1269 Arts and sciences poems

“Being so caught up So mastered.” —Yeats I was too shy to say anything but Your poems are so beautiful. What kinds of things, feelings, or ideas inspire you, I mean, outside the raw experiences of your life? He turned a strange crosshatched color as if he stood in a clouded painting, and said, Thanks, but no other phenomena intrude upon my starlit mind. I see you are wondering what this is all about. Don’t mind me, I’m talking to myself again. Yes, poetry is nice and often beautiful, yet it doesn’t beget much attention, money, or even a simple thanks for placing the best words in the best order. That’s when I forget all about your incessant demands, and the restless subject leaps the stream in Technicolor— until the Remembrancer appears and says, Stop this wasteful life. Doctor, lawyer, thief. These fancies of yours could cost a life or worse, two. Meanwhile, he perceives my gifted body upholding my mind as I’m explaining my stuff on the Unicorn Tapestries, cheeks starting to color, feathers ruffling, quiet shudders. He shrugs, Your content sounds too beautiful but I’d like to read it sometime. Okay. He says all the right things, like I love you Hyacinth Girl. Things get interesting until the sudden blow: Thanks For the memories. What I’ll think seeing his new work in The New Yorker is Thanks for nothing, asshole, as he drops me for that prolific pastoral life with his wife upstate. The more I think about it, it all depends upon your phantom attention. Surely a world embroiders itself in one’s mind at any moment, words resounding, ardent present clarifyingly beautiful And beautifully truthful. You know? Here I should put in a lapis color Or a murky midnight blue. Or have the crowd stagger by in a riot of color pinning down the helpless beast with spears and ritualistic thanks to their gods. What one really wants to get at is the real, the eternally beautiful like The White Album or something. That’s what makes one perilous life worth living. All the brute indifference, humiliation, and failure can put one in the mind to give up, freak out, kill somebody, heart battered, so mastered. Oh you Wherever I go, on the subway, in my cubicle, at play, in sleep, it’s always you of the air, overpowering my senses like a Dutch master in one pure color, its fiction at full speed, walls breaking, a clarity panorama for the mind hunting for meaning and finding it at last! Now look at all the work I did, and not one thanks Not even flowers. Off you rush to watch him accept another award in that life We can only dream of. From where you sit it all seems so beautiful And I finally understand you. For that I can’t express enough thanks As the subject is the best color for me in the difficulty of this lonely life. It’s always caught up in my mind, what could be more beautiful.

It was just a momentary untruth in my way, bodies of the crowd blocked the big blue outside. Now I have a stealthy cause: to try and be myself, to further a personal idea of arrangement, of how to use those thoughts, the ones that don't get used. But how to let them tick without abuse. How to repay the debt, use the solvent, blast the botched & troubled nearby— What does everyone else caress? All those etched poses neatly joined: Mastery, hierarchy, witchcraft & shamanism. A spike in the dander keeps me plain enough— but to insist! To consolidate those fears—after months of uncertainty couldn't cough or breathe or pilfer correctly. Now this victorious shape, this idea moves through muteness, shyness, weakness— then it awakens: Becomes a nonconformist happenstance— A person saddled beneath Reaches up for a fiction, abundant and unrestricted ideas poised and in front.

