1269 Arts and sciences poems

Momentarily the language of description is lost what you see with your eyes is enough, for you, anyway but how to get the sense of what you saw across to another person it’s possible through the spirit in your voice when you say “it was great!” to convey what happened in that moment & it was great not only that it was terrific, & interesting too it was nice & I had a good time doing it. I had fun. You should have been there. Not only that, it was beautiful. It was inspiring.

grown to give this gun to you that sings around another metal grip inside the stall that goes against the marker that has cuts and calculates their known deception, something ran instead around the parked encircles disks. wagon, tent was all that heard, no mouths were twice together found or borrowed in the ceiling of another torso promising this twice together head, this push through veins that gives your death another word, another his, another whipping rain with any arm and any end finished — pocketed amount that goes around the dust inside their word, their forest cut like wounded deer in sights they have you down around the bear that stole and bit no wash, no jail in beaming what had nothing in this earth to speak the level of their tongue that is all know, and all the S that Panamá has had in hand with me, I dream you were my heart all sewn together by their was and is is known right now

I hear a book being written, my sister says, or is it a poem? Her eyes are closed. It has a lot of semicolons. One sentence or two? she wants to know. Comma? Period. Well, I say, semicolons join and separate. Grammar, my sister says, is very interesting.

Doubt not the artist and his age (though bald as the pilled head of garlic), married or divorced and even vying downstage, are both aware that God or Caesar is the handle to the camel’s hair. Ye weeping monkeys of the Critics’ Circus (colorless as malic acid in a Black Hamburg grape), what profit it to argue at the wake (a hurrah’s nest of food and wine with Auld Lang Syne to cheer the dead), if the artist wrought (contrary to what the black sanders said) for Ars’, the Cathedra’s, or the Agora’s sake? No critic a Gran Galeoto between the Art-lover and the work of art, the world-self of the make- believe becomes the swimming pool of a class, the balsam apple of the soul and by the soul and for the soul, or silvered Scarahaeus glass in which Necessity’s figuranti of innocence and guilt mirror themselves as they pass. If brass, in the name of Id or Sinai or Helicon, wakes up the trumpet, is it to blame? Although the moment’s mistone and the milieu’s groan sharp an unbearable ache in the f of the age’s bone, this pain is only the ghost of the pain the artist endures, endures, —like Everyman— alone. The artist is a zinnia no first frost blackens with a cloven hoof; an eyeglass —in the eye of a dusty wind— to study the crosses and tangles in warp and woof; an evergreen cherry parasitic upon a winter sun; a paltry thing with varicose veins when the twelve fatigues are done. Under the Lesbian rule of the seeress Nix, blood and black bile mix: in the second of a bestiary-goat’s caprice, Elan, the artist’s undivorceable spouse becomes a Delilah of Délice or a Xanthippe bereft of sonnets from the Portuguese. In Chronos Park the Ars-powered Ferris wheel revolves through golden age and dark as historied isms rise and fall and the purple of the doctor’s robe (ephemeral as the flesh color of the fame flower) is translated into the coffin’s pall. The St. John’s agony of the artist in his gethsemane without a St. John’s fire— the Vedic god of the snaky noose discovers; his far far cry, like the noise of block tin, crackles the sky: “Wayfaring man unneighbored by a wayfaring tree (though one may rue this bark of the Moreton Bay laurel), it is true a something trans- Brow or cis- Brow —or both— wills one to the wings of the eagle, or to the teats of the sow. Yet, no lip need sneer to the beard of an ape of God, ‘Thou thing of no bowels, thou!’ So, I say as the Sire who chastens and rewards, ‘Let thy blue eyes resist white stars of red desire.’” Like the shape of Africa, the raison d’étre of Art is a question mark: without the true flight of the bat, it is a hanker in the dark. Not as face answers face in water, but as windows answer each other, one viewer, lyrical as Hafiz in his cups, discovers a lark; his companion, flat as an open Gladstone bag, spies out an ark. The blow of a fist on the nape, this question came from a Dog, “What color can escape the fluky flues in the cosmic flux?” Perhaps the high-C answer lies in the wreck the sea sucks back into her bowels. Let the Say be said: “In Philae the color is blue; in Deir-el-Baheri, red; in Abydos, yellow— and these are by the ravens fed.” Art is not barrel copper easily separated from the matrix; it is not fresh tissues —for microscopic study— one may fix; unique as the white tiger’s pink paws and blue eyes, Art leaves her lover as a Komitas deciphering intricate Armenian neums, with a wild surmise. At once the ebony of his face became moodless—bare as the marked-off space between the feathered areas of a cock; then, his spoon-shape straightened. His glance as sharp as a lance- olate leaf, he said: “It matters not a tinker’s dam on the hither or thither side of the Acheron how many rivers you cross if you fail to cross the Rubicon!” Postscript: He was robbed and murdered in his flat, and the only witness was a Hamletian rat. But out of Black Bourgeoise came— for John Laugart— a bottle of Schiedam gin and Charon’s grin and infamy, the Siamese twin of fame.

