1269 Arts and sciences poems

To Cornelius Nepos Who is it I should give my little book to, So pretty in its pumice-polished covers? Cornelius, I’ll give my book to you: Because you used to think my nothings somethings, At the time when you were the first in Italy To dare to write our whole long history, Three volumes, under the sign of Jupiter, Heroically achieved; so take this little Book of mine for what it’s worth; whatever; And oh, patroness Virgin, grant that it shall Live and survive beyond the century.

Holding only a handful of rushlight they pressed deeper into the dark, at a crouch until the great rock chamber flowered around them and they stood in an enormous womb of flickering light and darklight, a place to make a start. Raised hands cast flapping shadows over the sleeker shapes of radiance. They've left the world of weather and panic behind them and gone on in, drawing the dark in their wake, pushing as one pulse to the core of stone. The pigments mixed in big shells are crushed ore, petals and pollens, berries and the binding juices oozed out of chosen barks. The beasts begin to take shape from hands and feather-tufts (soaked in ochre, manganese, madder, mallow white) stroking the live rock, letting slopes and contours mould those forms from chance, coaxing rigid dips and folds and bulges to lend themselves to necks, bellies, swelling haunches, a forehead or a twist of horn, tails and manes curling to a crazy gallop. Intent and human, they attach the mineral, vegetable, animal realms to themselves, inscribing the one unbroken line everything depends on, from that impenetrable centre to the outer intangibles of light and air, even the speed of the horse, the bison's fear, the arc of gentleness that this big-bellied cow arches over its spindling calf, or the lancing dance of death that bristles out of the buck's struck flank. On this one line they leave a beak-headed human figure of sticks and one small, chalky, human hand. We'll never know if they worked in silence like people praying—the way our monks illuminated their own dark ages in cross-hatched rocky cloisters, where they contrived a binding labyrinth of lit affinities to spell out in nature's lace and fable their mindful, blinding sixth sense of a god of shadows—or whether (like birds tracing their great bloodlines over the globe) they kept a constant gossip up of praise, encouragement, complaint. It doesn't matter: we know they went with guttering rushlight into the dark; came to terms with the given world; must have had —as their hands moved steadily by spiderlight—one desire we'd recognise: they would—before going on beyond this border zone, this nowhere that is now here—leave something upright and bright behind them in the dark.

Pei designed the building with views, smooth masonry, and the mountains aligned for a photo opportunity; inside are files sufficient for forever, for fine tuning weather. Great Spangled Fritillary, the watcher vaguely recalls from Teach Yourself Lepidoptery, a book. He wanted to live in a land of appropriate weather with views of mountains and with music constant. He wants to tell a story but no one would listen, like opera: Black women clean the floors and shine the walls like silver nightly. Computers whir Platonic as nuns. Nothing escapes naming; storms arranged in teacups like anyone’s collection, like rows of butterflies pinned and satisfactory: this is the new landscape. Or there is a lewd father among the shrubbery watching daughters in weather; he breathes heavily and the wet wisdom begins, the storm gathering to spill across the ridge, longed for. Daughters must be warned against sincerity of frantic violins: “He was a man of sympathetic tendencies,” read the official report. “He was smaller than he looked and tended to lick chocolate from his fingers in a lascivious manner.” He tried his wife’s patience, it is true, and lived alone through the marriage, kept his own counsel. With such petty symbols as weather, he kept his own counsel. A butterfly like weather; the climate like laughter, the movement of small air. Clouds, too, have names. Clouds leave home to find themselves. Good money after bad, the fathers say, and close the door called Nature against their coming back. The funny little ways children have of making the world the color they always wanted. Sunset. Birds. The mathematics of memory begin to swirl like cookie dough, like chocolate with egg and sugar and vanilla and butter. A bowl to lick, dangerous with delight, as ultraviolet. Home again! begs the mother and soon the sorry child walks that long allée as rain begins to pour.   Past such petty symbols the boy returns through architecture, a silly gauntlet: the butterfly, the mother, the fit signatures of loveliness. His parents at the door, the little cottage in the woods, Hansel home again at last, the shining path. A little like a dream. Ours is not a simple age, and things are what they seem happily ever after in the malicious tiny rain.