You are a friend then, as I make it out, Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of us Will put an ass's head in Fairyland As he would add a shilling to more shillings, All most harmonious, — and out of his Miraculous inviolable increase Fills Ilion, Rome, or any town you like Of olden time with timeless Englishmen; And I must wonder what you think of him — All you down there where your small Avon flows By Stratford, and where you're an Alderman. Some, for a guess, would have him riding back To be a farrier there, or say a dyer; Or maybe one of your adept surveyors; Or like enough the wizard of all tanners. Not you — no fear of that; for I discern In you a kindling of the flame that saves — The nimble element, the true caloric; I see it, and was told of it, moreover, By our discriminate friend himself, no other. Had you been one of the sad average, As he would have it, — meaning, as I take it, The sinew and the solvent of our Island, You'd not be buying beer for this Terpander's Approved and estimated friend Ben Jonson; He'd never foist it as a part of his Contingent entertainment of a townsman While he goes off rehearsing, as he must, If he shall ever be the Duke of Stratford. And my words are no shadow on your town — Far from it; for one town's as like another As all are unlike London. Oh, he knows it, — And there's the Stratford in him; he denies it, And there's the Shakespeare in him. So, God help him! I tell him he needs Greek; but neither God Nor Greek will help him. Nothing will help that man. You see the fates have given him so much, He must have all or perish, — or look out Of London, where he sees too many lords. They're part of half what ails him: I suppose There's nothing fouler down among the demons Than what it is he feels when he remembers The dust and sweat and ointment of his calling With his lords looking on and laughing at him. King as he is, he can't be king de facto, And that's as well, because he wouldn't like it; He'd frame a lower rating of men then Than he has now; and after that would come An abdication or an apoplexy. He can't be king, not even king of Stratford, — Though half the world, if not the whole of it, May crown him with a crown that fits no king Save Lord Apollo's homesick emissary: Not there on Avon, or on any stream Where Naiads and their white arms are no more, Shall he find home again. It's all too bad. But there's a comfort, for he'll have that House — The best you ever saw; and he'll be there Anon, as you're an Alderman. Good God! He makes me lie awake o'nights and laugh. And you have known him from his origin, You tell me; and a most uncommon urchin He must have been to the few seeing ones — A trifle terrifying, I dare say, Discovering a world with his man's eyes, Quite as another lad might see some finches, If he looked hard and had an eye for nature. But this one had his eyes and their foretelling, And he had you to fare with, and what else? He must have had a father and a mother — In fact I've heard him say so — and a dog, As a boy should, I venture; and the dog, Most likely, was the only man who knew him. A dog, for all I know, is what he needs As much as anything right here to-day, To counsel him about his disillusions, Old aches, and parturitions of what's coming, — A dog of orders, an emeritus, To wag his tail at him when he comes home, And then to put his paws up on his knees And say, "For God's sake, what's it all about?" I don't know whether he needs a dog or not — Or what he needs. I tell him he needs Greek; I'll talk of rules and Aristotle with him, And if his tongue's at home he'll say to that, I have your word that Aristotle knows, And you mine that I don't know Aristotle." He's all at odds with all the unities, And what's yet worse, it doesn't seem to matter; He treads along through Time's old wilderness As if the tramp of all the centuries Had left no roads — and there are none, for him; He doesn't see them, even with those eyes, — And that's a pity, or I say it is. Accordingly we have him as we have him — Going his way, the way that he goes best, A pleasant animal with no great noise Or nonsense anywhere to set him off — Save only divers and inclement devils Have made of late his heart their dwelling place. A flame half ready to fly out sometimes At some annoyance may be fanned up in him, But soon it falls, and when it falls goes out; He knows how little room there is in there For crude and futile animosities, And how much for the joy of being whole, And how much for long sorrow and old pain. On our side there are some who may be given To grow old wondering what he thinks of us And some above us, who are, in his eyes, Above himself, — and that's quite right and English. Yet here we smile, or disappoint the gods Who made it so: the gods have always eyes To see men scratch; and they see one down here Who itches, manor-bitten to the bone, Albeit he knows himself — yes, yes, he knows — The lord of more than England and of more Than all the seas of England in all time Shall ever wash. D'ye wonder that I laugh? He sees me, and he doesn't seem to care; And why the devil should he? I can't tell you. I'll meet him out alone of a bright Sunday, Trim, rather spruce, and quite the gentleman. "What ho, my lord!" say I. He doesn't hear me; Wherefore I have to pause and look at him. He's not enormous, but one looks at him. A little on the round if you insist, For now, God save the mark, he's growing old; He's five and forty, and to hear him talk These days you'd call him eighty; then you'd add More years to that. He's old enough to be The father of a world, and so he is. "Ben, you're a scholar, what's the time of day?" Says he; and there shines out of him again An aged light that has no age or station — The mystery that's his — a mischievous Half-mad serenity that laughs at fame For being won so easy, and at friends Who laugh at him for what he wants the most, And for his dukedom down in Warwickshire; — By which you see we're all a little jealous ... Poor Greene! I fear the color of his name Was even as that of his ascending soul; And he was one where there are many others, — Some scrivening to the end against their fate, Their puppets all in ink and all to die there; And some with hands that once would shade an eye That scanned Euripides and Æschylus Will reach by this time for a pot-house mop To slush their first and last of royalties. Poor devils! and they all play to his hand; For so it was in Athens and old Rome. But that's not here or there; I've wandered off. Greene does it, or I'm careful. Where's that boy? Yes, he'll go back to Stratford. And we'll miss him? Dear sir, there'll be no London here without him. We'll all be riding, one of these fine days, Down there to see him — and his wife won't like us; And then we'll think of what he never said Of women — which, if taken all in all With what he did say, would buy many horses. Though nowadays he's not so much for women: "So few of them," he says, "are worth the guessing." But there's a worm at work when he says that, And while he says it one feels in the air A deal of circumambient hocus-pocus. They've had him dancing till his toes were tender, And he can feel 'em now, come chilly rains. There's no long cry for going into it, However, and we don't know much about it. But you in Stratford, like most here in London, Have more now in the Sonnets than you paid for; He's put one there with all her poison on, To make a singing fiction of a shadow That's in his life a fact, and always will be. But she's no care of ours, though Time, I fear, Will have a more reverberant ado About her than about another one Who seems to have decoyed him, married him, And sent him scuttling on his way to London, — With much already learned, and more to learn, And more to follow. Lord! how I see him now, Pretending, maybe trying, to be like us. Whatever he may have meant, we never had him; He failed us, or escaped, or what you will, — And there was that about him (God knows what, — We'd flayed another had he tried it on us) That made as many of us as had wits More fond of all his easy distances Than one another's noise and clap-your-shoulder. But think you not, my friend, he'd never talk! Talk? He was eldritch at it; and we listened — Thereby acquiring much we knew before About ourselves, and hitherto had held Irrelevant, or not prime to the purpose. And there were some, of course, and there be now, Disordered and reduced amazedly To resignation by the mystic seal Of young finality the gods had laid On everything that made him a young demon; And one or two shot looks at him already As he had been their executioner; And once or twice he was, not knowing it, — Or knowing, being sorry for poor clay And saying nothing ... Yet, for all his engines, You'll meet a thousand of an afternoon Who strut and sun themselves and see around 'em A world made out of more that has a reason Than his, I swear, that he sees here to-day; Though he may scarcely give a Fool an exit But we mark how he sees in everything A law that, given we flout it once too often, Brings fire and iron down on our naked heads. To me it looks as if the power that made him, For fear of giving all things to one creature, Left out the first, — faith, innocence, illusion, Whatever 'tis that keeps us out o' Bedlam, — And thereby, for his too consuming vision, Empowered him out of nature; though to see him, You'd never guess what's going on inside him. He'll break out some day like a keg of ale With too much independent frenzy in it; And all for collaring what he knows won't keep, And what he'd best forget — but that he can't. You'll have it, and have more than I'm foretelling; And there'll be such a roaring at the Globe As never stunned the bleeding gladiators. He'll have to change the color of its hair A bit, for now he calls it Cleopatra. Black hair would never do for Cleopatra. But you and I are not yet two old women, And you're a man of office. What he does Is more to you than how it is he does it, — And that's what the Lord God has never told him. They work together, and the Devil helps 'em; They do it of a morning, or if not, They do it of a night; in which event He's peevish of a morning. He seems old; He's not the proper stomach or the sleep — And they're two sovran agents to conserve him Against the fiery art that has no mercy But what's in that prodigious grand new House. I gather something happening in his boyhood Fulfilled him with a boy's determination To make all Stratford 'ware of him. Well, well, I hope at last he'll have his joy of it, And all his pigs and sheep and bellowing beeves, And frogs and owls and unicorns, moreover, Be less than hell to his attendant ears. Oh, past a doubt we'll all go down to see him. He may be wise. With London two days off, Down there some wind of heaven may yet revive him; But there's no quickening breath from anywhere Small make of him again the poised young faun From Warwickshire, who'd made, it seems, already A legend of himself before I came To blink before the last of his first lightning. Whatever there be, there'll be no more of that; The coming on of his old monster Time Has made him a still man; and he has dreams Were fair to think on once, and all found hollow. He knows how much of what men paint themselves Would blister in the light of what they are; He sees how much of what was great now shares An eminence transformed and ordinary; He knows too much of what the world has hushed In others, to be loud now for himself; He knows now at what height low enemies May reach