1269 Arts and sciences poems

to say no more of art than that it makes, by its very distraction a mode of abiding accordingly, its variations:    each type of thread-and-piecework named double engagement ring, log cabin, or broken dishes all built on the same geometric figures— precise interception of angle and line so too each tale of love is rooted in that first tale:    the poet descending to the underworld finally granted his shade, who'll follow him only to disappear again.      perhaps one version has them reunite affixed in their solo chromospheres the stars, which, to the human eye, appear to overlap substanceless love immune at last to gravity and time— in texas (I might as well recount this as a story) there's a town with a courthouse built on concrete and twisted iron edified in red granite, capitals & architrave of red sandstone with point and punch, a carver broached the effigy of his muse he rendered her attractive features, down to the very blush of course she spurned him, of course there was another to whom she turned love should not be written in stone but written in water (I paraphrase the latin of catullus) the sculptor carried on:    not just the face of his beloved but the face of her other lover: snaggle-toothed, wart-peppered, pudgy them both, made into ugly caricatures of themselves, as wanton as the carver perceived them, and as lewd well, craze and degenerate and crack:   the portraits hold though, long since, the participants have dwindled into dirt beautiful.      unbeautiful.      each with an aspect of exactness tread light upon this pedestal.      dream instead of a time before your love disfigured, a time withstanding even crass, wind-beaten time itself

The   first    great    poet  of the  crisis  the   one  whose generation   was  left  as  if firebombed     though      if you    look     back   at    the seminal    work    you   will see  that only a  handful of of   the   poems    explicitly touch   on   that  dark time the    blood    filling     with virulence    and   the  night always          black         and spangled   with  stars  says when           faced         with difficult      material      the poet       should          begin obliquely      creeping     in from   the   edge  a  square of         light             moving imperceptibly   across  the floor as    the earth    turns and   so   I   will   tell    you that  ever  since  I saw  the footage           of              the journalists   hiding  in  the attic      the    rope    ladder pulled     up     after    them only     the       one       with foreign   papers    left     to stand   her   ground  down below   the   journalist    at first     calmly    sitting   on the      couch      but     then huddling  in  a   cabinet  as the     soldiers    enter    the apartment     next       door, the   cries   of   the  mother floating       through       the wall ib’ni       ib’ni the language     ancient       like something       whetted   on stone     the   way   I   image language      would        have sounded     in     the  broken mouth    of     King      David Absalom        Absalom the man-child       hanging     by the    shining    black   noose of     his     own    hair  in the fragrant         woods           of Ephraim ib’ni           ib’ni next    door    the   sound  of a    body      being     dragged from     the    apartment    as his            mother           wails into      the        dark        how many     mothers   and   how many     sons    dragged   out into    a       night     spangled with             stars          where everything    is  a   metaphor for      virulence my     son my   son and   ever  since  I saw    a   clip  of the   footage the       foreign        journalist managed   to    smuggle   out of   the  country   images   of the        journalist       herself hiding   in   a   space   meant for   buckets   and   rags    as next     door    the     soldiers drag    away   a   young   boy please     hear     it   again   a child    of    no    more   than twelve         his        mother’s lamentations             forever seared   in    the    blood   of this    thing   I   call  my  life but     really     what     is    it what   is   this  light  I   hold so   dear  it  wants   to move imperceptibly    across   the floor    as   the   earth   turns so     as   not     to      become too       aware      of      itself?

I ply with all the cunning of my art This little thing, and with consummate care I fashion it—so that when I depart, Those who come after me shall find it fair And beautiful. It must be free of flaws— Pointing no laborings of weary hands; And there must be no flouting of the laws Of beauty—as the artist understands. Through passion, yearnings infinite—yet dumb— I lift you from the depths of my own mind And gild you with my soul’s white heat to plumb The souls of future men. I leave behind This thing that in return this solace gives: “He who creates true beauty ever lives.”

Paper creased is with a touch made less by half, reduced as much again by a second fold—so the wish to press our designs can diminish what we hold. But by your hand’s careful work, I understand how this unleaving makes of what’s before something finer and finally more.

On the express train to Vienna she writes in her diary notes about Rome and Naples. Ink marks like parthenogenetic aphids, pages like blood smears of homing pigeons. She is alone, gray, reconciled, a Leda long after the swan's departure, Odysseus retired at Lotophagitis. Back home, in Maryland, the notebook will be interred in the archetypal drawer, among the yellowed love letters, among the infant hair curls, among the dried adult flowers, near the cushion where the castrated cat dreams while Mahler's forever forever forever chokes in the green wallpaper. It is her message to imagined little sons; it is her membership in the club of Swifts, Goethes, Rimbauds, Horatiuses and deathwatch beetles. It is her monument outlasting bronze, five-dimensional reality, the last engraving of primeval man on reindeer bone, the last drop of the fluid soul before evaporation.

An erasure of  Laura Redden Searing’s “My Story” Generous instinct, were you My hand I must Think. The later brain. My hands craving every Learned heart. Nature, art, World. In my memories I thought of trust Then all fear. I Fell on my pain. Hope shall in loss Throb. My, my, my Stand for the release. A nation’s groan beneath Dear night. All right.

My observation are as follows: still dirty “in the wisdom” that is constructivist red theatre pieces, bike gloves all like a mashed crop of dyed hair, a bad crop this year. We started the play at once: An Enemy of the People. A Buddha of lapidary contrition enters, hospice, tears,La Clemenza di Tito interlude rolled in tulips of decisive consequence. Sprezzatura. Our row throws that cosmic scratch, apotropaic, scalene back to the corner pocket angle on the hustle— “Live at the Paradox.”

To say how much I've missed you, I offer this, at most mist, at least assorted letters, lists, numbers I insist tell stories. I kissed you last, Dad, in the casket in which you passed on, to some next place, but last listened for your voice last night, these long years after, will listen next when next oppressed by blue-gray, as I am now, as I, thus lost, am always by your absence.

As gestures to beckon geometry's end I post letters to my lost Mayan sisters, solicit layers sussed from layers to test history, push past parallel. Mystery becomes you, Mother, as does the lust the rest of us suffer, lust you must once have induced. What perceptions I trust defy perspective. I take my troubles scribbled, not erased.

for Joshua Starbuck, master of montage A Caledonian megalith. A tinted bather from Cape Ann. The 1937 kith and kin of a Kentuckian beside their Model T sedan. The Celts. Who set me this arith- metic of icons? Who began by pasting in Bob Dylan? Zith- erpicking rhinestone charlatan. He tries to be American. Who tries to be American as hard as him? Not Aly Khan. Not George F. Babbitt the Zenith- ophiliac Zenithian. As sure as God made Granny Smith a pricier-sounding product than the Winesap or the Jonathan, there is a mystery and myth to being an American, and being an American compounds it. Kurosawa-san, steady my Nikon while I pan across the porches of forsyth- iabedizened Mattapan in search of ... dot dot dot ... the plan, the weltanschauung, the ethnith- ifying principle a pith helmeted Oxbridge fancy-dan could pounce on like a fiend from Ran and authenticate forthwith. The cromlech beetles o’er the frith. The ultimate American possession rattles his Kal-Kan, Prince, you’re a prince. A dog a man can talk to. What this caravan of adumbrations and antith- esises panteth for is Dith Pran and the long-lost Mrs. Pran: Far-fetched, tenacious, captious: fan tabulously American.