1269 Arts and sciences poems

One said my book was like unto a coat, Of diverse colours black and red and white. I, bent to cross him, said he spoke by rote. For they in making rather are unlike. A coat, one garment made of many fleeces: My book, one meaning cut into many pieces.

Walking the fields a wantcatcher I spied, To him I went, desirous of his game: Sir, have you taken wants? Yes, he replied, Here are a dozen, which were lately ta’en. Then you have left no more. No more? quoth he. Sir I can show you more: the more the worse; And to his work he went, but 'twould not be, For all the wants were crept into my purse. Farewell friend wantcatcher, since 'twill not be, Thou cannot catch the wants, but they catch me.

It’s mostly someone long dead who gets curious all over again, who once told a book, the book picked clean to glow on a website now, an address with double slashes in it. Suddenly I love one detail: the way they harnessed horses or hammered copper, what seed — cardamom, rye — kept its small heart aloft for a millennium. Voices in that dark ago when I open to room light, lamp or window on book — old friend — or the new computer screen. It’s not technology, either way. It’s something in the brain first, an inkling.Not yet yours to know.

Like the blue angels of the nativity, the museum patrons hover around the art historian, who has arrived frazzled and limp after waking late in her boyfriend’s apartment. And here, she notes,the Procession of St. Gregory, where atop Hadrian’s mausoleum the angel of death returns his bloody sword to its scabbard

There should be a writing of non-writing. Someday it will come. A brief writing, without grammar, a writing of words alone. Words without supporting grammar. Lost. Written, there. And immediately left behind. —Marguerite Duras (translated by Mark Pollizzotti) It came. Words smashed out of the sky and from the mouths and off the pages and from the flesh and blood of the bodies and the words hit the readers and were destroyed like more bodies and the fields of the nation were littered with bodies and dead. Carcass love, they called it. Carcass economy, they called it. And the readers found the carcasses strewn across the pages and the readers came and stripped their innards and twirled intestines above their heads like lassos. The carcasses fell onto the pages and were taken away in wagons and trucks and they were replaced with new carcasses that were sold for words before the flies laid eggs and the wounds had time to fester. FALSE CARCASS ECONOMY! Will the souls of the carcasses miss themselves when they die? Will the bodies whose lips slurp out the souls of the carcasses miss themselves when they die? Will the words from the bodies who slurp out the souls of the carcasses cease to exist when the bodies themselves die? The readers grovel in the pages and find themselves in ditches with the carcasses but they do not know the rules of the false carcass economy. In this book the readers can feel their feet being removed. In this book the readers can feel the splash of the abattoir blood that sprinkles the page with poems. How do you know if the poems have too many bubbles? That is, how do you know if the blood of the poems has too many bubbles? When we speak of our own lives, says the collective voice of the readers, we certainly don’t mean human life. On the page the readers find themselves crawling around like quadrupeds with hands full of grass and earth uprooting plants and trees setting out for home and not getting far counting corpses on the fields to hell with animals there is God grinding his teeth with joy forging his way through the ruins of failing flesh there is the machine that has annihilated the bulk of humanity is it semen or is it a carburetor that makes us unrecognizable we know who we are through decay and in someone else’s story this is a lot worse than knocking your own brains out with good results then drinking tea with sugar and milk and suddenly feeling revived then exploding with words and speaking with animals and sinking in mud and being found by peasants who clean turds and who are like silent gods with holes in their shoes it is horrible to eat horrible to bulge in the belly with food horrible to blink when so many can’t blink oh to ruminate once more on the air polluted with liability on the hair singed from pollution the eyes burning fingers shrivelling the exact moment of ending will not come for many millennia we will not be able to document it it will document us it’s okay to kill some bodies speak of nothing and you’re lucky to make friends flank kidney liver swollen body on the sand who are you now that I am speaking with a mouth full of words that do not belong to me I crawl across the page and I don’t know if I’m dying or dead.

Spoiler alert: in this all-but-forgotten masterwork, Jean Stafford—who was once widely regarded as the leading novelist of her generation, and who wrote this perverse, short, lyrical novel, her second, during the flailing failings of her marriage to my hero Robert Lowell—kills Molly, her child-alter ego, a girl too unloved and unloving to survive puberty, too pure and awful—like Stafford, who died pickled and childish three decades later after winning the Pulitzer with her devastating, hurtfully compassionate Collected Stories—for this or any other world, especially the necessarily allegorical one of fiction. I am broken now, hopeless; hope is proved by this book to be a contrivance. I have just read the last pages in which Molly’s brother, Ralph—who, to live, cannot love either, has no spare love—shoots her, aiming for the wild mountain lion whose stuffed corpse was to be the triumph of his new manhood. I don’t hate Ralph—how can I, a boy, mistaken, like me? And can I hate Molly, who so needed Ralph and everyone, still young enough to savor the bittersweet of her anger? What about Stafford, who hurt herself, all our selves, with this ending, her classic tragedy, writing, decades later,Poor old Molly! I loved her dearly and I hope she rests in peace. Fuck insight and analysis: my heart is shot. Why did she have to die? Why does anyone? Why do you, do I? Because of what Ralph was feeling just before he accidentally slaughtered the future? This book must have ravaged the already sleepless poet Gregory Orr, who shot his brother, too, and suffers that endless error in poetry and prose. And because Molly refused everything, she stood between Ralph and tomorrow. But he grew, he changed. Confused? Read the book. In novels people die because of what they feel. In life, people die when their bodies conk out, exhausted machines that living expends. And what happens when people feel their feelings in life? Nothing? Anything? Brenda, dear Brenda, my love, nothing happens, I’m afraid. I’m sorry. And afraid. A small breeze born in the heart gently bends a blade of grass and no one hears a word. No one reads Stafford anymore—I asked on Facebook. Stafford died, her legacy gently dispatched into the low air. O, life is terrible, literature ridiculous. Stafford’s prose, teeming and rich as loam, could take Famous Franzen’s for a walk, feed it biscuits. But who cares? Who remembers? O, to have been Jean Stafford, in the past I idealize, when the world was less self-conscious, less precise. I could be dead already, warmish beneath a blanket of dust. Joyful are the faded, the once-greats whose afterlives slipped out a hole in posterity's pocket: they are loved poignantly by a needy few. O, to be kept cozy in the bosoms of those desperate and proud, forgotten for all the good I do. Love is sunlight streaming unevenly through the canopy of leaves overhead. We can only grow in the brighter patches below, fading where light is thin. Molly, we are with you, nowhere and gone. Mostly we are forgotten, too.

