hand had been dusk- yellow not a lantern but winged —a bridge or a dove sprung from the dirt. Trying to make a shape. The feathered thumb herring— bone. We would not fall. V I brought you in from the garden since I can't stand the trees' visions. William you will be there the last stately in ribbons. But the vision is a fattened glee. The glee is a clubfoot. The glee is a mutt. The eyes sewn up the air & nothing can be seen but visions. You are burst sideways like a fist in water. Your maker staring into an apron of mud. Thou art bore a hole in the man. Thou art not a bloody bit, not the man.

I He whom we anatomized ‘whose words we gathered as pleasant flowers and thought on his wit and how neatly he described things’ speaks to us, hatching marrow, broody all night over the bones of a deadman. My tongue is a curve in the ear. Vision is lies. We saw is so and it was not so, the Emperor with the Golden Hands, the Virgin in blue. (—A blazing parchment, Matthew Paris his kings in blue and gold.) It was not so, scratched on black by God knows who, by God, by God knows who. In the dark in fetters on bended elbows I supported my weak back hulloing to muffled walls blank again unresonant. It was gone, is silent, is always silent. My soundbox lacks sonority. All but inaudible I stammer to my ear: Naked speech! Naked beggar both blind and cold! Wrap it for my sake in Paisley shawls and bright soft fabric, wrap it in curves and cover it with sleek lank hair. What trumpets? What bright hands? Fetters, it was the Emperor with magic in darkness, I unforewained. The golden hands are not in Averrhoes, eyes lie and this swine’s fare bread and water makes my head wuzz. Have pity, have pity on me! To the right was darkness and to the left hardness below hardness darkness above at the feet darkness at the head partial hardness with equal intervals without to the left moaning and beyond a scurry. In those days rode the good Lorraine whom English burned at Rouen, the day’s bones whitening in centuries’ dust. Then he saw his ghosts glitter with golden hands, the Emperor sliding up and up from his tomb alongside Charles. These things are not obliterate. White gobs spitten for mockery; and I too shall have CY GIST, written over me. Remember, imbeciles and wits, sots and ascetics, fair and foul, young girls with little tender tits, that DEATH is written over all. Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul they are so rotten, old and thin, or firm and soft and warm and full— fellmonger Death gets every skin. All that is piteous, all that’s fair, all that is fat and scant of breath, Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair, is Death’s collateral: Three score and ten years after sight of this pay me your pulse and breath value received. And who dare cite, as we forgive our debtors, Death? Abelard and Eloise, Henry the Fowler, Charlemagne, Genée, Lopokova, all these die, die in pain. And General Grant and General Lee, Patti and Florence Nightingale, like Tyro and Antiope drift among ghosts in Hell, know nothing, are nothing, save a fume driving across a mind preoccupied with this: our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought. The Emperor with the Golden Hands is still a word, a tint, a tone, insubstantial-glorious, when we ourselves are dead and gone and the green grass growing over us. II Let his days be few and let his bishoprick pass to another, for he fed me on carrion and on a dry crust, mouldy bread that his dogs had vomited, I lying on my back in the dark place, in the grave, fettered to a post in the damp cellarage. Whereinall we differ not. But they have swept the floor, there are no dancers, no somersaulters now, only bricks and bleak black cement and bricks, only the military tread and the snap of the locks. Mine was a threeplank bed whereon I lay and cursed the weary sun. They took away the prison clothes and on the frosty nights I froze. I had a Bible where I read that Jesus came to raise the dead— I kept myself from going mad by singing an old bawdy ballad and birds sang on my windowsill and tortured me till I was ill, but Archipiada came to me and comforted my cold body and Circe excellent utterer of her mind lay with me in that dungeon for a year making a silk purse from an old sow’s ear till Ronsard put a thimble on her tongue. Whereinall we differ not. But they have named all the stars, trodden down the scrub of the desert, run the white moon to a schedule, Joshua’s serf whose beauty drove men mad. They have melted the snows from Erebus, weighed the clouds, hunted down the white bear, hunted the whale the seal the kangaroo, they have set private enquiry agents onto Archipiada: What is your name? Your maiden name? Go in there to be searched. I suspect it is not your true name. Distinguishing marks if any? (O anthropometrics!) Now the thumbprints for filing. Colour of hair? of eyes? of hands? O Bertillon! How many golden prints on the smudgy page? Homer? Adest. Dante? Adest. Adsunt omnes, omnes et Villon. Villon? Blacked by the sun, washed by the rain, hither and thither scurrying as the wind varies. III Under the olive trees walking alone on the green terraces very seldom over the sea seldom where it ravelled and spun blue tapestries white and green gravecloths of men Romans and modern men and the men of the sea who have neither nation nor time on the mountains seldom the white mountains beyond or the brown mountains between and their drifting echoes in the clouds and over the sea in shrines on their ridges the goddess of the country silverplated in silk and embroidery with offerings of pictures little ships and arms below me the ports with naked breasts shipless spoiled sacked because of the beauty of Helen precision clarifying vagueness; boundary to a wilderness of detail; chisel voice smoothing the flanks of noise; catalytic making whisper and whisper run together like two drops of quicksilver; factor that resolves unnoted harmonies; name of the nameless; stuff that clings to frigid limbs more marble hard than girls imagined by Mantegna ... The sea has no renewal, no forgetting, no variety of death, is silent with the silence of a single note. How can I sing with my love in my bosom? Unclean, immature and unseasonable salmon.

