1269 Arts and sciences poems

1 THE GESTURE The question is: how does one hold an apple Who likes apples And how does one handle Filth? The question is How does one hold something In the mind which he intends To grasp and how does the salesman Hold a bauble he intends To sell? The question is When will there not be a hundred Poets who mistake that gesture For a style. 2 THE LITTLE HOLE The little hole in the eye Williams called it, the little hole Has exposed us naked To the world And will not close. Blankly the world Looks in And we compose Colors And the sense Of home And there are those In it so violent And so alone They cannot rest. 3 THAT LAND Sing like a bird at the open Sky, but no bird Is a man— Like the grip Of the Roman hand On his shoulder, the certainties Of place And of time Held him, I think With the pain and the casual horror Of the iron and may have left No hope of doubt Whereas we have won doubt From the iron itself And hope in death. So that If a man lived forever he would outlive Hope. I imagine open sky Over Gethsemane, Surely it was this sky. 4 PAROUSIA Impossible to doubt the world: it can be seen And because it is irrevocable It cannot be understood, and I believe that fact is lethal And man may find his catastrophe, His Millennium of obsession. air moving, a stone on a stone, something balanced momentarily, in time might the lion Lie down in the forest, less fierce And solitary Than the world, the walls Of whose future may stand forever. 5 FROM VIRGIL I, says the buzzard, I— Mind Has evolved Too long If ‘life is a search For advantage.’ ‘At whose behest Does the mind think?’ Art Also is not good For us Unless like the fool Persisting In his folly It may rescue us As only the true Might rescue us, gathered In the smallest corners Of man’s triumph. Parve puer . . . ‘Begin, O small boy, To be born; On whom his parents have not smiled No god thinks worthy of his table, No goddess of her bed’

DC Comics, November 1990, #44 “Never Look Back, Flash Your Life Might Be Gaining On You” When I’m running across the city on the crowded streets to home, when, in a blur, the grass turns brown beneath my feet, the asphalt steams under every step and the maple leaves sway on the branches in my wake, and the people look, look in that bewildered way, in my direction, I imagine walking slowly into my past among them at a pace at which we can look one another in the eye and begin to make changes in the future from our memories of the past— the bottom of a bottomless well, you may think, but why not dream a little: our past doesn’t contradict our future; they’re swatches of the same fabric stretching across our minds, one image sewn into another, like the relationship between a foot and a boot, covariant in space and time— one moves along with the other, like an actor in a shadow play— like a streak of scarlet light across the skyline of your city sweeping the debris, which is simply confetti, candy wrappers, a can of soda, all the experience of a day discarded and now picked up even down to the youthful screams of play that put smiles on the faces of the adults who hear remnants of their own voices through a doorway leading back to a sunrise they faintly remember.

1.  Mary-Frances applied continual pressure on me to start the job and helped in recording and editing. 2.  Thanks to Sandra for her heroic typing, although this need not be taken to indicate her agreement with various points. 3.  Peter provided information about the notorious perpetual pills. 4.  As someone who gloried in seeing dogma overturned, he would have delighted in the irony of seeing arguments for the reverse. 5.  And without their willingness to take on the chore of responding to our whims and fancies over a 3-year period, this book would have fallen short of its goals. 6.  The production of this tome would have been unthinkable without the marvelous electronic tools that are now widely available. 7.  However, Chapter 7 was written in a relatively self- contained fashion, so the serious student may skip Chapter 6 and delve directly into the theory. 8. The late abbess of Shasta Abbey proved that looking through different windows into the same room is not a metaphor. 9.  Nick, who is writing a book on oxygen, gave much appreciated data concerning that element. 10. The filmstrip format employed in Chapter 10 originated with Elizabeth. 11.  I have been very fortunate in being able to use such penetrating minds. 12.  In recent months, I have often felt like a small child in a sweet shop as astronomers all round the world have sent me the most mouthwatering new data. 13.  Suffice it at this point to observe that I am not just talking about wallpaper patterns on shirts and dresses, although many of these patterns do turn out to have interesting properties. 14.  I do not expect that many readers will want to be masochistic enough to want to read the book in order from cover to cover.

We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone, Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought, And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought Eternal beauty from the sculptured stone,— A higher charm than modern culture won With all the wealth of metaphysic lore, Gifted to analyze, dissect, explore. A many-colored light flows from one sun; Art, ’neath its beams, a motley thread has spun; The prism modifies the perfect day; But thou hast known such mediums to shun, And cast once more on life a pure, white ray. Absorbed in the creations of thy mind, Forgetting daily self, my truest self I find.

