1269 Arts and sciences poems

We, the naturally hopeful, Need a simple sign For the myriad ways we’re capsized. We who love precise language Need a finer way to convey Disappointment and perplexity. For speechlessness and all its inflections, For up-ended expectations, For every time we’re ambushed By trivial or stupefying irony, For pure incredulity, we need The inverted exclamation point. For the dropped smile, the limp handshake, For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift Or taken the first sip of a flat beer, Or felt love or pond ice Give way underfoot, we deserve it. We need it for the air pocket, the scratch shot, The child whose ball doesn’t bounce back, The flat tire at journey’s outset, The odyssey that ends up in Weehawken. But mainly because I need it – here and now As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio Staring at my espresso and cannoli After this middle-aged couple Came strolling by and he suddenly Veered and sneezed all over my table And she said to him, “See,that’s why I don’t like to eat outside.”

Applied geometry, measuring the height of a pine from like triangles, Rosa’s shadow stretches seven paces in low-slanting light of late Christmas afternoon. One hundred thirty nine steps up the hill until the sun is finally caught at the top of the tree, let’s see, twenty to one, one hundred feet plus a few to adjust for climbing uphill, and her hands barely reach mine as we encircle the trunk, almost eleven feet around. Back to the lumber tables. That one tree might make three thousand feet of boards if our hearts could stand the sound of its fall.

1 What does it matter if the words I choose, in the order I choose them in, Go out into a silence I know Nothing about, there to be let In and entertained and charmed Out of their master’s orders? And yet I would like to see where they go And how without me they behave. 2 Speaking is difficult and one tries To be exact and yet not to Exact the prime intention to death. On the other hand the appearance of things Must not be made to mean another Thing. It is a kind of triumph To see them and to put them down As what they are. The inadequacy Of the living, animal language drives Us all to metaphor and an attempt To organize the spaces we think We have made occur between the words. 3 The bad word and the bad word and The word which glamours me with some Quick face it pulls to make me let It leave me to go across In roughly your direction, hates To go out maybe so completely On another silence not its own. 4 Before I know it they are out Afloat in the head which freezes them. Then I suppose I take the best Away and leave the others arranged Like floating bergs to sink a convoy. 5 One word says to its mate O I do not think we go together Are we doing any good here Why do we find ourselves put down? The mate pleased to be spoken to Looks up from the line below And says well that doubtful god Who has us here is far from sure How we on our own tickle the chin Of the prince or the dame that lets us in. 6 The dark companion is a star Very present like a dark poem Far and unreadable just out At the edge of this poem floating. It is not more or less a dark Companion poem to the poem. 7 Language is expensive if We want to strut, busked out Showing our best on silence. Good Morning. That is a bonny doing Of verbs you wear with the celandine Catching the same sun as mine. You wear your dress like a prince but A country’s prince beyond my ken. Through the chinks in your lyric coat My ear catches a royal glimpse Of fuzzed flesh, unworded body. Was there something you wanted to say? I myself dress up in what I can Afford on the broadway. Underneath My overcoat of the time’s slang I am fashionable enough wearing The grave-clothes of my generous masters. 8 And what are you supposed to say I asked a new word but it kept mum. I had secretly admired always What I thought it was here for. But I was wrong when I looked it up Between the painted boards. It said Something it was never very likely I could fit in to a poem in my life. 9 The good word said I am not pressed For time. I have all the foxglove day And all my user’s days to give You my attention. Shines the red Fox in the digitalis grove. Choose me choose me. Guess which Word I am here calling myself The best. If you can’t fit me in To lying down here among the fox Glove towers of the moment, say I am yours the more you use me. Tomorrow Same place same time give me a ring. 10 Backwards the poem’s just as good. We human angels as we read Read back as we gobble the words up. Allowing the poem to represent A recognizable landscape Sprouting green up or letting green With all its weight of love hang To gravity’s sweet affection, Arse-versa it is the same object, Even although the last word seems To have sung first, or the breakfast lark Sings up from the bottom of the sea. 11 The poem is not a string of knots Tied for a meaning of another time And county, unreadable, found By chance. The poem is not a henge Or Easter Island emerged Longnose Or a tally used by early unknown Peoples. The words we breathe and puff Are our utensils down the dream Into the manhole. Replace the cover. 12 The words are mine. The thoughts are all Yours as they occur behind The bat of your vast unseen eyes. These words are as you see them put Down on the dead-still page. They have No ability above their station. Their station on silence is exact. What you do with them is nobody’s business. 13 Running across the language lightly This morning in the hangingover Whistling light from the window, I Was tripped and caught into the whole Formal scheme which Art is. I had only meant to enjoy Dallying between the imaginary And imaginary’s opposite With a thought or two up my sleeve. 14 Is the word? Yes Yes. But I hear A sound without words from another Person I can’t see at my elbow. A sigh to be proud of. You? Me? 15 Having to construct the silence first To speak out on I realize The silence even itself floats At my ear-side with a character I have not met before. Hello Hello I shout but that silence Floats steady, will not be marked By an off-hand shout. For some reason It refuses to be broken now By what I thought was worth saying. If I wait a while, if I look out At the heavy greedy rooks on the wall It will disperse. Now I construct A new silence I hope to break.