his heart, and high friends let him fall; But what not even such as he may know Bedevils him the worst: his lark may sing At heaven's gate how he will, and for as long As joy may listen, but he sees no gate, Save one whereat the spent clay waits a little Before the churchyard has it, and the worm. Not long ago, late in an afternoon, I came on him unseen down Lambeth way, And on my life I was afear'd of him: He gloomed and mumbled like a soul from Tophet, His hands behind him and his head bent solemn. "What is it now," said I, — "another woman?" That made him sorry for me, and he smiled. "No, Ben," he mused; "it's Nothing. It's all Nothing. We come, we go; and when we're done, we're done." Spiders and flies — we're mostly one or t'other — We come, we go; and when we're done, we're done; "By God, you sing that song as if you knew it!" Said I, by way of cheering him; "what ails ye?" "I think I must have come down here to think," Says he to that, and pulls his little beard; "Your fly will serve as well as anybody, And what's his hour? He flies, and flies, and flies, And in his fly's mind has a brave appearance; And then your spider gets him in her net, And eats him out, and hangs him up to dry. That's Nature, the kind mother of us all. And then your slattern housemaid swings her broom, And where's your spider? And that's Nature, also. It's Nature, and it's Nothing. It's all Nothing. It's all a world where bugs and emperors Go singularly back to the same dust, Each in his time; and the old, ordered stars That sang together, Ben, will sing the same Old stave to-morrow." When he talks like that, There's nothing for a human man to do But lead him to some grateful nook like this Where we be now, and there to make him drink. He'll drink, for love of me, and then be sick; A sad sign always in a man of parts, And always very ominous. The great Should be as large in liquor as in love, — And our great friend is not so large in either: One disaffects him, and the other fails him; Whatso he drinks that has an antic in it, He's wondering what's to pay in his insides; And while his eyes are on the Cyprian He's fribbling all the time with that damned House. We laugh here at his thrift, but after all It may be thrift that saves him from the devil; God gave it, anyhow, — and we'll suppose He knew the compound of his handiwork. To-day the clouds are with him, but anon He'll out of 'em enough to shake the tree Of life itself and bring down fruit unheard-of, — And, throwing in the bruised and whole together, Prepare a wine to make us drunk with wonder; And if he live, there'll be a sunset spell Thrown over him as over a glassed lake That yesterday was all a black wild water. God send he live to give us, if no more, What now's a-rampage in him, and exhibit, With a decent half-allegiance to the ages An earnest of at least a casual eye Turned once on what he owes to Gutenberg, And to the fealty of more centuries Than are as yet a picture in our vision. "There's time enough, — I'll do it when I'm old, And we're immortal men," he says to that; And then he says to me, "Ben, what's 'immortal'? Think you by any force of ordination It may be nothing of a sort more noisy Than a small oblivion of component ashes That of a dream-addicted world was once A moving atomy much like your friend here?" Nothing will help that man. To make him laugh, I said then he was a mad mountebank, — And by the Lord I nearer made him cry. I could have eat an eft then, on my knees, Tail, claws, and all of him; for I had stung The king of men, who had no sting for me, And I had hurt him in his memories; And I say now, as I shall say again, I love the man this side idolatry. He'll do it when he's old, he says. I wonder. He may not be so ancient as all that. For such as he, the thing that is to do Will do itself, — but there's a reckoning; The sessions that are now too much his own, The roiling inward of a stilled outside, The churning out of all those blood-fed lines, The nights of many schemes and little sleep, The full brain hammered hot with too much thinking, The vexed heart over-worn with too much aching, — This weary jangling of conjoined affairs Made out of elements that have no end, And all confused at once, I understand, Is not what makes a man to live forever. O no, not now! He'll not be going now: There'll be time yet for God knows what explosions Before he goes. He'll stay awhile. Just wait: Just wait a year or two for Cleopatra, For she's to be a balsam and a comfort; And that's not all a jape of mine now, either. For granted once the old way of Apollo Sings in a man, he may then, if he's able, Strike unafraid whatever strings he will Upon the last and wildest of new lyres; Nor out of his new magic, though it hymn The shrieks of dungeoned hell, shall he create A madness or a gloom to shut quite out A cleaving daylight, and a last great calm Triumphant over shipwreck and all storms. He might have given Aristotle creeps, But surely would have given him his katharsis. He'll not be going yet. There's too much yet Unsung within the man. But when he goes, I'd stake ye coin o' the realm his only care For a phantom world he sounded and found wanting Will be a portion here, a portion there, Of this or that thing or some other thing That has a patent and intrinsical Equivalence in those egregious shillings. And yet he knows, God help him! Tell me, now, If ever there was anything let loose On earth by gods or devils heretofore Like this mad, careful, proud, indifferent Shakespeare! Where was it, if it ever was? By heaven, 'Twas never yet in Rhodes or Pergamon — In Thebes or Nineveh, a thing like this! No thing like this was ever out of England; And that he knows. I wonder if he cares. Perhaps he does .... O Lord, that House in Stratford!