At a certain point I stopped and asked what poems I could write, which were different from the poems I wanted to write, with the wanting being proof that I couldn’t write those poems, that they were impossible. What I could do was different from what I wanted. To see this was the beginning of work that could be work, not simply pursuit after pursuit that was bound to fail, yearning for qualities that were not mine and could not be mine. Aiming for a muscular logic that could be followed by a reader’s mind like an old stone wall running along a landscape, I got nothing so solid or continuous. The authority I wanted dissolved always into restlessness, into a constant gathering of images whose aggregate seemed like things that had come to settle inside a glove compartment. I had no faith in my flaws, but I had a grudging faith in the particular. There was the actual stone wall, its mongrel irregular blocks harmonized into use, rich and ordinary as a soul. There was the flea that landed on my forearm one night as I sat reading. The black speck of it, then the outsize sting. The flea that is an insect, has no wings, can jump vertically seven inches and horizontally thirteen inches. The flea that looks, through the magnifier, like the villain spaceship from a science-fiction movie, that can live for years in good conditions, and lives by drinking the blood of animals and birds, in a practice that is called, by science, hematophagy.

the pope has his cardinals batman has his robins shakespeare has a lark in just one of his sonnets

Osseous, aqueous, cardiac, hepatic— back from bone the echoes stroke, back from the halved heart, the lungs three years of weightlessness have cinched to gills. From a leather chaise, the astronaut's withered legs dangle, as back they come, sounds a beaked percussion hammer startles into shape. The physician cocks his head and taps—exactly as a splitter halves his slate, the metamorphic rock chisel-shocked, then shocked again, halved and halved, until a roof appears, black as space. I'm gaining ground, he says, the astronaut, who knows, from space, earth is just a blue-green glow, a pilot light he circled once, lifted, swiftly flown above the rafters and atmospheres, half himself and half again some metamorphic click, extinct as memory. I'm gaining ground, he says, and back it comes, his glint of cloud-crossed world: a pilot light or swaddled leaf, green in the season's infancy.

A species of tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago. . . . Researchers have so far unearthed remains from eight individuals who were just one metre tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people . . . made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area. —Nature, October 2004 Light: lifted, I stretch my brief body. Color: blaze of day behind blank eyes. Sound: birds stab greedy beaks Into trunk and seed, spill husk Onto the heap where my dreaming And my loving live. Every day I wake to this. Tracks follow the heavy beasts Back to where they huddle, herd. Hunt: a dance against hunger. Music: feast and fear. This island becomes us. Trees cap our sky. It rustles with delight In a voice green as lust. Reptiles Drag night from their tails, Live by the dark. A rage of waves Protects the horizon, which we would devour. One day I want to dive in and drift, Legs and arms wracked with danger. Like a dark star. I want to last.

Focus on the shapes.Cirrus, a curl, stratus, a layer,cumulus, a heap. Humilis, a small cloud, cumulus humilis, a fine day to fly. Incus, the anvil, stay grounded. Nimbus, rain, be careful, don’t take off near nimbostratus, a shapeless layer of  rain, hail, ice, or snow. Ice weighs on the blades of  your propeller, weighs on the entering edge of your wings. Read a cloud, decode it, a dense, chilly mass can shift, flood with light. Watch for clouds closing under you, the sky opens in a breath, shuts in a heartbeat.

When I was a young man, I loved to write poems And I called a spade a spade And the only only thing that made me sing Was to lift the masks at the masquerade. I took them off my own face, I took them off others too And the only only wrong in all my song Was the view that I knew what was true. Now I am older and tireder too And the tasks with the masks are quite trying. I’d gladly gladly stop if I only only knew A better way to keep from lying, And not get nervous and blue When I said something quite untrue: I looked all around and all over To find something else to do: I tried to be less romantic I tried to be less starry-eyed too: But I only got mixed up and frantic Forgetting what was false and what was true. But tonight I am going to the masked ball, Because it has occurred to me That the masks are more true than the faces: —Perhaps this too is poetry? I no longer yearn to be naïve and stern And masked balls fascinate me: Now that I know that most falsehoods are true Perhaps I can join the charade? This is, at any rate, my new and true view: Let live and believe, I say. The only only thing is to believe in everything: It’s more fun and safer that way!