Under the fire escape, crouched, one knee in cinders, I pulled the ball-peen hammer from my belt, cracked a square of window pane, the gummed latch, and swung the window, crawled through that stone hole into the boiler room of Canton Elementary School, once Canton High, where my father served three extra years as star halfback and sprinter. Behind a flashlight’s cane of light, I climbed a staircase almost a ladder and found a door. On the second nudge of my shoulder, it broke into a hallway dark as history, at whose end lay the classroom I had studied over and over in the deep obsession of memory. I swept that room with my light—an empty blackboard, a metal table, a half-globe lying on the floor like a punctured basketball—then followed that beam across the rows of desks, the various catalogs of lovers, the lists of all those who would and would not do what, until it stopped on the corner desk of the back row, and I saw again, after many years the name of my father, my name, carved deep into the oak top. To gauge the depth I ran my finger across that scar, and wondered at the dreams he must have lived as his eyes ran back and forth from the cinder yard below the window to the empty practice field to the blade of his pocket knife etching carefully the long, angular lines of his name, the dreams he must have laid out one behind another like yard lines, in the dull, pre-practice afternoons of geography and civics, before he ever dreamed of Savo Sound or Guadalcanal. In honor of dreams I sank to my knees on the smooth, oiled floor, and stood my flashlight on its end. Half the yellow circle lit the underedge of the desk, the other threw a half-moon on the ceiling, and in that split light I tapped the hammer easy up the overhang of the desk top. Nothing gave but the walls’ sharp echo, so I swung again, and again harder, and harder still in half anger rising to anger at the stubborn joint, losing all fear of my first crime against the city, the county, the state, whatever government claimed dominion, until I had hammered up in the ringing dark a salvo of crossfire, and on a frantic recoil glanced the flashlight, the classroom spinning black as a coma. I’ve often pictured the face of the teacher whose student first pointed to that topless desk, the shock of a slow hand rising from the back row, their eyes meeting over the question of absence. I’ve wondered too if some low authority of the system discovered that shattered window, and finding no typewriters, no business machines, no audiovisual gear missing, failed to account for it, so let it pass as minor vandalism. I’ve heard nothing. And rarely do I fret when I see that oak scar leaning against my basement wall, though I wonder what it means to own my father’s name.

Fair enough: you people have eaten me, I—wrote you down. They’ll lay you out on a dinner table, me—on this desk. I’ve been happy with little. There are dishes I’ve never tried. But you, you people eat slowly, and often; You eat and eat. Everything was decided for us back in the ocean: Our places of action, our places of gratitude. You—with belches, I—with books, with truffles, you. With pencil, I, you and your olives, me and my rhyme, with pickles, you. I, with poems. At your head—funeral candles like thick-legged asparagus: your road out of this world a dessert table’s striped cloth. They will smoke Havana cigars on your left side and your right; your body will be dressed in the best Dutch linen. And—not to waste such expensive cloth, they will shake you out, along with the crumbs and bits of food, into the hole, the grave. You—stuffed capon, I—pigeon. Gunpowder, your soul, at the autopsy. And I will be laid out bare with only two wings to cover me. Late July 1933

Cabbage—the first word put down with his new pen, a trophy pen, like a trophy wife, not cheap, absurd to use a ballpoint pen for a task like this, a challenge, for which he’d also bought a new, but antique, rolltop desk recently restored, with matching chair, also not cheap, and for which he’d renovated the attic room with pine-paneled walls, bookshelves, and a good light for his new office or weekend office, a place planned for many years, even before college, back in high school in fact, a resolve rare in his life, but about which he’d dreamed in free moments at work, and which kept him sane during those tedious years of doing the taxes for strangers, but now at last begun, excitingly begun, as he leaned forward with pen raised to put down on paper the first word of his first novel.

