1269 Arts and sciences poems

1 The clouds part revealing a mythology of clouds assembled in light of earliest birds, an originary text over water over time, and that without which the clouds part revealing an apology for clouds implicit in the air where the clouds had been recently witnessed rehearsing departure, a heartfelt phrase in the push of the airborne drops and crystals over water over time—how being made to think oneself an obstruction between the observer and the object or objects under surveillance or even desired—or if I am felt to be beside the point then I have wanted that, but to block a path is like not being immaterial enough, or being too much when all they want from you now is your station cleared of its personal effects please and vanish— not that they’d ever just come out and say it when all that darting around of the eyes, all that shaky camouflage of paper could only portend the beginning of the end of your tenure at this organization, and remember a capacity to draw meaning out of such seeming accidence landed one here to begin with, didn’t it. 2 The clouds part revealing an anatomy of clouds viewed from the midst of human speculation, a business project undertaken in a bid to acquire and retain control of the formation and movement of clouds. As late afternoons I have witnessed the distant towers borrow luster from a bourbon sun, in-box empty, surround sound on, all my money made in lieu of conversation—where conversation indicates the presence of desire in the parties to embark on exchange of spirit, hours forzando with heartfelt phrase— made metaphor for it, the face on the clock tower bright as a meteor, as if a torch were held against likelihood to illuminate the time so I could watch the calm silent progress of its hands from the luxury appointments of my office suite, the tumult below or behind me out of mind, had not my whole attention been riveted by the human figure stood upon the tower’s topmost pinnacle, himself surveying the clouds of the future parting in antiquity, a figure not to be mistaken, tranquilly pacing a platform with authority: the chief executive officer of clouds. 3 The clouds part revealing blueprints of the clouds built in glass-front factories carved into cliff-faces which, prior to the factories’ recent construction, provided dorms for clans of hamadryas baboons, a species revered in ancient Egypt as attendants of Thoth, god of wisdom, science, and measurement. Fans conveying clouds through aluminum ducts can be heard from up to a mile away, depending on air temperature, humidity, the absence or presence of any competing sound, its origin and its character. It is no more impossible to grasp the baboon’s full significance in Egyptian religious symbolism than it is to determine why clouds we manufacture provoke in an audience more positive, lasting response than do comparable clouds occurring in nature. Even those who consider natural clouds products of conscious manufacture seem to prefer that a merely human mind lie behind the products they admire. This development may be a form of self-exalting or else another adaptation in order that we find the hum of machinery comforting through darkness. 4 The clouds part revealing there’s no place left to sit myself down except for a single wingback chair backed into a corner to face the window in which the clouds part revealing the insouciance of clouds cavorting over the backs of the people in the field who cut the ripened barley, who gather it in sheaves, who beat grain from the sheaves with wooden flails, who shake it loose from the scaly husk around it, who throw the now threshed grain up into the gently palm-fanned air whose steady current carries off the chaff as the grain falls to the floor, who collect the grain from the floor painstakingly to grind it into flour, who bake the flour into loaves the priest will offer in the sanctuary, its walls washed white like milk. To perform it repeatedly, to perform it each time as if the first, to walk the dim corridor believing that the conference it leads to might change everything, to adhere to a possibility of reward, of betterment, of moving above, with effort, the condition into which one has been born, to whom do I owe the pleasure of the hum to which I have been listening too long. 5 The clouds part revealing the advocates of clouds, believers in people, ideas and things, the workers of the united fields of clouds, supporters of the wars to keep clouds safe, the devotees of heartfelt phrase and belief you can change with water over time. It is the habit of a settled population to give ear to whatever is desirable will come to pass, a caressing confidence—but one unfortunately not borne out by human experience, for most things people desire have been desired ardently for thousands of years and observe—they are no closer to realization today than in Ramses’ time. Nor is there cause to believe they will lose their coyness on some near tomorrow. Attempts to speed them on have been undertaken from the beginning; plans to force them overnight are in copious, antagonistic operation today, and yet they have thoroughly eluded us, and chances are they will continue to elude us until the clouds part in a flash of autonomous, ardent, local brainwork— but when the clouds start to knit back together again, we’ll dismiss the event as a glitch in transmission. 6 The clouds part revealing a congregation of bodies united into one immaterial body, a fictive person around whom the air is blurred with money, force from which much harm will come, to whom my welfare matters nothing. I sense without turning the light from their wings, their eyes; they preen themselves on the fire escape, the windowsill, their pink feet vulnerable—a mistake to think of them that way. If I turn around, the room might not be full of wings capable of acting, in many respects, as a single being, which is to say that I myself may be the source of what I sense, but am no less powerless to change it. Always around me, on my body, in my mouth, I fear them and their love of money, everything I do without thinking to help them make it. And if I am felt to be beside the point, I have wanted that, to live apart from what depends on killing me a little bit to keep itself alive, and yet not happily, with all its needs and comforts met, but fattened so far past that point I am engrossed, and if I picture myself outside of it it isn’t me anymore, but a parasite cast out, inviable. 7 The clouds part revealing the distinction between words without meaning and meaning without words, a phenomenon of nature, the westbound field of low air pressure developing over water over time and warm, saturated air on the sea surface rising steadily replaced by cold air from above, the cycle repeating, the warm moving upward into massive thunderclouds, the cold descending into the eye around which bands of thunderclouds spiral, counter- clockwise, often in the hundreds, the atmospheric pressure dropping even further, making winds accelerate, the clouds revolve, a confusion of energy, an incomprehensible volume of rain—I remember the trick of thinking through infinity, a crowd of eyes against an asphalt wall, my vision of it scrolling left as the crowd thinned out to a spatter and then just black until I fall asleep and then just black again, past marketing, past focus groups, past human resources, past management, past personal effects, their insignificance evident in the eye of the dream and through much of the debriefing I wake into next.