Excellent In The Two Sister-Arts Of POËsy And Painting: An Ode

the absence was there before the meeting the radical of presence    and absence does not return with death’s chance- encounter, as in the old duality, life or death, wherein the transcendence of the one translates the other into an everness we do not meet in heaven, that outward of hell and death’s beauty    it is a bright and terrible disk where Jack is, where Charles is, where James is, where Berg is  is here in the continuous carmen O, some things—di—breathe into—aspirate—and lead away— deducite! for the soul is a thing among many Berkeley shimmers and shakes in my mind    most lost    the absence preceded the place and the friendships    Lady Rosario among us    of Spanish and Greek rushes from the hedges around the gas station, swirled with Lawrence’s medlars and sorb-apples What is it reminds us of white gods flesh-fragrant as if with sweat    the delicious rottenness

I'm preparing myself for an extended period of loneliness That will begin very soon I think I've illegally downloaded two new depressing songs I've placed a copy of Good Morning, Midnight under my pillow for easy reference I've printed out the tablature for every Morrissey song I know so I can sing them to myself Alone in my room Just a few things are needed really To make me calm While I figure out a simple, clean, and effective way to kill myself, With minimal stress for the person who has to find and dispose of my body But I'll probably never think of a way Because I'll probably never kill myself I'll just lie in my bed suffocating myself with my pillows While listening to the four songs you said were your favorite And maybe burn myself a little with the iron On special occasions And the next time I'm in a subway station, I'll stand a little further on the yellow line Or maybe the next I'm at your apartment I'll try a little harder

And I will bend down to smell his desire his tomb's flowers and marble his wilting joy his swapping temptation for content And I will keep him from the cold, visitors, oleander, and the sons of bitches and say: No one will resemble me like my father his white stumbling and the illusion that plucks words A shout that walks on two feeble legs eyes me with the summer of discontent and sprinkles me with water, turns me green before it shakes the bitter dirt off its fingers … that's my father he cried from a darkness in the grave And I will gather the house of your chucked absence as if we were alone on Earth … you die so I can fold the falcon's wings after its departure and believe the silence that remains

Only sometimes does homegrown bedrock glow moneygreen. Sometimes rock whines mommy. Sometimes rock coos baby. Sometimes rock calls late with the mortgage. Sometimes rock knits shoulder blades right where you can’t pluck. Early mornings something doesn’t sit right over the sink. Sits crooked. Slumps askew. Body doesn’t lay the way you left it. Squinting gets you nowhere. You squat to the floor and feel around. Stop. Smell for it. Shrug. Still some dangling something modifies you. Smackdab midchest you feel lumpy empty. Sniff. Sniff. Shrug. Like those days we grab our own pickaxes and head down to the mine. We hum worksongs. We sing hymns. We chip worry stone. We gather moss. We lie flat. We scratch at the mineshaft. Not toward exit but deeper to the core.

—not pen. It’s got that same silken dust about it, doesn’t it, that same sense of having been roughed onto paper even as it was planned. It had to be a labor of love. It must’ve taken its author some time, some shove. I’ll bet it felt good in the hand—the o

amid the growing craze for automatons The voice within the device that moves      is not (as if nothing human could be quite that moving) My precious edgling:though some believe the answers be given by a man concealed, these are speaking machines. They were risking their lives. Usually a woman or a child, who woke up inside the oracle, who swallowed the burning oil, and who forces the idols to speak? Though when the bishop Theophilus broke open the statues at Alexandria, he found them hollow it does not necessarily follow that The penalty for trickery was death. Such is the wealth of belief. Behind a finely painted sheet of shell a voice unlatched surrounds the world.

