1269 Arts and sciences poems

Perhaps I’m a cruel artist. I always depict In great details, lovingly, all the defects On the faces and bodies of my models. I use my eyes and brushes to thread The jagged gaps of their stiff smiles. I pamper Each pimple, hump, massage each incrustation. I cajole my models into poses that are awkward, Dangerous, unhygienic, sometimes mortifying. I don’t care to paint smooth, poreless skin but collect All manners of rashes and eruptions. Inspired, I’ve forced a hundred bodies—impossibly old, Extremely young—onto appalling heaps, Democratically naked, viscous with sweat, spit and etc., Just so I could render the human condition Most accurately and movingly.

Aliens have inhabited my aesthetics for decades. Really since the early 70s. Before that I pretty much wrote as myself, though young. But something has happened to my memory, my judgment: apparently, my will has been affected. That old stuff, the fork in my head, first home run, Dad falling out of the car— I remember the words, but I can't get back there anymore. I think they must be screening my sensations. I'm sure my categories have been messed with. I look at the anthologies in the big chains and campus bookstores, even the small press opium dens, all those stanzas against the white space—they just look like the models in the catalogs. The models have arms and legs and a head, the poems mostly don't, but other than that it's hard—for me anyway—to tell them apart. There's the sexy underwear poem, the sturdy workboot poem you could wear to a party in a pinch, the little blaspheming dress poem. There's variety, you say: the button-down oxford with offrhymed cuffs. The epic toga, showing some ancient ankle, the behold! the world is changed and finally I'm normal flowing robe and shorts, the full nude, the scatter—Yes, I suppose there's variety, but the looks, those come on and read me for the inner you I've locked onto with my cultural capital sensing device looks! No thanks, Jay Peterman! No thanks, "Ordinary Evening in New Haven"! I'm just waiting for my return ticket to have any meaning, for those saucer-shaped clouds to lower! The authorities deny any visitations—hardly a surprise. And I myself deny them—think about it. What could motivate a group of egg-headed, tentacled, slimier-than-thou aestheticians with techniquies far beyond ours to visit earth, abduct naive poets, and inculcate them with otherwordly forms that are also, if you believe the tabloids, salacious? And these abductions always seem to take place in some provincial setting: isn't that more than slightly suspicious? Why don't they ever reveal themselves hovering over some New York publishing venue? It would be nice to get some answers here— we might learn something, about poetry if nothing else, but I'm not much help, since I'm an abductee, at least in theory, though, like I say, I don't remember much. But this writing seems pretty normal: complete sentences; semicolons; yada yada. I seem to have lost my avant-garde card in the laundry. They say that's typical. Well, you'll just have to use your judgment, earthlings! Judgment, that's your job! Back to work! As if you could leave! And you thought gravity was a problem!

Shooting pleasures Ok’d by My being seen For Or as If. * Not just light at the end of the tunnel, but hearts, bows, rainbows— all the stickers teachers award if pleased. * Pigeons bathe in technicolor fluid “of a morning.” * If I was banging my head with a shoe, I was just exaggerating— like raising my voice or the ante. Curlicues on iron gratings: Can it be a flourish is a grimace, but a grimace isn’t a flourish? * On the inscribed surface of sleep. Almost constant bird soundings. “Aloha, Fruity Pebbles!” Music, useful for abstracting emphasis. Sweet nothing to do with me.

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making and balancing on eyebeams above a sea of faces paces his way to the other side of day performing entrechats and sleight-of-foot tricks and other high theatrics and all without mistaking any thing for what it may not be For he's the super realist who must perforce perceive taut truth before the taking of each stance or step in his supposed advance toward that still higher perch where Beauty stands and waits with gravity to start her death-defying leap And he a little charleychaplin man who may or may not catch her fair eternal form spreadeagled in the empty air of existence

for Elizabeth Bishop You said to me that day, “There’s nothing you can do,” and spoke of Auden’s line: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” And though I honor you, especially your poems, the objects you dipped in light, then, left in the rainbow, let slip from our sight, I admitted, diving out of self, a sweet woman’s white caress, the hundreds of lives and places in books, failed to counter confusion. You did agree that it was Socrates who said to his Athenian friends that governments are only governments with many heads and cannot think as one. That history continues to show how they swing from war to peace and back again, in one wide gallow-sweep just as the pendulum of the world’s clocks returned its towns to craters. Now I must ask myself, fifteen cobalt-blue years later, if the dust of each new war that settles in our bones, and deadens a generation, is no more than negatives of the Kennedys, King, and Lennon, has less weight than what we felt the day the Apollo spaceship landed on the moon, and Auden’s line is true, then why did you to the end, live with the dark, sing into your ruin?