I keep returning to John Constable’s Study of Clouds. Oil on cardboard, six by seven and a half inches, it shows purple-gray thunderheads, one patch of blue, above low hills and two small trees flanked by shrubs in the left foreground. A sketch en plein air, a half hour’s worth of work at most, it catches exactly one scrap of sky and shifting sunlight on a blustery day in 1820. The year King George the Third died in Windsor Castle, blind and insane, the year 50,000 Scottish weavers went on strike and printed a proclamation calling for a new “provisional government.” Their leaders were caught, hanged, and then decapitated for good measure. This cloud study survived that history. Two minutes later, the clouds would have taken on a different cast of light and shape just like the thunderheads now piling up above the Liffey. I hobble out of the Dublin City Gallery, take a bus to the river, sit on a park bench with a ziplock bag of ice on my swollen knee. Its wet cold makes the joint ache. My body is breaking down, bone spur under the right kneecap. At fifty-eight, I watch young men and women in black sweats run along the River Liffey — Abha na Life, Anna Liffey, river that crosses the plains of Life. I envy them. Once I too could run over the asphalt, almost without knowing I inhabited a body whose knees might seize up and swell. I will not run again in this life. Cirrus and cumulonimbus scud across the blue escutcheon of sky. Sun’s blazon through rain rampant, my life is a cloud study for some larger landscape John Constable never got around to painting. It hangs in a gilded frame. People stare at it before passing on to more important canvases, to Renoir’s Les Parapluies, women and men opening shiny black umbrellas in a Paris park. There a mother shelters her two daughters under an umbrella meant for one. The younger daughter holds a wooden hoop she has been rolling along tamped dirt paths, whipping it with a stick to keep it spinning, before the rain settled in. Renoir painted this small family in his lush, impressionistic style. Five years later, after visiting Italy and studying Piero della Francesca’s frescoes, he came back and finished the painting in his new “manière aigre” or harsh style. He handled the gray silk folds of the auburn-haired woman’s dress on the left as if they were granite to be sculpted. She carries a market basket filled to the brim with shadow. To approach old age, one needs a new, harsher style. Here, by the Liffey, mothers push screaming infants in strollers. Five teenagers in blue jeans and bright yellow or green raincoats walk by, joking, texting on cell phones, smoking. One girl and her boy hang back, embrace, French-kiss a long ten seconds. Another boy shouts over his shoulder, “Get a room!” A pair of mute swans preens and swims down the River Liffey, whose amber waters mirror how the clouds pass, avalanche of cumulus that hangs forever on the burnished unrippling surface of my memory — vast sky surf, cloud after cloud cresting, breaking to be washed away to blue nothing. Each of us — lovers, mothers, runners, me — no more than windblown swansdown.

I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world’s eyes As though they’d wrought it. Song, let them take it For there’s more enterprise In walking naked.