A bridge is a passage between two banks. On Saturdays both banks are closed. A well is located in a wall of sound. But space is not the stake and suddenly both travellers fall in. Now draw a line between some water and their eyes. Express it as the border of a reservoir. The term ears stands ready to attack. Attach it then repeat the phrase my body lives inside a closed shed. The nose with this noise invents a scale. The cottage is attempts and tries to break at random or at noon a forest hidden by a single tree. Narrative dilates sporadic or clairvoyant in a place where bed becomes the meaning of the rest. Now say embrace me. Motors trivialize. Eighty-six windows show the noun to be a house. The heart is now a hole in space that falls across and leaves a certain number. Forget the thirds in this and the silhouettes change place. You can no longer have a choice. You start at zero by the church called word in the forest by a beach beyond the sea between a fingernail at the moment logic begins. Basic liquids add a soup. Now change it. Write down I can no longer state a model is at work. Then make filters for each body. Draw all the composition off. Forbid readers to leave. This sea as a mixture and the sand relating questions to the horizontal movements of a prebiotic plan. You are now discovering that concrete form involves both circulation and the clinamen. Start to weave and you’ll connect this space. Now try to say the eye is paradoxical so that all future lines repeat a plate. Nothing is narrative. Now alter it. The equator drops and float upstream. A pluralist sidewalk remains. Go back to the start. The Saturdays stay close to a catastrophic separation. The bridge is now a son who kills the father at a crossroad. In the well of the week drops the son’s name. Add wings to it. Now set out all the other links to constitute a set of probable ideas. The crevice of the lip connects a writing that’s as still as ink. This final switch is exactly what’s happening. The constant factor in a cloud.