Around the bend of a phrase you return, it’s dawn in a book, it’s a garden, one can see everything, the dew, a moth on a leaf and it’s you who rises suddenly amid the pages and the book grows more lovely because it’s you and you’ve not grown old, you walk slowly to the door.

I will tell you what he told me in the years just after the war as we then called the second world war don't lose your arrogance yet he said you can do that when you're older lose it too soon and you may merely replace it with vanity just one time he suggested changing the usual order of the same words in a line of verse why point out a thing twice he suggested I pray to the Muse get down on my knees and pray right there in the corner and he said he meant it literally it was in the days before the beard and the drink but he was deep in tides of his own through which he sailed chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop he was far older than the dates allowed for much older than I was he was in his thirties he snapped down his nose with an accent I think he had affected in England as for publishing he advised me to paper my wall with rejection slips his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled with the vehemence of his views about poetry he said the great presence that permitted everything and transmuted it in poetry was passion passion was genius and he praised movement and invention I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write

Mudd Club 4th floor gallery Manhattan, April 1981 If you bomb the IND or tag the 2 downtown —gallery-bound— dousing it in tribal shrapnel, you're it —the shit— If you can lie between the rails —Please Stand Clear the Closing— or press yourselves betw. train & the wall spray can rattling like a tooth— The roof the roof the roof is on fire

“A Billion Things in One” is an erasure of the article “YesJulz, Snapchat Royalty” by Max Berlinger, which appeared in the New York Times on June 30, 2016.

Authorized, booked By my steadfast prose The dead I ghost write Shed shadows that shine With hindsight, hearsay— The last word is mine

It is terrible to be trapped at def con with not even Ray Kurzweil’s daughter to gaze upon I know some of you wish I would go wherever my people go, the factory, physical therapy, a telethon No! says my mentor Not this. This is too angry This is too much about Not that. Not that I like to hack, sometimes, the Hebrew Bible I don’t think my mentor hacks the Bible b/c it has too much lame deaf blind circumcised in it Not that. Not that in poetry Didn’t we already have Judd Woe? He was so good to us so good and sad and sorry The great thing about Judd Woe is that now we don’t have to keep looking for a disabled poet We got him Everybody together now: We got him Thank yhwh he’s a man I am so relieved, aren’t you? I am so cock blocked, aren’t you? Here I am at the cobbler Please, please can you make all my high heels into wedges Here I am at Wal-Mart Please, please, can you make your children stop following me Here I am at Advanced Prosthetics Please, please, can you change my settings this is not poetry , they said Be happy with what we give you We got you Insurance: You are allowed ten socks/year Insurance: You are not allowed to walk in oceans Insurance: If you had fought for us, if you had lost your leg for us, for freedom, then we would cover the leg that walks in oceans and why is it always a poem is a walk? A poem is like a walk A poem is like going on a walk A walk is like a poem I was walking the other day and a poem tripped me Don’t leave Don’t I have any other ideas Be a man, mortality, zip it Call in the aubades I wish I would read an aubade Is it morning yet? This manifesto is so so long. Too angry Who you bangin’ on my door? judy grahn Thank yhwh . It was getting hot in here Ray Kurzweil’s daughter is in Hawaii I was about to give up Yes Yes I know I am trying to walk the treadmill My leg beeps at 3 mph This is the conference for hackers Can somebody hack me Can somebody change my settings Yes Yes I know jenny holzer So glad you could make it Come in, judy is here What do y’all do with all the men in our heads Yes Yes It is terrible My people are just trying to get born like please don’t test us we are going to fail and the test comes back and says your baby is fucked judy, jenny , I have been your student faithfully I have kissed some ass, tho, hoping if they like me enough — what if they like me enough — why judy , do you need a coaster? Thy cup runneth over The glass slipper, amenities The manifesto must go on biohack it cut all of it my mentor says This is not poetry My mentor says: A poem is a walk Get well soon, I pray for you Must go          Poem about coed virility          aging       dahlias Recurrent word to describe beauty hacked from the Hebrew Bible: Ruddy Don’t leave     In the morning I will vacuum this up      Scansion, feet I am sorry if you offended me Role of disabled artist: Always be sorry