A cento Is there no when where this dream will rest? Blue smoke, wings, a plague of  walls, the city motionless, mass of mind and angst rising in the brilliance of a cloudless light [le ciel, c’est mauve comme la lavande]. Everything turns in the quiet leisure of disaster: a kind of innocence now supernatural darkness floating, trees shaking, waterways swollen under a livid sky, storm clouds forming in the blink of an eye. The thought of you is performative: blonde hair, pale complexion, downcast jewels for eyes. Your dreadful martyrdom runs its course, written in mud and butter: the human instant, in which you sing yourself full-throated. Honey, ginger, flared saffron, graywhite momentous rhythm of sea, barbarous smell of wet earth, ransacking or ravaged flowers, the landfill site, shit-hole, killing ground from which we sup as shaking, hiccuping drunks. To forfeit wisdom, atone for sins undone: the allegorical hand thrust into torture, noise, shadows of men. Between the lines, against the clock, this does not make, does not make a difference to them. This age [our age] demands an image of its accelerated grimace — an old bitch gone in the teeth, the ultimate cunt — our botched civilization, our grave in the sky: last jizz of consciousness. I could have, now, blown my fucking brains out, but for a sweet shimmer of reason, blood, lone bells in gritty belfries, the shallows of the sea, the surprise of days which slide under sunlight, the soul gathered up, exhaled as rings of smoke. Clay is the word and clay is the flesh. You drape your body against my body, like a sheet of mirrored glass; you remain,comme le dit Flaubert, melancholique devant son rêve accompli. — The word “red” is not. Forever in lust, forever in heat of fire and flood. Mule-bray, pig-grunt, bawdy cackle and the stomping of feet to the beat of some undone family portrait — bad teeth, bad eyes, beer and paint cans — the name and date split in soft slate. Money makes an inverse difference to distance, when I lift her back to me now: nothing there but that pale curly head, working a machine up and down, an ochre autumn merging into twilight. I read much of the night. Guns click and spit and split up timber, until the river’s tent is broken: old kettles, old bottles, a broken can, old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut who kept the till. Dreams nourished with tears, the sweet kinks of fists, light rain falling as mist. The hours after you are gone are a lead white morning of  hard, new ice, the snow drift of that which is left unspoken. Care and great sadness are both a burden. No gods, but a black swastika and no sky but grinding water, gasping wind, the wares of carthage, girls with peacock eyes. The churn of stale words staining the heart again: bleached wood massed as bones. Your body is white as anemone petals, your skin is stone smooth, we [as cold as the dead they load like a pile of  baskets, mound of refuse, the sweepings of a street] are pressed close together, swaying. Merely the despaired occasion of wordshed made keener by blessed rage. Scrape away the prison coating, the itchy sea; drink from this glass of pure, real, resplendent blood, its malediction, freshly soiled and snug. It’s a question of altitude, probably, walking along your eyelid again, towards your tear duct. This dance of fire that touches our lips, scorches our tongues and pulls out the thin beaten tin of my squally voice. O technosociety, where memory is tolerated, barely, as real estate on which to mount steeples of rust, lay fresh mowed grass, burn gasoline: anything so long as there’s a margin and little but commerce between us. We never have pure space in front of us, rather: slight bondage, the world’s halter, this fashion for dressing or setting our hair ablaze until we’re ash and ash in the heat of a blank but infinitely scrolling screen, flared back to scratch. We begin and end with a groan, the tongue’s comfortable wetness, sureness of soul and fluttering lips. Then: lords of unquiet, quiet sojourn, each atom which belongs to you belongs to me. All abandoned, the last rig broken, the staggering shadows of trees, fence posts, gutted cars, faces blurred and Sienese grave. I wish that I could speak only of  it all, the voices of children singing. A chapel, in spite of  it all.

I lost my book. It’s got the names in it. Names for things and goods; structures, Types, boundaries, procedures, goads. My girl is in it, she who carried it Within her like a rare worm Until the untended bird came And tore its leaves from her As she lay there, Pencil pressing page, Taking it all down. Then the vast storehouses came down too, And the small secret ones, The shelves and grappling hooks, Dust, ink, lead, linen, ragged board. It’s time to go home and wash up. Home was in the book in my possession When I was reading what had been put down In her hand and mine, Instructions, inventories, Names. But I can’t read this while looking at words While I am assigned to living In what is called a home. It is all unkept. Its yard has turned back to heat-giving Snail-like deposits drowning in daylight By the mossed-over fence post. We lived here once? We took words down for all the names, Made markings? That book is lost, reader, Not misplaced.

The welcome Sun from sea Freake is returned, And cheereth with his beams the naked earth, Which gains with his coming her apparel And had his absence six long months mourned. Out of her fragrant sides she sends to greet him The rashed primrose and the violet; While she the fields and meadows doth beset With flowers, and hangs the trees with pearl to meet him. Amid this hope and joy she doth forget, To kill the hemlock which doth grow too fast, And chill the adder making too much haste, With his black sons revived with the heat; Till summer comes with diverse colours clad, Much like my Epigrams both good and bad.

My little book: who will thou please, tell me? All which shall read thee? No that cannot be. Whom then, the best? But few of these are known. How shall thou know to please, thou know'st not whom? The meaner sort commend not poetry; And sure the worst should please themselves for thee: But let them pass, and set by most no store, Please thou one well, thou shall not need please more.

The little world, the subject of my muse, Is a huge task and labor infinite; Like to a wilderness or mass confuse, Or to an endless gulf, or to the night: How many strange Meanders do I find? How many paths do turn my straying pen? How many doubtful twilights make me blind, Which seek to limb out this strange All of men? Easy it were the earth to portray out, Or to draw forth the heavens’ purest frame, Whose restless course, by order whirls about Of change and place, and still remains the same. But how shall man’s, or manner’s, form appear, Which while I write, do change from what they were?

I met a courtier riding on the plain, Well-mounted on a brave and gallant steed; I sat upon a jade, and spurred to my pain My lazy beast, whose tired sides did bleed: He saw my case, and then of courtesy Did rein his horse, and drew the bridle in, Because I did desire his company: But he corvetting way of me did win. What should I do, who was besteaded so? His horse stood still faster than mine could go.

Wotton, the country and the country swain, How can they yield a Poet any sense? How can they stir him up, or heat his vein? How can they feed him with intelligence? You have that fire which can a wit enflame, In happy London England’s fairest eye: Well may you Poets’ have of worthy name, Which have the food and life of Poetry. And yet the country or the town may sway, Or bear a part, as clowns do in a play.