1269 Arts and sciences poems

The Traveler’s Vade Mecum, line 907 The exhibition opened on a rainy Thursday, with cello suite. They hung the paintings to be viewed from both front and back. Luna moths flapped their great green sail-wings. Stingrays flapped their great gray sail-wings. Those visiting the exhibition were encouraged to touch. Captions were available in Braille and audio. The exhibition tasted like cherries. A critic asked if the exhibition was a “facile juxtaposition of   ideals.” The mother of the exhibition calls constantly and the father, never. The exhibition has taken to pouring a little scotch in the coffee. When designing layout, remember it is crucial how a bias cut fits at the exhibition’s hips and foot traffic turns to the right, not the left. They hung the sculptures to be viewed from both above and below. They painted the walls a shade of “eggshell, minus calcium.” The exhibition did not consider itself an exhibitionist until the incident at the east window. The exhibition is very sorry and will refund upon request. Stingrays flapped their great gray sail-wings. Luna moths flapped their great green sail-wings. No matter how short a trip, the exhibition packs two pairs of shoes. The exhibition never knows when it is coming home again.

In what way names were applied to things. Filtration. Not every word that has been applied, still exists. Through proliferation and differentiation. Airborn. Here, this speck and this speck you missed. Numbers in cell division. Spheres of doubt. The paradigm’s stitchery of unrelated points. What escapes like so much cotton batting. The building, rather, in flames. Does flight happen in an order. Dates to impugn and divluge. The laws were written on twelve tablets of bronze which were fastened to the rostra. Trembling hold. Manner of variation and shift. Vacillation hung by tactile and auditory cues.

I stumble down        around torn peaks “Fit the right suit to trick them all.” the questions fall around allure. Poems floated from the hearth sparks out the mouth. I am wound up, bored we are only strangers on our way the hotel                turned slender to mind now written out (sloppy) to music dark brown wood gold mirrors (tight) The drinking songs from upper stories drag us to sleep                 a bend in the basement wall unexplained scorched. pulling on clean clothes I let myself out walk up underground to a far off hill smoke on top “The orchestra of the immense magnified inner life is now prodigious.” the strings sound down make the surface of a mirror & hang the head my forbidden past Rose & Silk the wine is young The brooks still hum with melted snow

Salt is pity, brooms are fury, The waterclock stands for primordial harmony. The spruce forest, which is said to be Like a cathedral Indicates proliferation of desire. The real meaning of the beginning Will not become clear until later, if ever. Things no longer being what they were, Artifice poses as process, The voice is tinged with melancholy. The teacup, the brass knuckles, and the pearl-handled razor Resist interpretation As if to say That half the wind is in the mind And half in the mind of the wind. Speaking through the character Who comes to faith on his deathbed, The author makes apology For saying things he didn’t mean. Little girl-cousins with ribbons in their hair Confuse him with their names and are carried away By laughter. Thus, The force of love comes from belief, Hate is from lack of doubt.

A hackneyed burden, to a hackneyed air,— “I love thee only,—thou art wondrous fair!” Alas! the poets have worn the theme threadbare! Can I not find some words less tame and old, To paint thy form and face of perfect mould, Thy dewy lips, thy hair of brown and gold? Can I not sing in somewhat fresher strain The love I lavish and receive again,— The thrilling joy, so like to thrilling pain? Can I not, by some metaphor divine, Describe the life I quaff like nectared wine In being thine, and knowing thou art mine? Ah, no! this halting verse can naught express; No English words can half the truth confess, That have not all been rhymed to weariness! So let me cease my scribbling for to-day, And maiden, turn thy lovely face this way,— Words will not do, but haply kisses may!

It had almost nothing to do with sex. The boy in his corset and farthingale, his head- voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin was not and never had been simply in our pay. Or was it some lost logic the regional accent restores? A young Welsh actor may play a reluctant laborer playing Thisby botching similes and stop our hearts with wonder. My young friend he’s seven—touched his mother’s face last night and said It’s wet and, making the connection he has had to learn by rote,You’re sad. It’s never not like this for him.As if, the adolescents mouth wherever California spills its luminous vernacular.As if, until the gesture holds, or passes. Let’s just say we’ll live here for a while. O habitus. O wall. O moon. For my young friend it’s never not some labored simulacrum, every tone of voice, each give, each take is wrested from an unrelenting social dark. There’s so much dark to go around (how odd to be this and no other and, like all the others, marked for death), it’s a wonder we pass for locals at all. Take Thisby for instance: minutes ago she was fretting for lack of a beard and now she weeps for a lover slain by a minute’s misreading. Reader, it’s sharp as the lion’s tooth. Who takes the weeping away now takes delight as well, which feels for all the world like honest work. They’ve never worked with mind before, the rich man says. But moonlight says,With flesh.