One might understand Turner, you said, in North Atlantic sky east-southeast from Newfoundland toward Hibernia. Cloud darker than cloud cast doubt upon muttering, pacing water, even backlit by a devouring glare that whitened its edges, bent the bars. Waters apart from society by choice, their living room the aftermath of accident or crime. When the storm comes, we will see into it, there will be no near and no far. In sixty-five-foot 
seas for the Ocean Ranger, green turned to black then white as molecules changed places in the Jeanne d’Arc Basin, the way wood passes into flame, and communication errors into catastrophic failure for the Piper Alpha offshore from Aberdeen. It burned freely. If I don’t come home, is my house in order? Big fear travels in the Sikorsky. Twelve-hour shifts travel with them, the deluge system, aqueous foam. Machinery’s one note hammering the heart, identity compressed with intentions, drenched, the tired body performs delicately timed, brutal tasks no training adequately represents and which consume the perceivable world. In beds on the drilling platform in suspended disbelief, identified by the unlovely sea’s aggression, no sleep aids, should a directive come. Underwater welders deeply unconscious. Survival suits profane in lockers. By dreams of marine flares and inflatables, buoyant smoke, percolating fret, one is weakened. Violence enters the imagination. Clouds previously unrecorded. Unlocked, the gates of light and technology of capture in bitumen oozing from fractures in the earth or afloat like other fatty bodies, condensed by sun and internal salts, harassing snakes with its fumes. Light-sensitive bitumen of Judea upon which Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce recorded the view from his bedroom. It looked nice. A new kind of evidence developed from the camera obscura of experience and memory, love-object to dote on and ignore. Collectible photochrome postcards. Storm surge as weather segment, tornados on YouTube relieve us of our boredom. In the rain, drizzle, intermittent showers, unseasonable hurricane threatening our flight plans, against a sea heaving photogenically, straining at its chains like a monster in the flashbulbs, on wet stones astonishingly slick, we take selfies, post them, and can’t undo it. Meaning takes place in time. By elevated circumstance of Burtynsky’s drone helicopters, revolutionary lenses pester Alberta’s tar sands, sulphur ponds’ rhapsodic upturned faces, photographs that happen in our name and in the name of composition. Foreground entered at distance, the eye surveils the McMurray Formation’s freestanding ruin mid-aspect to an infinity of abstraction. A physical symptom assails our vocabulary and things acquire a literal feeling from which one does not recover. Mineral dissolution, complete. Accommodation space, low. Confinement, relatively broad, extremely complex stratigraphy, reservoirs stacked and composite. An area roughly the size of England stripped of boreal forest and muskeg, unburdened by hydraulic rope shovels of its overburden. Humiliated, blinded, walking in circles. Cycle of soak and dry and residue. The will creates effects no will can overturn, and that seem, with the passage of time, necessary, as the past assumes a pattern. Thought approaches the future and the future, like a heavy unconventional oil, advances. Hello infrastructure, Dodge Ram 1500, no one else wants to get killed on Highway 63, the all-weather road by the Wandering River where earthmovers remain unmoved by our schedules. White crosses in the ditches, white crosses in the glove box. The west stands for relocation, the east for lost causes. Would you conspire to serve tourists in a fish restaurant the rest of your life? I thought not. Drinks are on us bushpigs now, though this camp is no place for a tradesman. Devon’s Jackfish is five-star, an obvious exception. But Mackenzie, Voyageur, Millennium, Borealis — years ago we would have burned them to the ground. Suncor Firebag has Wi-Fi, but