after Laura Riding Jackson There's a structure for idiocy—lamplight— all over the nation; it's an illumination with such sheer creative force it is misrecognized genius. I have misunderstood people's duplicitous ways—their lightbulbs— as righteous forms of complexity; not calculated obfuscations. Much like the voice in a poem that insists it sing the most important seer of light. Am I providing this luxury as well? Or is this my radical assertion in order to call into question what an aesthetic authority looks like? (That's my problem with the poem these days.) (The light in my office flickers on and off—the lamp is broken.) I see no enlightenment here, much like I see my acquaintances: bright lights and night lights. The fragility of the intellectual is the same as the poet's: It's all about the I and its desperate sense of the we.

for Robert Lowell We smile at each other and I lean back against the wicker couch. How does it feel to be dead? I say. You touch my knees with your blue fingers. And when you open your mouth, a ball of yellow light falls to the floor and burns a hole through it. Don’t tell me, I say. I don't want to hear. Did you ever, you start, wear a certain kind of silk dress and just by accident, so inconsequential you barely notice it, your fingers graze that dress and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper, you see it too and you realize how that image is simply the extension of another image, that your own life is a chain of words that one day will snap. Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands, and beginning to rise heavenward in their confirmation dresses, like white helium balloons, the wreaths of flowers on their heads spinning, and above all that, that’s where I’m floating, and that’s what it’s like only ten times clearer, ten times more horrible. Could anyone alive survive it?

Champollion fainted, she says, once he had wrested their secret from the hieroglyphs and saw them turn transparent. The serpent no longer with power to strike, but biting its tail. I smell my salts, my packets of words, panicked. I’m no longer sure whether they shape my reality or have too little mass to interact with naked matter. Then they would pass right through the earth as I will in death. The lightest particles gather the energy, he says, and given their density, outweigh stars. Thought follows thought, the interval calibrated on the space between your legs. Your yes fire, your no the crack of a whip. Well, more a filament breaking in a lightbulb. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge can’t be undone. Only muddied, as by motivation. And the way you thrust out your belly as you walk, with almost shameless indifference, makes a void in the air, but no case for cosmic deceleration. So even if I despair of plane surfaces, she says, writing, even talking, becomes an act of faith that my bondage to grammar and lexicon is not in vain. That these symbols in their beautiful and hallucinatory nudity blind me only to make me see. There is fire under the smoke. The sun also rises and falls. We still read at risk, he says, but we don’t need to lard the crocodile with arrows. The picture won’t devour us. It is swallowed in the fluid agreements between gonads and frontal lobe at a rate relative to the dark closing in. Yet two speeds in paroxysm need not mesh. A burning heart, failing to strike while hot, may not save the burning feet.

I’ve always felt as if I were in a cage. If I stick out an arm, I’m seen as wanting and taking. A leg: my violence is noted. When I mentioned the suffocation by my father, they made it autobiographical. The subtext of my work in iron has been ignored, lost in discussions of time, not space. What you’ll never understand about installations is that everyone else is always outside of them. I’m stuck inside. The move toward deliberate transience is the mark of a fool. If disappearing is inevitable, you must fight it. No one misses the prisoner. The bars are like a frame: you want in as much as I have always wanted out.

The rhinestone lights blink off and on. Pretend stars. I'm sick of explanations. A life is like Russell said of electricity, not a thing but the way things behave. A science of motion toward some flat surface, some heat, some cold. Some light can leave some after-image but it doesn't last. Isn't that what they say? That and that historical events exchange glances with nothingness.