Switzerland, 1920 Dear Friend, “Called away” from my country, I square the egg and put it in a letter that all may read, gilding each word a little so that touched, it yields to a secret stirring, a small gold bird on a spring suddenly appearing to sing a small song of regret, elation, that overspills all private bounds, although you ask, as I do, what now do we sing to, sing for? Before the Great War, I made a diamond-studded coach three inches high with rock crystal windows and platinum wheels to ceremoniously convey a speechless egg to Court. All for a bored Czarina! My version of history fantastic and revolutionary as I reduced the scale to the hand-held dimensions of a fairy tale, hiding tiny Imperial portraits and cameos in eggs of pearl and bone. Little bonbons, caskets! The old riddle of the chicken and the egg is answered thus: in the Belle Epoque of the imagination, the egg came first, containing, as it does, both history and uncertainty, my excesses inducing unrest among those too hungry to see the bitter joke of an egg one cannot eat. Oblique oddity, an egg is the most beautiful of all beautiful forms, a box without corners in which anything can be contained, anything except Time, that old jeweler who laughed when he set me ticking. Here, among the clocks and watches of a country precisely ordered and dying, I am not sorry, I do not apologize. Three times I kiss you in memory of that first Easter, that first white rising, and send this message as if it could save you: Even the present is dead. We must live now in the future. Yours, Fabergé.

Ink-black, but moving independently across the black and white parquet of print, the ant cancels the author out. The page, translated to itself, bears hair-like legs disturbing the fine hairs of its fiber. These are the feet of summer, pillaging meaning, destroying Alexandria. Sunlight is silence laying waste all languages, until, thinly, the fictional dialogue begins again: the page goes on telling another story.

the lonely Incorporating the words of L.S. Lowry I used to paint the sea, but never a shore, and nobody was sailing on it. It wasn’t even the sea, it was just my own loneliness. It’s all there, you know. It’s all in the sea. The battle is there, the inevitability of it all, the purpose. When I switched to people they were all lonely. Crowds are the loneliest thing of all, I say. Every individual in them is a stranger to everyone else. I would stand for hours in one spot and scores of little kids who hadn’t had a wash for weeks would group round me. Had I not been lonely, none of my work would have happened. I should not have done what I’ve done, or seen what I’ve seen. There’s something grotesque in me and I can’t help it. I’m drawn to others who are like that. They’re very real people. It’s just I’m attracted to sadness and there are some very sad things. These people are ghostly figures. They’re my mood, they’re myself. Lately, I started a big self-portrait. I thought I won’t want this thing, no one will, so I went and turned it into a grotesque head. memo to lowry You’re right, there are grotesques who shine a dark light that lures us like how the sirens tried to lure Odysseus, and yes, maybe we ourselves are among the grotesques, but there are also the beautiful who, if we’re lucky, save us from ourselves, and validate the sun’s light, and maybe also the moon’s.

I suppose so. I was living in an attic in Philadelphia It became very hot in the summer and so I stayed in the bars. I didn’t have any money and so with what was almost left I put a small ad in the paper and said I was a writer looking for work . . . which was a god damned lie; I was a writer looking for a little time and a little food and some attic rent. a couple days later when I finally came home from somewhere the landlady said, there was somebody looking for you. and I said, there must be some mistake. she said, no, it was a writer and he said he wanted you to help him write a history book. oh, fine, I said, and I knew with that I had another week’s rent—I mean, on the cuff— so I sat around drinking wine on credit and watching the hot pigeons suffer and fuck on my hot roof. I turned the radio on real loud drank the wine and wondered how I could make a history book interesting but true. but the bastard never came back, and I had to finally sign on with a railroad track gang going West and they gave us cans of food but no openers and we broke the cans against the seats and sides of railroad cars a hundred years old with dust the food wasn’t cooked and the water tasted like candlewick and I leaped off into a clump of brush somewhere in Texas all green with nice-looking houses in the distance I found a park slept all night and then they found me and put me in a cell and they asked me about murders and robberies. they wanted to get a lot of stuff off the books to prove their efficiency but I wasn’t that tired and they drove me to the next big town fifty-seven miles away the big one kicked me in the ass and they drove off. but I lucked it: two weeks later I was sitting in the office of the city hall half-asleep in the sun like the big fly on my elbow and now and then she took me down to a meeting of the council and I listened very gravely as if I knew what was happening as if I knew how the funds of a halfass town were being dismantled. later I went to bed and woke up with teethmarks all over me, and I said, Christ, watch it, baby! you might give me cancer! and I’m rewriting the history of the Crimean War! and they all came to her house— all the cowboys, all the cowboys: fat, dull and covered with dust. and we all shook hands. I had on a pair of old bluejeans, and they said oh, you’re a writer, eh? and I said: well, some think so. and some still think so . . . others, of course, haven’t quite wised up yet. two weeks later they ran me out of town.