1269 Arts and sciences poems

When you know that vore means eat, you will know that insectivores feed on grasshoppers, moths, and butterflies, mosquitoes, bees, and plain-old flies. When you know that carni means meat, you will know that carnivores eat snakes and lizards, deer and lamb, carrion, birds, fish, and ham. When you know that herb means plant, you will know that herbivores CAN'T eat anything that moves on a foot, just foods that spring up from a root. When you know that omni means all, you will know that omnivores call Everything they can suck or chew— sometimes even me or you— food.

I His holy slowly mulled over matter not all “delirium of delight” as were the forests of Brazil “Species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable” He was often becalmed in this Port Desire by illness or rested from species at billiard table As to Man “I believe Man… in the same predicament with other animals” II Cordilleras to climb—Andean peaks “tossed about like the crust of a broken pie” Icy wind Higher, harder Chileans advised eat onions for shortness of breath Heavy on him: Andes miners carried up great loads—not allowed to stop for breath Fossil bones near Santa Fé Spider-bite-scauld Fever Tended by an old woman “Dear Susan… I am ravenous for the sound of the pianoforte” III FitzRoy blinked— sea-shells on mountain tops! The laws of change rode the seas without the good captain who could not concede land could rise from the sea until—before his eyes earthquake— Talcahuana Bay drained out— all-water wall up from the ocean —six  seconds— demolished the town The will of God? Let us pray And now the Galápagos Islands— hideous black lava The shore so hot it burned their feet through their boots Reptile life Melville here later said the chief sound was a hiss A thousand turtle monsters drive together to the water Blood-bright crabs hunt ticks on lizards’ backs Flightless cormorants Cold-sea creatures— penguins, seals here in tropical waters Hell for FitzRoy but for Darwin Paradise Puzzle with the jig-saw gists beginning to fit IV Years… balancing probabilities I am ill, he said and books are slow work Studied pigeons barnacles, earthworms Extracted seeds from bird dung Brought home Drosera— saw insects trapped by its tentacles—the fact that a plant should secrete an acid acutely akin to the digestive fluid of an animal! Years till he published He wrote Lyell: Don’t forget to send me the carcass of your half-bred African cat should it die V I remember, he said those tropical nights at sea— we sat and talked on the booms Tierra del Fuego’s shining glaciers translucent blue clear down (almost) to the indigo sea (By the way Carlyle thought it most ridiculous that anyone should care whether a glacier moved a little quicker or a little slower or moved at all) Darwin sailed out of Good Success Bay to carcass- conclusions— the universe not built by brute force but designed by laws The details left to the working of chance “Let each man hope and believe what he can”

I am as guilty as many. No one speaks of David Ignatow anymore. No one speaks of  your lonesome time in the New York boonies, those outer reaches of Jamaica, where the Z & J Lines go no more. No one speaks of your sparsely furnished rooms, the low-slung Danish sofa where you sit and muse and daydream out the grimed window on rainy days. Even in the warmth of spring, there is no spring. You don’t go out much, I would imagine. I imagine much for the both of us. All those darknesses at noon. Those woodlands filled with songbirds twittering. Even scribblings on the morning Times are but a momentary respite. Words we’ve been blessed with, still blessed, even in our nightly dreams unfinished. Where art thou now, dear David? Where is the love for my desperation that I may fight your fears?

Negative, chalk (how I first saw your sign) reads like smoke signals. Has an extensive collection of glasses. On this side of the earth, no sides: where we practice our marksmanship, like soldiers in the city square, on corpses, no matter many beetles in the grass. Find it. Obstinately refuse to grasp. The spades, today valiantly shouldered, submerge in the unprofitable patch. Beetles are back-up plan zero, the if I were you thing inside the water container, which is too blind to trust with the wheel, to leave alone, even if in for the eve. The wounds we gave ourselves have just begun us, irreligious, and are the deterrents, as escarpments, of else but warlike heads. Go get your own aquarium, each fin becoming coiled beneath the bus, cruising along. There you'll find the nasal passage. Ask the operator for extreme commitment from the lamp shade to the table, all reflected in the unwashed window. Table of omens. Flotation devices murmured and murdered. The shutters of thunder are forlorn like the song of the sound of my own voice: a different tattooed country. Nationalism. At the rally, everybody's grin gives away two bags. All are watered, her body slipping out from under the dripping awning, effortlessly.

