1269 Arts and sciences poems

The songs swept down from the northern steppes with cinerary horse and sword and vestment in the wake of battle suicidal for a bronze translation of flesh burnt to a vertical vapor trail of fame which, so they claimed, would be undying by which they meant the dying would be just prolonged a little longer as on a ladder made of air each legendary smoke of name could only climb by thinning till it wasn’t there. And now as the steel tips of our devices dig, sort through and analyze what’s left behind: scant traces of berserk debris, dumb soot of ritual effaced by dumber ash, beneath ghost towns the ghosts have all abandoned, all we unearth intact now are the untranslated bones of babies, inhumed at home in older dwellings on deeper strata under mud floors in pits — placed carefully on sides, knees drawn to chests, skulls cupped in pebble bones of hand, the dead nursling, the stillborn, the miscarried — unnamed, unadorned, as if the only grave goods buried with them were their perishing — as if that were what the mothers wanted to keep close, keep hidden, safe from the heroic stench of burning upward while their breasts still swelling dripping freshened the black dirt sucking at their feet.

How many books now have the word Last In their title? Or worry, or some dangling variation Of mistake? Or empire burning, or The fools have fucked it up? Who the hell listens? They roar and Wriggle, up and down the page, They screen-print what’s coming next — pinups Of blocked streets and stone faces. How many books sling the word doom, Or mimic spotlights or air raid sirens, Regurgitate the Romans, the Kick Down the Door Guys, our genius with the fiery furnace? The quivers, the shakes, the iambic dread, The anger, the insomnia, the slow tic Of the wait, the wail, the transcribed too late, In the manner of those who have gone before us, Geiger counters, clacking the rising damp.

The word is the making of the world. — Wallace Stevens It’s a filmstrip afternoon and we’re all grateful to the humming projector in the middle of our desks, the closed blinds, the absence of a real adult. There’s a vague promise of revelation from the title and the dark, tree-lined streets, the voice calling from a house carrying within it our freedom not to answer. Inside another house, a little girl in a pretty dress is falling asleep at her father’s desk, turning into Alice in Wonderland as her mind falls down the rabbit holes of grammar. The Mad Hatter and Jabberwocky tell her to lure the letters into a trap so they can beat them to death with mallets. We’d like to see that. Without words no one could tell us what to do. We know grammar is just a byproduct, like schizophrenia, of a brain that grew too fast for its own good and that history is a series of conspiracies by accidental despots. Mrs. Bradford is falling asleep on the wide window ledge, her blue polyester pants gapped to reveal her white socks and pink spotted shins. We try not to look. The Mad Hatter doesn’t say that the alphabet was first used to keep track of property or that for centuries people believed if women learned to write the lost world would never be recovered or that the Mayans believed outsiders wrote things down not in order to remember them but to free themselves into the work of forgetting. That year Mrs. Bradford taught us about the Lewis & Clark expedition over and over again. We never learned why it mattered so much to her or what possible use it could be to anyone. The professor tells Judy about the thousands of words Arabs needed for camels and their parts, the dozen words Eskimos had for snow, and a chimp who learned seven human words. A voice made visible says: magic is a matter of fact to you, Every miracle has to have its qualifications, reservations, footnotes and our heads rise from our desks. The rest of the year will be a series of substitute teachers who teach us nothing but footnotes and their own reservations. Mrs. Bradford dead of a brain tumor. We sit in our sixth-grade desks with the blinds closed against the tree-lined streets as the letters of the world rise up and, forming a single word, eclipse our world and fill our mouths with shadows.

Bob Dahlquist is an artist whose work I first noticed in New York City's Bryant Park, where I saw staring down at me an imaginative logo for a sandwich shop. The logo demonstrated Dahlquist's grasp of what I call the printer's fist—an understanding of the visual and intellectual significance of typographic characters. His "alwaysendeavor" replicates the look of old-fashioned office signs etched into translucent glass doors, but in this case we see the text from both sides at once, and we must pull apart the strands of overlapping text to reconstitute the meaning.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>

+ This is a poured-truth dressed in memory and cut down; this is a matter ruff; a gray middle the world is in flight and many things circle. What world do you want me in? I ask. But I am confronted with touch, the work of hand and eye, and a kept-remark roaming ... When in Rome, I think. + A dressed-memory: never did more frill mean curtained-silence. Hello? We’re here, they say. I remember the moment first-harvested: no possible brimming is ever frank. At that age, who knew filth could be forward. I thought I could cut it down. + Look, the leaping is possible, I think. I watch the way evening attaches to us. See its starting point? It banded, uncontrolled and gleaming. Our jewel. Not all worlds see the darkness. Remember: the world is good, that leaping center is a tuned heart. I want that melody. + What world do you want me in, now? I ask I feel broad-throated, and slippy. I say,tell me the times the chronicle mentions me. 56, she says. Let me be clear: I knew. I said,I knew. I wanted to have my own grown romance.Plant me another. Do it now.

