1269 Arts and sciences poems

Thomas Edison loved a doll with a tiny phonograph inside because he made her speak. Is there any other reason to love a woman? Did she say the ghost of my conception or something equally demure? It’s hard to be sure how he feels when he holds me, I fall apart. I’m projecting here. He didn’t feel her first transgression was in having no expression. René Descartes, too, traveled alone with a doll-in-a-box he called his daughter.Francine, Francine... is it better to be silent and wait for everything we were promised? Or should we love them back, the way a train loves its destination, as if we have the machinery necessary for it?

Her pencil poised, she's ready to create, Then listens to her mind's perverse debate On whether what she does serves any use; And that is all she needs for an excuse To spend all afternoon and half the night Enjoying poems other people write.

We can have our pick of seats. Though the movie's already moving, the theater's almost an empty shell. All we can see on our side of the room is one man and one woman— as neat, respectable, and distinct as the empty chairs that come between them. But distinctions do not surprise, fresh as we are from sullen street and subway where lonelinesses crowded about us like unquiet memories that may have loved us once or known our love. Here we are an accidental fellowship, sheltering from the city's obscure bereavements to face a screened, imaginary living, as if it were a destination we were moving toward. Leaning to our right and suspended before us is a bored, smartly uniformed usherette. Staring beyond her lighted corner, she finds a reverie that moves through and beyond the shine of the silver screening. But we can see what she will never see— that she's the star of Hopper's scene. For the artist she's a play of light, and a play of light is all about her. Whether the future she is dreaming is the future she will have we have no way of knowing. Whatever it will prove to be it has already been. The usherette Hopper saw might now be seventy, hunched before a Hitachi in an old home or a home for the old. She might be dreaming now a New York movie, Fred Astaire dancing and kissing Ginger Rogers, who high kicks across New York City skylines, raising possibilities that time has served to lower. We are watching the usherette, and the subtle shadows her boredom makes across her not-quite- impassive face beneath the three red-shaded lamps and beside the stairs that lead, somehow, to dark streets that go on and on and on. But we are no safer here than she. Despite the semblance of luxury— gilt edges, red plush, and patterned carpet—this is no palace, and we do not reign here, except in dreams. This picture tells us much about various textures of lighted air, but at the center Hopper has placed a slab of darkness and an empty chair.

The boss is sitting at the desk the boss doesn’t look at her the boss is waiting for the black telephone to ring she also waits for a ring from the boss he is waiting for the files from her her blue dress like a reused file folder around her body her hands tight around the files the filing cabinet might eat her might take her hand off the boss might eat her the boss wants her but the boss wants money more just a little bit more the boss always seems to want the money a bit more the boss doesn’t hear there are taxis outside waiting for all the women down on the street across the street a boss prepares for bed another boss above him in apartment X rotates a Q-tip in his ear before sex despite instructions on the box we took my father out of the paper the living will the letters with their little capes will leave the paper who will take care of my children later who will take care of my father the will will take care of no one a piece of paper cannot take care of anyone I cannot take care of everyone on some nights I wake in a panic and can’t tell if I am dead or alive this year I dye my hair so I won’t have to die

While the man is away telling his wife about the red-corseted woman, the woman waits on the queen-sized bed. You'd expect her quiet in the fist of a copper statue. Half her face, a shade of golden meringue, the other half, the dark of cattails. Her mouth even— too straight, as if she doubted her made decision, the way women do. In her hands, a yellow letter creased, like her hunched back. Her dress limp on a green chair. In front, a man's satchel and briefcase. On a dresser, a hat with a ceylon feather. That is all the artist left us with, knowing we would turn the woman's stone into ours, a thirst for the self in everything—even in the sweet chinks of mandarin.

Einstein’s happiest moment occurred when he realized a falling man falling beside a falling apple could also be described as an apple and a man at rest while the world falls around them. And my happiest moment occurred when I realized you were falling for me, right down to the core, and the rest, relatively speaking, has flown past faster than the speed of light.

there are some things up there uptown I want to see I want to see    I'm going to look at that and see I want to go up and see that show. That show I went to see, I went to see. There are some things up there   uptown I want to look at that and see. I'm going to see what I look. What I look at, when I look, vessel, I stood to see. I went to stand to look to see. Venturing further I went outside myself to look at that wall. It fed! There was a box inside that was not blank, I saw it. It was really different from an aura, the thing had colors, the thing was talking to itself. And spoke to me, not incidentally.

I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile! Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee: I saw thee every day; and all the while Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea. So pure the sky, so quiet was the air! So like, so very like, was day to day! Whene'er I looked, thy Image still was there; It trembled, but it never passed away. How perfect was the calm! it seemed no sleep; No mood, which season takes away, or brings: I could have fancied that the mighty Deep Was even the gentlest of all gentle things. Ah!then, if mine had been the Painter's hand, To express what then I saw; and add the gleam, The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the Poet's dream; I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile Amid a world how different from this! Beside a sea that could not cease to smile; On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss. Thou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house divine Of peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven;— Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine The very sweetest had to thee been given. A Picture had it been of lasting ease, Elysian quiet, without toil or strife; No motion but the moving tide, a breeze, Or merely silent Nature's breathing life. Such, in the fond illusion of my heart, Such Picture would I at that time have made: And seen the soul of truth in every part, A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed. So once it would have been,—'tis so no more; I have submitted to a new control: A power is gone, which nothing can restore; A deep distress hath humanised my Soul. Not for a moment could I now behold A smiling sea, and be what I have been: The feeling of my loss will ne'er be old; This, which I know, I speak with mind serene. Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the Friend, If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore, This work of thine I blame not, but commend; This sea in anger, and that dismal shore. O 'tis a passionate Work!—yet wise and well, Well chosen is the spirit that is here; That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell, This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear! And this huge Castle, standing here sublime, I love to see the look with which it braves, Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time, The lightning, the fierce wind, the trampling waves. Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone, Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind! Such happiness, wherever it be known, Is to be pitied; for 'tis surely blind. But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, And frequent sights of what is to be borne! Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.— Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

In memory D.K., Scrovegni Chapel, Padua “Even Duccio can’t match Giotto’s stage management of great tragedy”: Transgendered Professor Y. in leather miniskirt paces before the screen, wood pointer scraping saint faces, slapping hunched women of the Lamentation. Blue-gold tumult of the chapel walls. After-lunch lecture hall heat. You’re in that class with me. We go on from there—not long. You do The Waste Land in different voices—Come in under the shadow of this red rock

I am writing now in preconceptions Those of sex and ropes Many frantic cruelties occur to the flesh of the imagination And the imagination does have flesh to destroy And the flesh has imagination to sever The mouth is just a body filled with imagination Can you imagine its contents The dripping into a bucket And its acts The ellipses and chaining apart The feather The observer The imagination, bare, has nothing to confirm it There's just the singing of the birds The sounds of the natural scream A strange example The imagination wishes to be embraced by freedom It is laid bare in order to be desired But the imagination must keep track of the flesh responding—its increments of awareness—a slow progression It must be beautiful and it can't be free -for John Zorn, after his “Elegy”