Now I know what it is to bite the tongue inside the mink stole: I do not want my inspiration stolen! ms. merongrongrong , for you I do my husband’s hairdo in a kind of flip. Now for once I want to build a data cage, a firewall, encrypt a fiber option, to lock up his image, lock the tick into his rib. I grasp his slim wrist and mask him for the gas: what a pheasant operation, his plumage brilliants as he whites out in closed caption, under glass. A harmless operation, a lipid removal or a viscous camera drip. ms. merongrongrong , please do not misprism me, for normally I am not like this, I do not creep or crypt, do not go hissing, bent double, kettlewaisted, clinched. When pressed I spread; when pinched, pinch; shiv and shinny my way out, make a finger mouth that shrinks the moon to a pupa, shove it in my purse to pupate on my cabbage stash, my petty rash cashola. In your stall, I dump the stenchy contents of my clutch on your counter, your clerk Moonlight scrubs the Wikifile, slicks the nail down to a nib, mums me in muff, ruff, muffler, ruffle, stomacher, pannier of ribbed silk, knight’s visor, hutch where I keep my prize rabbits, ms. merongrongrong I and II, which liplop the moonlit garden in stitched minks. ms. merongrongrong you send the Dutchman moon to touch us you cinch my betrothed ’s throat till he has to swallow what I bite, he drags himself to the window to vomit, he drags the bile sea in drag like a widow with a ghost lover, mourning over the suck white sand in white I wear a glass pane over my face, a teller’s window or a train’s, ms. merongrongrong , I stutter by in sailor’s guise, adrenal sink disguised as swagger, a thickened chest wall, a fat and padded neck. I go a specimen, I pose between the slides for my decline, ms. merongrongrong time thins and quickens, I help my husband up over the lip of the Dutch oven, his flank is ripped, one paw limp, one soft ear hangs by a thread, I lug myself up the path you have prepared for us, the trestle, the wooden tread—

I hope you'll pardon the informality of this letter, postmarked Olympia (Greece, not Washington), its task not simple: crossing lines you've crossed, time, mortality, to find you, who spent a lifetime crossing lines out, twisting, polishing them to shine cool and lustrous as the statue I fell in love with yesterday. I'm sure you saw him too, that perfect Hermes by Praxitelis, full lips, hips contrapposto. I wished to draw him down, latter-day Pygmalion, and embrace him. Or barring Eros (and the guards) I'd trace his face, the supple muscle of the marble. I had a student who resembled him— yes, Angelos—arrogant and beautiful. I never touched him though he touches me in dreams. Eros dangles his perfection in our faces like one-armed Hermes with his promise of the grapes. I was certain I'd dream of him last night. Instead I dreamed another in the growing chain of others with whom it ended not quite right. But the thirst was perfect, if its price pain and shattered crystal, spilling wine, all part and parcel of our imperfect lives. Then Art startles out of heartache, marble or page. You learned this long ago. Now I too see the wildest things require the strongest cages, the panther's double bars, or the seeds, bloodysweet and bitter, in the pomegranate's rind. Love held tight in a sonnet.

I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance displaying their capital letters like license plates. Truth cantering on a powerful horse, Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils. Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat, Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended, Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall, Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm. They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes. Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator. Valor lies in bed listening to the rain. Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood, and all their props are locked away in a warehouse, hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles. Even if you called them back, there are no places left for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss. The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair. Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies and next to it black binoculars and a money clip, exactly the kind of thing we now prefer, objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case, themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow, an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray. As for the others, the great ideas on horseback and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns, it looks as though they have traveled down that road you see on the final page of storybooks, the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep.

I want to be sweet and clear and free, as half a line of Auden, or an episode of the Powerpuff Girls; I want to be dew, and honest with mine, like Bob Marley, or Boesman the Boer. I want to swing and get it right at the speed of Pollock’s light, I want to be deep like Zulu, tight like Tamil, and trust my sense of Sanskrit true with little shame for its will. I want to dabble in the fields ignorant of what I was doing, rub myself on the ruins with a self-induced disease and gleefully lapse the hope to be heard. I want to fix my favourite English words into the forty-fifth century— haw, for instance, or luminary— hiding them in a snatch of prose… passed over in silence like Wittgenstein, no evidence for myself or Laura Riding, like Bharathiyar going mad composing, I want to dissolve into our language printing too little for my age; I want to be obscure but not leaden, flippant if I feel like it, then I don’t mind being called poetically shitty in a note from Manohar Shetty, writing into the time we’ve borrowed, singing from our utter boredom; I want to hold in me the heat of my combustion and leave this sweat-smear as a resurrection: I want to be sweet and clear and free, insouciant, insufferable, just like me.