for Jack Kerouac IN LIGHT ROOM IN DARK HELL IN UMBER IN CHROME, I sit feeling the swell of the cloud made about by movement of arm leg and tongue. In reflections of gold light. Tints and flashes of gold and amber spearing and glinting. Blur glass…blue Glass, black telephone. Matchflame of violet and flesh seen in the clear bright light. It is not night and night too. In Hell, there are stars outside. And long sounds of cars. Brown shadows on walls in the light of the room. I sit or stand wanting the huge reality of touch and love. In the turned room. Remember the long-ago dream of stuffed animals (owl, fox) in a dark shop. Wanting only the purity of clean colors and new shapes and feelings. I WOULD CRY FOR THEM USELESSLY I have ten years left to worship my youth Billy the Kid, Rimbaud, Jean Harlow IN DARK HELL IN LIGHT ROOM IN UMBER AND CHROME I feel the swell of smoke the drain and flow of motion of exhaustion, the long sounds of cars the brown shadows on the wall. I sit or stand. Caught in the net of glints from corner table to dull plane from knob to floor, angles of flat light, daggers of beams. Staring at love’s face. The telephone in cataleptic light. Marchflames of blue and red seen in the clear grain. I see myself—ourselves—in Hell without radiance. Reflections that we are. The long cars make sounds and brown shadows over the wall. I am real as you are real whom I speak to. I raise my head, see over the edge of my nose. Look up and see that nothing is changed. There is no flash to my eyes. No change to the room. Vita Nuova—No! The dead, dead world. The strain of desire is only a heroic gesture. An agony to be so in pain without release when love is a word or kiss.

There are places for chaos on the page, meaningful, apparent confusion —temps en temps on the continent does not mean “time to time” in Kent, or Greenwich. From stone through weeds and parchment, through bad times, words made their way to the printed page. Bibles now not just for those who go to worship by carriage, but for those who pray with bare feet, some washed, some smelling of stables and excrement. I’m not sure the words ocean and sea mean the same to you and me. Ninety-five percent universal confusion, dark matter was born with the legitimacy of an onion, the roar of a lion. I sit in the rumble seat of judgment, I damn myself for entertainment, for wasting time on hopeless entertainment. I am guilty of snarling lines, Gordian knots in my “Shakespeare” fishing reels. I must untangle this because eels have hearts like us. The enemy is symmetry. In the spring of content, I trust glorious chaos. I smell in disorder the outhouse of order. I must have respect for what I kill and eat, Jesus gave them loaves and fishes, not meat. He added, “Waste nothing you eat,” he did not say, “Waste is chaos made by me, or my Father, one person who is three.” Rebecca, at the well, said, “Drink. Water your camels.” I swear, my hands each on a Bible, the only evidence admissible is invisible. At twenty, I was lost in the snow, a sleigh bell. Chaos is not a “sometime thing,” its face and back are turned to and from us, what I cannot see is beautiful, or an isthmus that connects almost nothing to almost nothing — the great unless, either/or. I grab on to metaphor, uncertainty, dark matter, gravity specific. The motto I nail to my door: The Devil generalizes, angels are specific. Chaos makes me merry, string or rose-by-any-other-rose theory, romance of the rose, roses that go with any other flower, from devil’s paintbrush to huckleberry. From fertile Chaos sprang Eros and Night: Chaos danced first with Eros, then jealous Night. Time carries a scythe, women and men sound the hour. I model for myself, I pose in north light. With helpers, his stevedore brothers, Hypnos and Thanatos, Charon still poles his familiar ferry across the Styx to an island where skeletons dance. Einstein said, “I too believe in appearance,” he didn’t think Old One plays dice, takes chances. You bet your bottom dollar the universe rhymes with another universe like verse. Yeats, Herrick, and Herbert would like that. To them, I lift my hat. Delphic chaos is wise, metaphoric thinking multiplies bunches of grapes, by tripod, by butterflies. Chaos is endless longing — God’s pussycat. In Prague, Mozart knew a starling who sang his piano concerto all along, except for one note he always got wrong.

We make our meek adjustments, Contented with such random consolations As the wind deposits In slithered and too ample pockets. For we can still love the world, who find A famished kitten on the step, and know Recesses for it from the fury of the street, Or warm torn elbow coverts. We will sidestep, and to the final smirk Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us, Facing the dull squint with what innocence And what surprise! And yet these fine collapses are not lies More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane; Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise. We can evade you, and all else but the heart: What blame to us if the heart live on. The game enforces smirks; but we have seen The moon in lonely alleys make A grail of laughter of an empty ash can, And through all sound of gaiety and quest Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