will track usage. Guard towers and turnstiles at Wapasu — we’re guests, after all, not prisoners, right? Efficiently squalid, briskly producing raw sewage, black mold, botulism, fleas, remorse, madness, lethargy, mud, it’s not a spiritual home, this bleach taste in the waterglass, layered garments, fried food, bitter complaint in plywood drop-ceiling bedrooms strung out on whatever and general offense and why doesn’t anyone smoke anymore. Dealers and prostitutes cultivate their terms organically, as demand matures. The Athabasca River’s color isn’t good. Should we not encourage a healthy dread of the wild places? Consider the operator crushed by a slab of ice, our electrician mauled by a bear at the front lines of project expansion into the inhumane forest. Fear not, we are worth more than many sparrows. They pay for insignificance with their lives. It’s the structure. Jackpine Mine photographs beautifully on the shoulders of the day, in the minutes before sunset it’s still legal to hunt. One might, like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer, at a certain remove from principal events, cut a sensitive figure in the presence of the sublime. Except you can smell it down here. Corrosive vapors unexpectedly distributed, caustic particulate infiltrates your mood. As does the tar sands beetle whose bite scars, from whom grown men run. Attracted by the same sorrowful chemical compound emitted by damaged trees on which it feeds, its aural signature approximates the rasp of causatum rubbing its parts together. The only other living thing in situ, in the open pit where swims the bitumen, extra brilliant, dense, massive, in the Greek asphaltos, “to make stable,” “to secure.” Pharmacist’s earth that resists decay, resolves and attenuates, cleanses wounds. Once used to burn the houses of our enemies, upgraded now to refinery-ready feedstock, raw crude flowing through channels of production and distribution. Combustion is our style. It steers all things from the black grave of Athabasca-Wabiskaw. Cold Lake. Rail lines of Lac-Mégantic. The optics are bad. We’re all downstream now. Action resembles waiting for a decision made on our behalf, then despair after the fact. Despair which, like bitumen itself, applied to render darker tones or an emphatic tenebrism, imparts a velvety lustrous disposition, but eventually discolors to a black treacle that degrades any pigment it contacts. Details in sections of Raft of the Medusa can no longer be discerned. In 1816, the Medusa’s captain, in a spasm of flamboyant incompetence, ran aground on the African coast, and fearing the ire of his constituents, refused to sacrifice the cannons. They turned on each other, 147 low souls herded onto a makeshift raft cut loose from lifeboats of the wealthy and well-connected. The signs were there, risk/reward coefficient alive in the wind, the locomotive, small tragic towns left for work, where the only thing manufactured is the need for work. Foreshortening and a receding horizon include the viewer in the scene, should the viewer wish to be included in the scene. One can’t be sure if the brig,Argus, is racing to the rescue or departing. It hesitates in the distance, in its nimbus of fairer weather, the courage and compassion of a new age onboard. Géricault’s pyramidical composition — dead and dying in the foreground from which the strong succeed upward toward an emotional peak — an influence for Turner’s Disaster at Sea, the vortex structure of The Slave Ship: all those abandoned, where is thy market now? It’s difficult to imagine everyone saved, it’s unaffordable. Waves disproportionate, organized in depth, panic modulating the speaking voice. The situation so harshly primary and not beautiful when you don’t go to visit the seaside, but the seaside visits you, rudely, breaks in through the basement, ascends stairs to your bedroom, you can’t think of it generally then. The 
constitution of things is accustomed to hiding. Rearrangement will not suit us. Certain low-lying river deltas. Island states, coastal regions — floodwaters receding in measures like all we haven’t seen the last of reveal in stagnancies and bloat what’s altered, as avernal exhalations of mines and flares are altered but don’t disappear. Still, iceberg season is spectacular this year, worth the trip to photograph in evening ourselves before the abundance when, aflame in light that dissolves what it illuminates, water climbs its own red walls, vermilion in the furnaces.