1269 Arts and sciences poems

The poet is a man who feigns And feigns so thoroughly, at last He manages to feign as pain The pain he really feels, And those who read what once he wrote Feel clearly, in the pain they read, Neither of the pains he felt, Only a pain they cannot sense. And thus, around its jolting track There runs, to keep our reason busy, The circling clockwork train of ours That men agree to call a heart.

To Have and Have Not, 1944 Betty Joan Perske, age nineteen, gives that look, the one that shifts tectonic plates, to Bogie, and that’s it: Germany surrenders, Japan bows its apologies, and that sailor smooches the nurse in Times Square. The world, no longer black and white, makes love as D-Day shrinks to just a time for planting daffodils, and Hiroshima grows Toyotas. Harry T. has lunch with Stalin; General Patton takes up nursing Bonsai trees. “You know how to whistle, don’t you,” says Bacall, as the moon sighs and the Earth sighs back. “Just put your lips together and blow.”

for Miami They all like to hang out. Thinking is all rather grim to them. Snake and Minnie, who love each other dearly, drink in different bars, ride home in separate cars. They like to kiss good night with unexplored lips. They go out of town to see each other open. This they do for no one else. Minnie does it all for God. Snake does it all for fame. Backstage is where they play their games; that’s why i know their business. I was gonna talk about a race riot. They say they’ve never played that town. Fleece tells me he’s seen an old movie about a black town attacking a white one. Sidney Poitier was the young doctor, accused, abused and enraged. There were Ossie Davis and Woody Strode, Ruby Dee and a hundred unknowns. Also Sapphire’s mama as a maid. “What was Sapphire’s mama’s name?” says Inez. I was going to talk about a race riot but we were stuck on Kingfish’s mother-in-law. Minnie kisses Snake so he’ll forget about that and I say, “They’re mad, they’re on the bottom going down, stung by white justice in a white town, and then there’s other colored people, who don’t necessarily think they’re colored people, leaving them the ground.” “That’s just like the dreads, the Coptics, and the Man-ley-ites,” one drunk says too loud, “I and I know,” say he. Snake yells, “Are you crazy? No, it ain’t, and no, we don’t.” “That’s just like Angola,” Terri chimes, “Sometimes it’s not who but what, sometimes not what but who.” I’m trying to talk to these people about this race riot, someone is walking on the bar, and every one of us belongs even now to Miami, to people we have never seen. Pookie and Omar want to know what’s goin’ on. They always do, ’cause they’re always in the bathroom when it’s goin’ on. They do everything together and not for God, and not for fame, but for love. At least that’s what their records say. They are a singing group that’s had 13 Pookies. Omar asks me, “What do you want to say?” Inez interupts, “She don’t know what to say, she just wants to say something, I understand that.” The 13th Pookie chirps, “This race riot sounds like all the other race riots.” Fleece says, “And you sound like 12 other Pookies, Pookie.” I am still trying to talk about this race riot. Minnie looks up and says, “We don’t have anywhere to put any more dead.” Snake puts on his coat to leave alone, “We never did, we never did.”

Bird of the bitter bright grey golden morn Scarce risen upon the dusk of dolorous years, First of us all and sweetest singer born Whose far shrill note the world of new men hears Cleave the cold shuddering shade as twilight clears; When song new-born put off the old world's attire And felt its tune on her changed lips expire, Writ foremost on the roll of them that came Fresh girt for service of the latter lyre, Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name! Alas the joy, the sorrow, and the scorn, That clothed thy life with hopes and sins and fears, And gave thee stones for bread and tares for corn And plume-plucked gaol-birds for thy starveling peers Till death clipt close their flight with shameful shears; Till shifts came short and loves were hard to hire, When lilt of song nor twitch of twangling wire Could buy thee bread or kisses; when light fame Spurned like a ball and haled through brake and briar, Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name! Poor splendid wings so frayed and soiled and torn! Poor kind wild eyes so dashed with light quick tears! Poor perfect voice, most blithe when most forlorn, That rings athwart the sea whence no man steers Like joy-bells crossed with death-bells in our ears! What far delight has cooled the fierce desire That like some ravenous bird was strong to tire On that frail flesh and soul consumed with flame, But left more sweet than roses to respire, Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name? Prince of sweet songs made out of tears and fire, A harlot was thy nurse, a God thy sire; Shame soiled thy song, and song assoiled thy shame. But from thy feet now death has washed the mire, Love reads out first at head of all our quire, Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name.