The Pontalba Apartments in the View-Master and the cardboard cathedral as if trapped in the dream twenty years early, the whole a furious search as if for a reason. Still, it's sex that spoils it, isn't it? Jackson Square was the smallest sufficient landscape, but that was before, and now the gates are locked at sundown, and the smell of the river fails, falls ever backward. Some of us lived there, though: What shall we say who have knowledge carried to the heart?

Of all living monuments has the fewest facts attached to it, they slide right off its surface, no Lincoln lap for them to sit on and no horse to be astride. Here is what I know for sure: Was a gift from one city to another. A city cannot travel to another city, a city cannot visit any city but itself, and in its sadness it gives away a great door in the air. Well a city cannot except for Paris, who puts on a hat styled with pigeon wings and walks through the streets of another city and will not even see the sights, too full she is of the sights already. And within her walk her women, and the women of Paris looking like they just walked through an Arch... Or am I mixing it up I think I am with another famous female statue? Born in its shadow and shook-foil hot the facts slid off me also. I and the Arch we burned to the touch. “Don’t touch that Arch a boy we know got third-degree burns from touch- ing that Arch,” says my mother sitting for her statue. She is metal on a hilltop and so sad she isn’t a Cross. She was long ago given to us by Ireland. What an underhand gift for an elsewhere to give, a door that reminds you you can leave it. She raises her arm to brush my hair. Oh no female armpit lovelier than the armpit of the Arch.

Even C.P. Cavafy– cynical, ascetic, unknown in his day– printed at his own expense poems no one would publish, poems intimate, personal, to share with readers he called friends. But I have hundreds of poems hidden away in a box. Even when I know Cavafy once wrapped verse with black and gold ribbons to give away as a gift.

In edges, in barriers the tonal light of t the one thing removed overemphasizes tonally and you could hurry it, and it vanish and plan You go out on an avenue, but may be taken in despite your chordal list of hates, overcomings banished ready receiving you from a darkened cone, the one a beat behind the one you there are Then the I not part of the you equation, but the spider trying to build where it is written vibrates tentative I don’t want to talk to you about it anymore crystal region in its light, there are failures and there are failures But it’s imperative, abrupt catch, that you sink the final catch, trounced morning this is awful but none other available, words reach and visually fail to tie audibly retire the pieces of the opening collision, and the reaches of turning aside remind I am hopefully this is position of the world overcome by and by the wind takes our voice the collateral one voice after Diane Ward