“considering that by such trade and entercourse, all things heretofore uknowne, might have come to light.” —Pliny the Elder To cure a child of rickets, split a living ash tree down its length and pass the child through (naked, headfirst, three times). Seal the two halves of the tree back up and bind them with loam and black thread. If the tree heals, so will the child. (The child must also be washed for three mornings in the dew of the chosen tree.) Two men (no, women) must pass the child through. The first must say, “The Lord receives,” and the second say, “The Lord gives.” This is how you ensure a happy marriage: This is how you keep the engine running: A jackdaw or swallow that flies down the chimney must be killed. If it is allowed to leave the house by a window or door, a member of the family will This is how, when your mother tells you she’s going in for biopsy, to make the growth benign: Burn a fire and in the morning examine the ashes for footprints, the image of a ring, the likeness of a cat, a bed, a horse, a This is how you keep from thinking of the one thought you’re thinking: Say your own name backwards three (no four) times and turn around (keep your eyes shut). The unborn child must be called pot lid or tea kettle until you hear its voice. Carry a live bat around the house three times, then nail it upside down outside the window. This will ensure If your mother calls you at 6 A.M. while she eats her breakfast (do not eat after 7), this is how you can calm your voice: This is how you say Good luck and mean An egg laid on Sunday can be placed on the roof to ward of fire and lightning. If you put a stillborn child in an open grave, the man who is buried there will have a ticket straight to heaven. Never sleep with your feet toward the door. Do not sneeze while making a bed. Step on a beetle, and it will rain. Bury it alive in the earth for good weather. Put it in your mouth and your loved ones will When you see a dead bird lying in the road you must spit on it. If a rooster crows in the night, you must go and feel his feet. When a woman is in labor, all the locks in the house must be undone, windows and doors must be left ajar. This will not prevent death but will quicken the escape of the spirit if If the ash tree remedy fails, bring the child to a third (no, seventh) generation blacksmith. The child must first be bathed in the water trough, then laid on the anvil. Each of the smith’s tool’s must be passed over the body, and each time one must inquire what the tool is used for (no one must answer). Then the blacksmith must raise his hammer and bring it down (gently) three times (four) on the child’s body. If a fee is given or even asked for, the cure will not If the phone rings, this is how you answer: This is how you say, How did it go?

Toss in some wavy lines, an equal sign, and a squiggle, then a lilac log, boulders with faces, a few phrases like rock walls, twin marks from wagon wheels on granite. The tell-tale lilacs give away the cellar hole: magnetic lilacs, like nineteenth-century girls in pinafores and blossom sprays, stationed beside their no-longer houses. They look about to sing. Banana curls. Purple ribbons tying their waists. And boulders in the woods act as billboards interrupted by an enormous Mont Blanc fountain pen, lounging like an alligator. It intrudes. Comes out of my present time. No. Be less. It's a Bic ballpoint. Bleached by deletion, "By the middle of the nineteenth century, when de forestation reached its peak, more than half of New England's native forests"—according to Robert M. Thorson, Stone by Stone—"as much as 80 percent in the heavily settled parts of southern New England—had been cut down," "replaced with 'open space,'" the autumn foliage is paint-by-number and different tabs throughout are half-finished murals of a single type of tree in a single time of year. Here's the place where someone w/ a pewter spoon kneeled to plant the Lady's Slippers that still appear, and the mushrooms like a stack of dinner plates that run up the side of a rotting tree. Here's the fallen-in deer stand and the apple tree among maples making fruit for deer. Outside the woods, the puff of dust on the road where the school bus used to stop. Outside is the failure to stay in touch or, really, to ever be in touch. I didn't ever know them (my neighbors) well. In winter you are handed a white tray with a few tiny rock walls, short lines drawn with a ruler, an indent for where a cellar hole could be a hyperlink to once go once more to the lake and told to go at it, go play.