— “mu” one hundred sixteenth part — Again that closer walk, legless though they’d be. Low Insofarian sun I cut my teeth on, theirs to be better to bite with, me theirs the closer we walked. They were insisting time seeds grievance, crooned it the closer I got, Zeno and Zenette moment’s nurs- es, Nunca Anuncia’s net...    Thus it was they were there again, thus they walked legless, noses thumbed at the sun. Unlay’s avatar said to’ve become caricature, sacred clown of late’s late awakening, laughed having thought it so...    So it was I saw what I saw was too much. So it was I sewed my mouth shut, they who’d have heard me gone again, what- say’s entourage. “So it was” were the words they’d gone away muttering, unlay’s non- chalance...    Everything was leaving itself, eve- ryone himself, herself, all of them, all of it, moving. It was as though they were each an- other. Outmost urge met indrawn joust, pe- yote-pod baritone tap. They were saying they’d gotten back from this or that place. Where was the honey we’d heard about I wanted to know... In the realm of whatsay it all bore consequence. They did a slack-legged shuffle, legless though they were, quick-switch imbroglio the cost of it, rum- ble in the house of who knew. It was my own most inward step, my heart itself, closer than close could be. I had a go at it but fell, my legs were in the way, no way could legless grace come again...    I thought about walking. I had to think about walk- ing, Nunca’s pelvic sway. Though what I saw I couldn’t say, it made me say things, realm in whose wood I hung in love with her hard look, walk in whose wake I lay ________________ I was whistling when my lips fell off. Lip- less was to legless in some way I couldn’t say, the closer walk words got in the way of... What it was lay on the tip of my tongue, say to unlay already in some way, unsay’s day begun. We were of more than one mind Huff had it. Sophia said the same... I wanted rele- vance, trust, I whistled even so, wind in the gaps in my teeth • A new lady named Ahdja joined our group, slight of limb, loose tomboy body, smile so broad we blushed. The Egyptian spring was up in smoke in back of us, we trudged on, far from all that, even far from Lone Coast, a former life stalked us it seemed... We took tiny steps, unsure what lay under us, unlay’s realm the sweet precinct we sought, unsure what would get us there... To say we was too much my head told me. Not so my second head said. To say we was all I wanted my third head said, sec- ond head said to’ve lost itself, third head always at odds with itself, want wanting more of itself... It was Ahdja’s dream we were in, the we I went on about, unlay’s adumbration. When would its day begin we wondered, the we I so insisted on, the we we’d eventually be, when would lay’s day be done. It was my dream of Ahdja we were in said my third head, we the one risk I took, one wish, flat rhapsodic stitch... I walked haunted by the we she made us, Nunca’s promenade be- hind us now. We’d seen Egypt in flames and we kept walking. Huff said, “I told you so,” and we kept walking, unlay’s late promenade all there was left... I dreamt a dream of moving on, I dreamt a dream of standing pat, first head and second head and third head’s agreement, a dream I let my true self slide • Unlay was no simple stand, this or that mystic hustle, this or that bodily rebuke. In the end it will have been all there was we grew to expect, no soul’s captivity some book had called Egypt, a book we no longer read... In the realm of whatsay we tramped along, there no matter spun by the swirl of it, there no matter where we were. Moment’s notice moment’s gnosis, the moment brought bad and good. Ahdja’s ka was Layla, Itamar’s Majnun, our crew caught up in the old way, the old way’s day redone... “Madness be our name,” we chimed in unison, incensed, Majnun’s dream of a just world just dreaming, Majnun’s each and all we were. So it was and so we sang, snuffed Egyptian spring an- acrustic, uncuffed auspice there’d be. Thus it was, so it went, unlay unlike what it was we expected, sanc- tified feet where voices met water, far from cause and consequence we stumped... We were relishing being together for a time, something seen in a face peering out from inside we saw was what soul was. “This is how it is,” I was telling myself, some spectral aspect it had somehow. “This is how it is,” I said, “this is how it is,” voice eaten at by the bay we stood in front of, cold ad- vent of water, cold commiseration, ythmic arrival, salt... If not what wet our hems anointment was nothing, nothing if not what tugged our feet. “Froth be what we’ll be,” we chimed, indignant, high falsetto in- sistence, deep gubgubi thrum. There was a sense there was a core to be gotten to, cloth drawn aside or gone under, frills fallen away at the water’s edge... If not it, albeit illusory it might have been, instigation was nothing ________________ The advance I wanted lay at Ahdja’s feet, scruffy thought’s nubbly dispatch. That all bow down and be at rest, unlay’s un- soon come... Chill water, careening bus, what Egypt was... World under glass wraps, flat