1269 Arts and sciences poems

In placid hours well-pleased we dream Of many a brave unbodied scheme. But form to lend, pulsed life create, What unlike things must meet and mate: A flame to melt—a wind to freeze; Sad patience—joyous energies; Humility—yet pride and scorn; Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity—reverence. These must mate, And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel—Art.

Shoot in 16 mm film, capture her sitting under an olive-green archway. Loop the sound of steel striking glass. When you blink, the camera captures the frame of her kin, walking upside down. Loop the sound of tundra grass sprouting. Her hairline marks her shift        from caribou to woman. Standing in front of three white spotlights the silhouette of five black arrowheads departs from her lips. Splice together her eyelashes and frozen lids        exaggerate the strain of her freckles coiled into song. Inukshuks tumble from the tips of her fingernails guiding the landing strip for twin otters; they watch their children travel to the moon, or perhaps they erase our oiled webs. Chart sixteen luminaries into the Beaufort Sea. Wait.     Wait.        Wait. The shutter will remember their white crested etchings. They resurface in the lyric of your documentary.

If you believe in the magic of language, then Elvis really Lives and Princess Diana foretold I end as car spin. If you believe the letters themselves contain a power within them, then you understand what makes outside tedious, how desperation becomes a rope ends it. The circular logic that allows senator to become treason, and treason to become atoners. That eleven plus two is twelve plus one, and an admirer is also married. That if you could just rearrange things the right way you’d find your true life, the right path, the answer to your questions: you’d understand how the Titanic turns into that ice tin, and debit card becomes bad credit. How listen is the same as silent, and not one letter separates stained from sainted.

Blushing in a manner out of keeping with my age (my graying hair, my falling face) I entered Greyfriar’s Inn. I was blushing, and out of keeping with my age. In I went, making my foolish entrance, folding down my umbrella self-consciously — aware of the locals at the bar with their gin and their small talk — and walked right up to the barmaid, somewhat brazenly, I thought. One glass of beer, I said to her, and she, smiling kindly, pulled it. I stood and waited. I waited for them all to stop their fond, drunken reminiscences, for them to stop putting forth their opinions, and to turn to me and say — in an accusatory way — What are you doing here? On a Wednesday night? Unaccompanied? With an accent we can’t quite identify? I waited ready: Why am I here? I would say. I am here as an imposter, an outsider, a reluctant admirer of your lovely daughter Jane — I am here for my Lecture in the Picturesque, to learn of sidescreens and perspectives, to learn of window tax and syntax — and “ha-has” — for harmless gambling in the parlor, wearing mittens and handworked collars and a pretty amber cross — I am here to steal a pistol and a spoon found underground, to rob the peacock feathers streaming from the silly boy’s crown — I am here, I would say, for sensation— For sensation? they would say, and I would say: Yes!Painful sensation of restraint or alarm! Oh ye patrons of Greyfriar’s Inn, I would exclaim, I am here to meet your high-waisted Jane, to embrace her as my comrade; as my brother-in-arms! I stood and waited. But the good patrons of Greyfriar’s Inn, they never said a thing; just continued talking amongst themselves, quietly reminiscing. I paid the barmaid and turned my head. I looked out at the wet; I looked out at the southwest rain, and the redbrick houses. I watched the famous silhouette, gently swinging back and forth above the gate. I raised the glass to her impassive, sideways face. Nothing ventured. Nothing gained.

I have always aspired to a more spacious form that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose and would let us understand each other without exposing the author or reader to sublime agonies. In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the light, lashing his tail. That’s why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion, though it’s an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel. It’s hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from, when so often they’re put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty. What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons, who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues, and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand, work at changing his destiny for their convenience? It’s true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I’ve devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony. There was a time when only wise books were read, helping us to bear our pain and misery. This, after all, is not quite the same as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings. People therefore preserve silent integrity, thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors. The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will. What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry, as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, under unbearable duress and only with the hope that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument. Berkeley, 1968