Aship, reel in fountainhead enclosure of roses skies indigo, gold moon Omphalos triumphant “only connect” end, point of beginning of old, apotheosis chandelier fond du lac cross (mortal) hid boundary compass beyond confines music of the spheres solved, mosaic of Cosmos snowflakes lit darkest sea, bowsprit the deeps bound white antipodes such conflagration of souls Dawn in Erewhon, corporeal cornucopia one being, surround in bloom flow essential seed portal system Milky Way as Unmoved Mover under orders axis mundi, ascend scale organism omnipotent poised in flesh, awake horns psaltery Fanfare for the Common Man mind set razor an edge, blood fulfill final ablution fire purify baton Oompapah! to lead the band anystray orchestra knows who destination core of the universe (so rings redwood of eons) gospel sentience Lo!allegro non troppo remake mankind, a joyous noise into the void “from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it” as speech arc Simulacrum, O chorus us Homo Sapiens in a major key! tools, consonant & vowel to fashion a voice commensurate wheel of time Origins great aorta leaved from the wrist up, but yet to attain the skies all arrowed a rainbow midair, ad astra per aspera countdown for Lift Off

A poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit, Dumb As old medallions to the thumb, Silent as the sleeve-worn stone Of casement ledges where the moss has grown— A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds. * A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs, Leaving, as the moon releases Twig by twig the night-entangled trees, Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves, Memory by memory the mind— A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs. * A poem should be equal to: Not true. For all the history of grief An empty doorway and a maple leaf. For love The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea— A poem should not mean But be.

To grasp, like Prometheus, the fire — without the power to give it away ... — Betty Adcock At first a silhouette on the horizon, then turning solid, like Schiller coming up the path to meet the adorable sisters, and they, pretending not to watch, their hearts, all the time, pounding, driven by the same spring force (that would tear them apart), the same force that drives the salmon upriver, against the current, the odds, back to the home pool, even as the autumn mind, in spite of itself, turns backward, with the same feverish glow as autumn gives to the summer’s leaves, a deceptive glamour, warming the past with an amber light, like brandy held up to the fire, or the sun sinking at dusk into the water, into the Baltic Sea each night, where, in the mythical depths of Lithuanian folktale, lies the amber castle of the female sun, burning in the dark water, a globe the color of harvest, aglow there in the depths of the past, though the amber, congealed sap of a once living force, is broken into bits, and the mythic castle with it — strung now as beads, and hung, a charm, around the neck of a daughter, like the one in a Greek dream, picking flowers when the earth opened, and in a swirl of violet cape and the pounding of hoofs, the dark god broke out of the earth driven by the same spring force, consequential and mortal, and up there, hanging over the mythic fields of what recurs and recurs (though never the same, and never to be reconciled) — what is that? A hot air balloon filled with passengers who paid to be raised in a basket, to be up there looking down on the ground where they live, a place shrunken now beneath their gaze, while their bloated shadow floats like a jellyfish in a green sea, barely a smudge on the pastures below, the trace of their passage less than a breath of smoke from a coal-fired engine — a blast of tarnished air from the actual past, heavy metal delivered from memory. Useless to warn the girl, whose hand will always be reaching out for the flowers, or the sisters inflamed with Schiller, as he with the tricolor dream of a world he could never inhabit ... useless to comfort the eyeless Tiresias who knew how terrible was wisdom when it knew itself useless, and useless to read the names on the shining black wall of the Vietnam Memorial, the text of exactly what war has accomplished — and look, there, standing high above the tragic scene, not the little figures of the wise ancients that Yeats saw carved into the deep blue stone — but there, standing high above Arlington, against the blank lapis of the sky: a horse with the torso and head of a man, yes, it is Chiron, the last of the hybrids, the wise and terribly wounded centaur for whom immortality was a curse, and he gave it away to Prometheus, who stole the god’s fire and gave it away, as art gives the power to give it away, for that fire is the gift that cannot be held, for it will burn to an ash those (born and born again, war without end) who would hold it.