When I think of that room I see the de Kooning at the end of the hall Sometimes rain on the long windows Or the tinkering of drops on the skylight But not Yvon Splashing Scotch into a cocktail glass Otherwise fastidious— In retrospect I should have asked her more About the famous jazz guitarist She had been engaged to But that much was true— Even after she bought me a pocket knife Sheathed in velvet Every young man needs a knife She informed her group But in the restaurant her friends Eyed me like a turnip. One that talked— While she was away at her office, I tried to read Her unfinished essay On the vagaries of diplomacy Reclining On a rug of embroidered storks The two small Rodins Seemed misplaced A grand piano She didn’t play (though I did, affecting a controlled passion while gazing over rooftops at carefully maintained gardens)— I don’t remember her smell I don’t recall her fingers The last I heard she was living in Barcelona She never did learn to cook Now her letters are worth money

“To find a connectome, or the mental makeup of a person,” researchers experimented with the neurons of a worm then upgraded to mouse hoping “to unravel the millions of miles of wire in the [human] brain” that they liken to “untangling a bowl of spaghetti” of which I have an old photo: Rei in her high chair delicately picking out each strand to mash in her mouth. Was she two? Was that sailor dress from Mother? Did I cook from scratch? If so, there was a carrot in the sauce as Mother instructed and I’ll never forget since some strand determines infatuation as a daughter’s fate.

The lump on his neck that no collar could hide, and the charity of his presence there in the neighborhood each fall, door-to-door, standing in the swept porches, waiting for the housewives to answer. The ugly, pitiable treeman, reddish and leathery from the sun. His baseball cap pulled tight over his head, the visor stiff as a beaver’s tail. Year after year, the bowsaw with its wide teeth and the long-handled toppers were all that announced his trade. And standing on the porch he advised nothing, though he coughed and hacked, covering his mouth with his sap-blackened fist and waited for the infrequent yes that sent him up the trunk and into the solid lap of the branches, where he clipped and sawed the bony leafless rigging until the tree, all torso—lung and heart, ribs and hips and shoulders—, stood like a knotted goblet in the yard, a figure, as in allegory, of his own stunted self, rooted, alive. My mother tried hard to convince us we were all children of God and that the sick and maimed, the poor, were creatures born to special destinies so unique we could not understand. But who could understand pain’s redemptiveness and how it rarely seemed to translate into grace. The poor were always poor, the sick, sick—just as the treeman’s goiter did not respond to treatment, inscrutable, part of God’s plan, part of the unlovely element of love: the humbling, the pity, the scar of violence— a craving too frightening to name, or too tender, the way the treeman bundled the trimmings in twine and hauled them to the alley. And as if he counted it his real work, leaned against the fence and with his fingers picked the dogged sap from the blade and with a file sharpened the teeth.

We were application — aerial shapes investigating their causes as they unfolded their wandering life — possessed of temper, parents, talent, fancy — in books in which characters redeem being from the hands of infidels. I feel soaring pleasure. When I was thirteen I opened my father — title page of my book —to explain exploded powers warmed by a glance. To penetrate the ocean behind the elements and give names — fidelity — from a stream of fire reduced to electricity — over the malignity of an alarming bed — the brightness of a familiar eye commences connection: These are the faces cooped up in one place, and his sweetest voice hiding how the blood circulates, and my peculiar trembled body, the seat of beauty. At the end of two years every object inherited human feelings. I paused and brain exemplified generation. His child pursuing these reflections. My pale cheek and tremendous secrets of fingers. Winter, spring passed — watch the blossom — it breathed hard —convulsive muscles of pearly whiteness — with his watery eyes disturbed by the first kiss traversing my bedchamber. His eyes held up the curtain of the bed. I remained listening, unfinished. My food its white steeple drenched by the rain. We ascended into my room, putting my hands before my eyes —tingle — save me and save me — anticipated with such nervous joy I became capable of shooting forth from the trees — it was a divine spring — that night drawing me out I felt the sensations of others. When shown the body they saw permission — I believe in innocence notwithstanding temptation — whom you loved was a creature who’d fill the air with birds serving you — feelings worked up by events — to wean us fro our future prospects towards a tenderness of fainting limbs, a type of me. I was encompassed by a bodily cloud. I remained rushing at the window. They congregated around me, the unstained pinnacle. I arrived at the same lulling sounds: the giver of oblivion. The ascent is solemn, curling in wreaths — I sat upon the glittering peaks — swelled with sunlight over your narrow beds. I beheld the figure of a man at some distance. As he approached a mist came over my eyes. You are community. Instinctively lying down I covered myself with little winged animals, light from my eyes. Spreading my cloak I covered the ground. One part was open. It was a paradise filled with milk. Uttering a few sounds the young man had been filled up. I awoke into my voice by his means — sun on the red leaves — mounted high in the heavens using gesticulations and a gush of tears. Feelings of kindness and gentleness overcame me. Fringed by deep lashes, I contemplated my companyion…