Reading what I have just written, I now believe I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes. Why did I stop? Did some instinct discern a shape, the artist in me intervening to stop traffic, as it were? A shape. Or fate, as the poets say, intuited in those few long ago hours— I must have thought so once. And yet I dislike the term which seems to me a crutch, a phase, the adolescence of the mind, perhaps— Still, it was a term I used myself, frequently to explain my failures. Fate, destiny, whose designs and warnings now seem to me simply local symmetries, metonymic baubles within immense confusion— Chaos was what I saw. My brush froze—I could not paint it. Darkness, silence: that was the feeling. What did we call it then? A “crisis of vision” corresponding, I believed, to the tree that confronted my parents, but whereas they were forced forward into the obstacle, I retreated or fled— Mist covered the stage (my life). Characters came and went, costumes were changed, my brush hand moved side to side far from the canvas, side to side, like a windshield wiper. Surely this was the desert, the dark night. (In reality, a crowded street in London, the tourists waving their colored maps.) One speaks a word:I. Out of this stream the great forms— I took a deep breath. And it came to me the person who drew that breath was not the person in my story, his childish hand confidently wielding the crayon— Had I been that person? A child but also an explorer to whom the path is suddenly clear, for whom the vegetation parts— And beyond, no longer screened from view, that exalted solitude Kant perhaps experienced on his way to the bridges— (We share a birthday.) Outside, the festive streets were strung, in late January, with exhausted Christmas lights. A woman leaned against her lover’s shoulder singing Jacques Brel in her thin soprano— Bravo! the door is shut. Now nothing escapes, nothing enters— I hadn’t moved. I felt the desert stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems) on all sides, shifting as I speak, so that I was constantly face to face with blankness, that stepchild of the sublime, which, it turns out, has been both my subject and my medium. What would my twin have said, had my thoughts reached him? Perhaps he would have said in my case there was no obstacle (for the sake of argument) after which I would have been referred to religion, the cemetery where questions of faith are answered. The mist had cleared. The empty canvases were turned inward against the wall. The little cat is dead(so the song went). Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks. And the sun says yes. And the desert answers your voice is sand scattered in wind.

I can play songs in my head Yes I can perfectly replicate (the) full-on orchestral every note (when the lights / do down / in the city) yet I cannot compose, for example and though when I was young I believed that the fullness meant I could recreate the sounds I heard in my head with my mouth I learned through painful iteration painfully unsatisfactory shameful the rendition so partial almost unrelated the qualities are: note tone scale register vocality musicality incapacity painfully shy of representation is there anyone? who is a record player

A board. A slab. A draught. A frame strewn with sand for the delineation of figures. A sandbox. And. Geometrical diagrams. Or. A frame divided in two sections and in which round wooden plums slide upon parallel rods. For performing the functions of arithmetic. Finding mechanical solutions to mathematical problems. Addition and subtraction. Multiplication and division. Both square and cube root operations. On numbers. As. A set of positive integers unique in meaning and fixed in order. But. If the value of the plum changes according to its position on the rod, you find that I am divisible. Can be rendered invisible. That I can be reduced, diminished, and deducted from the larger quantities. I am trying to discover the value of me. But. I am dumb to the wonders of your great numbers. A child puts a penny in a penny loafer. A woman with two broken fingers carries three bags up four stairs. Five or six men stamp their feet in the snow. And. In the middle of a rectangular room, halfway across the world, seven empty chairs form a circle. For. A nine inch statue portrays a man on the back of an ox. And. I am trying to accrue. I am trying to accumulate. But. You have given me the gift of two glass eyes. Or. You've added eight and subtracted ten. The word is derived from a Semitic word ibeq. To wipe the dust. And. In architecture, a slab on the top of the capital of a column. In the Ionic orders, a square flat plate. In the Corinthian and Composite, variously cut and ornamented. See. You are bedazzled. You stand at the edge of a hundred horizons wearing a thousand crowns. While I, in this world, am slowly disappearing. As is this image of you. For. Any number times zero. Always equals zero.

Without the manifest necessity of a paint-laden brush, the motion traced by the painter's hand would mimic that moth's fragile desperation against the glass as it seeks escape into the already painted sunset. It drops to the sill periodically the way the painter's hand would drop to the palette. Then it sputters back up erratically and zigzags to indicate the horizontal nature of sunsets. On the other side of the glass, free to the air, a nighthawk enacts the same erratic striving, up and up and down and sideways then up again and falteringly up until it drops, wings folded, suicidally earthward. It spreads its wings just above the ground for the life- saving aerialist's breathtaking swoop. Air through feathers (they call it drumming) hums like a wind harp or tissue paper on a comb. The nighthawk flies like that, erratic as a bat, because that's how moths fly, and that's what nighthawks eat and what they feed their fledglings. Nighthawks build no nests but lay their eggs on bare ground. Their camouflage is so perfect you can find them only by accident. If you are out walking and the mother flies up, pulling that clichéd broken-wing trick, and you mark the spot she rose from, you can find the eggs . If you go back after they hatch, you can look right at them and think they aren't there—just some small chunks of wood. So I'm watching this nighthawk and the moth on the glass in their painterly struggles that mirror each other as the sunset reclines, aloof. This is the only moth I've seen this rainless summer. The only nighthawk too. So I open the window and give them both what they want.

A sentence with “dappled shadow” in it. Something not sayable spurting from the morning silence, secret as a thrush. The other man, the officer, who brought onions and wine and sacks of flour, the major with the swollen knee, wanted intelligent conversation afterward. Having no choice, she provided that, too. Potsdamerplatz, May 1945. When the first one was through he pried her mouth open. Bashō told Rensetsu to avoid sensational materials. If the horror of the world were the truth of the world, he said, there would be no one to say it and no one to say it to. I think he recommended describing the slightly frenzied swarming of insects near a waterfall. Pried her mouth open and spit in it. We pass these things on, probably, because we are what we can imagine. Something not sayable in the morning silence. The mind hungering after likenesses. “Tender sky,” etc., curves the swallows trace in air.