I wonder if I’ve really scrutinized this experience like you’re supposed to have if you can type —Frank O’Hara, “For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson” I was born in Tennessee. I was raised on ideas. Now I fall down as a person in bodily emulsion. But spiritually speaking? I’m not suffering. I’m looking at nine pictures on a light blue wall in black frames with white matting. In one the Secretary of Defense walks through Iraq in a suit and boots, surrounded by a thick white line. If it wasn’t like this I wouldn’t care, which is not to say I wouldn’t mind. Some find this layering of thoughts within the ever-diminishing moment to be a complete defense to the charge of privilege, but surely more is expected, and there is no defense; we commit crimes and show ourselves and each other unbelievable mercy. To be meticulous is to give up in a way still marked by effort, which for many is the one, true art. What did the New Critics think about plagiarism? Repetition as a form of time travel? Conservatives prefer repetition in service of an incantatory mourning for a lost world, but one plagiarizes the self in the commission of boredom. Maybe it’s the difference between new meanings and a complex weave of old ones, or those who hold no new meanings are possible. Or maybe all that’s possible is a new ordering of priorities within experiences. A sensibility and its chosen course are what matter most to me. The present calcifies into interlocking crystals, leaving so much gratuitous precedent to be lined up in the narrow hallway of one’s attention that a trajectory could be plotted to anywhere. You go through each room and remove a single wall, but only in your mind, and still the house collapses. It wasn’t built to last. What kind of imposition would that have been anyway? Words on a page and a bare molecule of intentionality coming through this pinhole of sensation and time. My face, lit by screens and angled penitently towards coffee, withers like a democracy under its loudest features. Sometimes it’s hard to watch, I know. Not at all like yours, or yours, presences to which my life is a distracted vigil, having found no higher calling. Certainly not this, which could happen or not and all that's at stake is whether I’ve told you. You drive us through the rain in Virginia after taking me to see my 93-year-old grandfather in Nashville. My dad and I went to his hospital room at night, where he told me about the Korean man he’d met at the church he built in Nagoya who had to hide from police after becoming a suspect in the kidnapping of a local teenager. He hadn’t kidnapped her. Years later they learned she’d run away in the middle of the night to avoid an arranged marriage. But prejudice against Koreans ran high in late forties Japan, so my grandfather’s friend became the target of an investigation whose misguidedness ensured its longevity. I forgot to ask my grandfather, whose name is Ernest, what Nagoya was like in the late forties, after a quarter of the city was incinerated by American firebombing that Robert McNamara, who also lived to see 93, later conceded was a war crime. A few weeks after the Korean man disappeared he called Ernest and asked to meet at a popular restaurant in town. Ernest arrived at the appointed time and found the restaurant packed with people. A hostess, upon learning whom Ernest was meeting, directed him to the restaurant's second floor, which he found completely empty except for his friend who sat alone at a table at the far end and waved Ernest over as soon as he came up the stairs. They talked for a couple of hours, during which time the man explained that he was innocent, but, given the conditions in Nagoya, he would have to remain out of sight, at least for now. He thanked Ernest for his friendship and went on to explain that he owned the restaurant they were sitting in, as well as a couple of nearby hotels, and he was actually quite wealthy. A few years later, Ernest’s job as a missionary was moving him to Tokyo, and apparently his friend learned he was leaving because he called Ernest again and asked to meet at ten the next night, this time at an address my grandfather recognized as being in the industrial section of town, mainly warehouses and the like, with few stores or restaurants and probably no people around so late. With some trepidation, Ernest went to the address at ten and waited. The streets were empty except, after fifteen or twenty minutes, a yakimo man whom Ernest heard a couple of blocks away. Yakimo men drive carts around at night selling sweet potatoes—yakimo—that are roasted over charcoal on the cart itself. You can hear them at night bellowing out, "Yaaakiiiiiiiiiiiimooooooo!" Eventually the yakimo man came right up next to Ernest, then stopped his cart and said, in Japanese, “It’s me.” It was his friend, who explained that this was one of several disguises his circumstances unfortunately required. He said he’d heard Ernest would soon be moving, and he just wanted to see him again to thank him for his friendship. They spoke briefly, and then my grandfather's friend rolled his cart away, occasionally calling out, "Yaaakiiiiiiiiiiiimooooooo!" And now you and I are driving through Virginia again, the sky a further gray. I woke up this morning with you in Roanoke, thirty-five years old for the first time, in love and astonished. I jogged three miles while listening to “The Weight” seven times in a row and thought the song could be a pacifist anthem: you righteous people go on and kill each other; all us sinners will be here, living in peace and mutual assistance. The feeling vanished, or perhaps deepened past visibility, when I heard about the acquittal. Bastille Day. A wary sun bided its time in the drowsy grad school of an overcast sky, and then, finding its moment, delivered a bleaching intensity to the reading glasses resting on the dashboard of our financed Acura under a dewy windshield, casting bleary water shadows through the double lens of windshield and glasses across the car’s front seat, the deep blue fabric of which was brushed into dark and light patches working crossways from the sun cast complexly through fat leaves of the adjoining yard’s many hardwoods. A single leaf shadow bobbled over the plastic lid of a day-old coffee cup sitting in the center console next to the gear shift, white and blue-gray mixing over the still black hole of the spout, a small, circular cinema. Doubled, tiny threads of dust on the rearview glowed in a stripe of light reflected from the trunk forward, trembling minutely as the air inside the Acura warmed, circulated, and gained humidity, seashells of fog developing from the bottom of the windshield at the defroster’s vents. Spots of dew on the roof shrank as they dried, leaving concentric trails of pollen and air dirt in a yellow-brown haze against the car’s light blue exterior, sediment at the level of microns building glacially over weeks of quickly warming summer mornings. Seatbelts and downward seams in the upholstery lent no sense of vertical logic to the interior. The passenger side buckle rested papally on a pile of folders and papers in the seat. The silver tip of the buckle breached the edge of a pie chart printed on the piece of paper at the top of the pile. The chart was in grayscale and demonstrated striking productivity. Before the dewdrops on the windshield dried, the bumpy shadows of four of them fell evenly along the rounded edge of the chart’s largest triangle, giving the edge’s black line the appearance of growing darker as it travelled through the dewdrop shadows. Up very close, the paper itself was a thicket of rough fibers, a cotton ball flattened, and the black line of the chart’s edge was a dense, black dust resting on the thicket, containing to one side a far less concentrated swarm of black particles.

I called you names, for the further processing of color or movement, all you were able to get into, a sort of blur. She leaned out against the water. Lay me down like anthozoa to anthozoa, with the other light things that brush against the earth. Breathe. Don't breathe. Breathe. A figure in a constellation was staring off. Did it turn up three days later, did it accept inside its body, a no for universal application, an only mine or yours? Gate One. Open your mouth. If you would only open your mouth. Gate Two. To bridle, to curb, to dam. Gate Three. Anagnorisis. Gate Four. Closed. Gate Five. Hold up. Gate Six. If everywhere that Mary went, the brain was public and exposed. Gate Seven. Do you mind, do you. Gate Eight. Fish moving in the boat's direction will be recorded in our diagram with the more substantial marks. Gate Nine. The rhythm and interval between objects. Gate Ten. Our simplest subject. Our lightest lights. Our darkest darks.