‘He thought it had only been put there to finish off th’ alphabet, like, though ampus-and (&) would ha’ done as well.’ (George Eliot: Adam Bede) And had in fact, for generations— the plump, open armed ‘&’ waving goodbye from the end of the old-world alphabet like an innkeeper framed in doorway candlelight, farewells swelled with hopes of come again. Then the old world burned down because we sensed, beyond the candle’s glow, the road led to a dead end. No traveler returned, even the unverified odd reports of happy returns petered out. So we renovated the alphabet, signing it off with a streamlined ‘z’ as sharp and final as lightning: no sense in posting notice of further connections that didn’t exist, or passing off maps as places. Trouble was, nobody felt at home in the revamped compound. Bookings fell off, postcards of views of blank walls piled unsold in the unvisited gift shop, the same paperbacks stalled on the revolving racks. It was a paradise of sorts, a golden age of nullity, no relatives breaking the costly silence. No wonder Eliot’s befuddled Jacob Storey felt his page of Z’s was somehow ‘not right,’ that ‘it was a letter you never wanted hardly.’ He knew, as one newly released from the unlit cell of his long-unlettered ignorance, what you did want hardly: you wanted, needed—as hardly as Hetty Sorrel, abandoned at the dock—someone to stand by. You were the murderess of your baby, silenced with a ‘z.’ You needed a hand, the open-armed return of all your relations. You wanted, harder than death, ampersand

L’ange Anatomique, by Jacques-Fabien Gautier Dagoty, 1746 Unfastened avidly from each ivory button of her spine, the voluntary muscles open virtuosities of red: Cinnabar the mutagen, and carmine from cochineal born between fog and frost, so many little deaths Buddhists refuse to wear robes soaked in its thousands. Sunsets of other centuries fade in galleries to ash. Red is fugitive: As the voice, the blow of gravity along a nerve opening to an ache the body can’t unhouse: As the carnation suffusing cheek and haunch like saucers from the king’s porcelain rinsed in candlelight. Gratuitous as the curl, the urn-shaped torso, the pensive, brimming gaze of pretty post-coital thought she half-turns over one excavated shoulder. As if to see herself in a mirror’s savage theater as elegy to the attempt to fill an exhausted form, to learn again the old ordeals of wound and hand and eye. To find the source of burning.

The chair has arms. The clock, a face. The kites have long and twirly tails. The tacks have heads. The books have spines. The toolbox has a set of nails. Our shoes have tongues, the marbles, eyes. The wooden desk has legs and seat. The cups have lips. My watch has hands. The classroom rulers all have feet. Heads, arms hands, nails, spines, legs, feet, tails, face, lips, tongues, eyes.

Some things no one says aloud. But he was there if he says he was. Bleaching fields and buttermilk. The stench of breweries and lye. Two-thirds of his life before this one? Sky. His current city rises off a river not Lek, though here in the gallery, a train ride away: The impossible familiar. The somehow known. The curator has written: On the crowded ferry, cows attempt to drink. But anyone can see that one scratches her neck, a good-sailor cow, sickle-hocked, not parched. Cows like that. Yes. He remembers. Also that, downriver, float the fishmongers’ baskets of haddock and crab. On the way home, this will be also his view, the river running toward its source, a reverse birthing. But now, he sees that Rembrandt has wired coils of light into the shipbuilder’s ruff. He remembers shipbuilders, the horizon upon which sailed their fluyts, and above which: homesick. That was what we call a long time ago because it has to be called something. And now? The guard warns him back from one world. Rose hip. Willow. Sea salt.       The infinite clouds.

You can’t say it that way any more. Bothered about beauty you have to Come out into the open, into a clearing, And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange Of you, you who have so many lovers, People who look up to you and are willing To do things for you, but you think It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . . So much for self-analysis. Now, About what to put in your poem-painting: Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium. Names of boys you once knew and their sleds, Skyrockets are good—do they still exist? There are a lot of other things of the same quality As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed, Dull-sounding ones. She approached me About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments. Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something Ought to be written about how this affects You when you write poetry: The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate Something between breaths, if only for the sake Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you For other centers of communication, so that understanding May begin, and in doing so be undone.

I mean this thing I want to write and no other You will not be so clever as to resurrect the feathered the tatty wings of a costumed angel in my dining room tatty spatial realm room where I exist and look at things and eat them and float nine inches above the floor and no one else need know and no other poet will do The poet will do what the poet will do and mime or maim the poet meme—in fancy venue or classroom or focus group the wings of the poet relax and warm and shed and oracular shit out the window in a pile by the side of the road and the commitment of the poet to engage, subvert, refract, or remand is safe in my vagina at last where it belongs.