Dear Writers, I’m compiling the first in what I hope is a series of publications I’m calling artists among artists. The theme for issue 1 is “Faggot Dinosaur.” I hope to hear from you! Thank you and best wishes.

i fail in the retry of possible gaps for the middle of canyons in crumbling lights for the scarification of vinyl. it rides through the forest and throbs a small packet where parallel seams scratch a readable surface on the backs of the camels in mirages of separate planes to the bursting eclipse of pronounceable service, two spots on its forehead call out for the country of doubling masses on a highway that cuts into faces in line for the city every stream ties a knot for an opening under the sea i lose all my digits to the moon that will one day be bare to the parched piles of breathing in farms to the doorways that promise a morning on the accident prone to a murder of chance every mouse in the dust in the kitchen will harvest the cold in the sickness of scattering twigs in the answer of mirrors for the double that sings with the night by the prayer full of ashes under frozen cadavers that once were the hearts in the egg of a wound i disappear in the wrap-up for invisible letters that leave all the snow for the hunt to deliver migration on the mushroom fields full of returns under beaches in roads by a promise where the water turns into a home and the blame of the air will no longer wail for the spot in the cloud full of planets while a bubble reenters a womb for explosions in placards like the front of a bus crossing vines in a prairie that were traced on the skin of a goat i look at the picture of too many races for the blood of a horse that a bundle of sleeping 3 shorted connections for the change of electrical chairs under pools of announcements for the battling showers that tell all the stories of war to infants in sight of the corner of trading for the telephones buried in answers under barrooms and sawdust and piers where the songs of an isthmus circle the beacon where the moon cannot pull where a whisper moves sand off a stone i weigh every mote in my eye with the fingers of handshakes they calibrate walks like the wheels of a car they reflect in a wave like untying the knot of a bruise full of ice where once was a number where the count was eleven where equality lifts like the dough that incarcerates mud clots and showers for the vanishing thorn in a guide by the pillow softly omitted what the second hand sees under gears by the hand of a cripple for the ditch in a face that is fine i bury my head in the leaves that the buses were lost in that day when i looked for her here in the Arctic when the telephone poles were the marks of equators when the mornings at home could not write their own name when the shepherd was singing too many shields at the entrance of staring at stars in the basement with the light in the chest of what follows with a walking that pulls at two seals for the trouble in words in the empty in the on and off one why there have to be zeros to raise all the shores for piñatas to line themselves up in the snow under spreading the phase of recalling the crosshairs on the hive that the singing will never return when the breaking gives others a prompt to give air i radio frequencies meant to undress all the parrots in the knot that a hill on the head of the viewer can see without even a monkey to grow with a molecule’s power in a black hole instead of a screen in identity swimming to surface every outlook reframes on a break in circular lots by the parking spot full of directions where a jacket sinks into the roll of an orange in Fez around trains in the mountains that the pantomime echoes in the valley of shells that call out for an engine to answer when penalties cease in the skull of another score gone on the pavement with the sound of a bell that is broken to bear its first weight in the sand

They wore out the a in the letterpress case only after a few thousand hits under the inked rollers, pulling the crank, turning the giant wheel. Must have been 1820. Thereabouts. Wanderer, glory-run of letters:thereabouts. Hunger took its due from the belly of the a. So? All kept reading it as a— those who could read — and anyway, a bite out of that apple proves our kind mortal. Rare good paper into page until most everything about the a was shot. Practically prayer, humility, a great foreboding not just bare-bones frugal. Simple aaaa from that a— First letter loved, to hear it ache and fill even at half breath. Look, it’s standard. No one but a divine being or two makes perfect copy. Real case in point: my now and again body so poorly echoed off my mother, my father out of a broken skull simmering in a bog, BC probably, long before AD pretended anything in order. Earlier, our whole dark hole of a planet copied unto itself via earthquake, flood, star shard, raging molten ball in the middle, some big bang’s idea of a flawed, proper start. For a while there, the tiny a wounded. What it does. Doing, to herald every human sentence.

one box falls out of another box, ashy covenant of separation two birds, one clamp, no reaction just hanging there as the arrow moved notes put the map back into the water they don’t notice what they’re learning name all the days, parts of them painted to look out of control then crashed into a tree letters in the boxes in the light old lady opportunity the mirror ceases to be right here, pressure on the hand sends a biscuit to the mouth a circuit connected by eyes stopping watching quantity of information in the type, nation in the line or lines legs broken and maladroit preview a long corridor filing against walls engaging hands going without end in the corridor back to front to quay, cracking of wood, a miner’s ladder five meters high notices filled with objects later, however, a gelatin lit up, Chinese cryptesthesia, American music mural fold or fist, magnetic moment measures behavior, thinking penetrates slowly start over a sensible solution, a compact rower’s body zippered into an orange flight suit, all the confidence of the Chinese navy exposing a big area extinct of life forms

To unlock predisposives in carbon to cancel sleep as pyretical drachma not as transaxial summa or intense aboriginal invasive but as promenade as forgery by craft as soiled apparitional anagram yes as a dark stochastic wheat drained of its magic as drift being boundary being hellish invention as grasp I am thinking of aroused electrical blockage of human monsoon killing as treaty as breach as strangled impulse by identity I mean the psychic root which is stained by dialectical illness by the thought contained in black ozonal mirrors where general slaughter is reflected where the mind impels its wits by bleak molecular isolation by stunted mangrove withdrawal by absence from the life of euphoric solar trees such prone negation imploded from the realms of a suicide foundry of broken wisdom as diamond it is an eon of fallen snow in a well an injudicious barrier gone awry the ingrained Eurocentric example of the hatred of the darker integument with its combative belligerence against the core of volational mystery so what concerns me is a yoga which implodes the sun which compounds its runics the body then electric like a stunning sapphire serpent with the arc of its cells alive as interior alter species as an eye of analogical waters no longer of ennui of the praxis of perfidious helium atrocity extended by the vapour of betrayal by the dazed imperceptives in the molecules here in such preternatural enclave I swim in the murmur of sun dogs of kindled potentate spasms like interior distillation from Moorish pre-Copernica as if at the height of Kemetic day there existed the dauntless sphinxian geometries those pre-existent personas of lightning no longer of the form of gravity as bastion of lingering ammonia in the genes but of absent chemical flaw the body becoming the magic flight of a transmuted corium of the bell of a bloodless liminal amber