1 Meryon saw it coming (who was he?): No people, so no noise. As it should be. The Bridge. The Morgue. Ghostly round his bed Antipodean atolls and tattoos had fluted, Volcanoes puffed. Then borborygmic sea Forked, at its last gasp, into a V: Down that black gallery and backward slid A syrup, foul, ovum and sperm concocted, The foggy groan of Antichrist. 1863: People mattered nothing, live or dead. Paris by his impeccable etchings emptied: Pointy turrets, windows, not a single head Poking out—and there across the sky, Tortuous, the skeleton birds creak by. 2 As if all the steps had stopped As if all the takes had token As if all the creaks had croaken As if all that weeps had wopped As if all that flips had flopped As if all that mocks had moaken As if all that speaks had spoken As if all that drips had dropped As if all that hopes had hopped As if all that leaps had lopped As if all that aches had oaken As if all that peaks had poken As if all that creeps had cropped As if all that peeps had popped 3 The old aquaforte art is back, thought Baudelaire. Multiple majesty of stone piled on stone; Obelisks of industry discharge into the air Their coalescent smoke. Almost airborne Scaffoldings roped to monuments under repair— Very poetic, beauty so paradoxical I never saw the like; and the sky over it all— Eagles. Tumult. Perspective deepens there With all the dramas that have come and gone. The artist: Once a sailor, now he’ll seek In nooks of masonry a sphinx. I think you’d get a scare To hear him talk

An old man in a lodge within a park; The chamber walls depicted all around With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound, And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark, Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound; He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound, Then writeth in a book like any clerk. He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote The Canterbury Tales, and his old age Made beautiful with song; and as I read I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note Of lark and linnet, and from every page Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead.

We have the whole evening ahead of us, We think, our eyesight starting to weaken, We must have missed the houselights growing dim, But how could that moment have escaped us when The roots of the paper trees struck water And transformed themselves into the real thing— This nervous wood at the edge of a small, Provincial town whose still lifes waken To find that they’re portraits after all And subject to the risk of animation? Tonight we may discuss—after the Chopin Nocturnes, after the I-don’t-know-how-many Performances of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata— The gradual reduction of Roman columns, The disease of too many lakes and clouds. Do cobblestones have a future? Is rain Removable? Depressing mornings find Characters in bed who have no reason To get up, the light a yellowish half-light Mirroring the mind, its sad affections. At the lake, a flat of faultless summer Is being taken down, the view abandoned; The puzzled players change their places. Once You might have found them walking in an orchard, The blossoms opening their mouths to speak And song occurring as if it were natural; Now that trees uproot themselves and bankrupt Agriculture wanes in its drying furrows, Property and battlefields turn out to share A fate in common—they exchange hands. Shrines “fallen out of the perpendicular,” Stones “that have apparently once been tombstones”— We are on someone’s estate not far from Moscow. How simply the sun goes out like a match! How deeply the wounds stay on the surface! He said the best that can be said for property: It lets an old man fall in love with landscape, Lets so many trees have a chance to be noticed, Allows the self-interested birds to preen, Until the property is lost again. To an upstart creditor who sells the trees For lumber, then, to the sounds of saws, Tramps through the hallway in his dirty boots To explain, in tears, the dreary motivation: His mother’s dying, his young wife’s in love With a boor . . . The Babel of trouble starts; Among all the hells that go on talking, Only one is real, though it is silent, And everything leads up to it—to lose The land, to lose the very ground you stand on. If the temporary brilliancies gather once more In the middle distance, and the modal lark Persuades the summer evening to reveal One private little splendor not for sale, Still, a gunshot, onstage or off, Tells us what no one is prepared to know: Love is a tourniquet tightening its bands Around the slowly dying wrist of freedom, Futility’s a spinster bending over A book of household accounts forever. Bathed in the acid of truth, all things Become possible: to be a cold snake At an interview, to live on scraps of soap To keep oneself warm, to resemble a cat Constantly stalking the shadow of nothing, To the horse’s clop-clop outside the window, Or the sound of a guitar from a neighboring room, The doctor, with a smile, asks, What is man? A hero about to be done-in for good? A villain about to be rescued by pain? The governess is wearing her old forage cap. That’s Epihodov playing his guitar. Astrov is talking about trees. We could be Racing the wolves at thirty below In a ravine whiplashed by snow, or slowly Succumbing to boredom in a seaside town, Waiting for a future that will never be, The heat getting worse, far off the waves Pounding faintly late in the moonlight, At a low moment in our lives.

The white chocolate jar full of petals swills odds and ends around in a dizzying eye of four o’clocks now and to come. The tiger, marvellously striped and irritable, leaps on the table and without disturbing a hair of the flowers’ breathless attention, pisses into the pot, right down its delicate spout. A whisper of steam goes up from that porcelain urethra. “Saint-Saëns!” it seems to be whispering, curling unerringly around the furry nuts of the terrible puss, who is mentally flexing. Ah be with me always, spirit of noisy contemplation in the studio, the Garden of Zoos, the eternally fixed afternoons! There, while music scratches its scrofulous stomach, the brute beast emerges and stands, clear and careful, knowing always the exact peril at this moment caressing his fangs with a tongue given wholly to luxurious usages; which only a moment before dropped aspirin in this sunset of roses, and now throws a chair in the air to aggravate the truly menacing.