1269 Arts and sciences poems

The abracadabra boys—have they been in the stacks and cloisters? Have they picked up languages for throwing into chow mein poems? Have they been to a sea of jargons and brought back jargons? Their salutations go: Who cometh? and, It ith I cometh. They know postures from impostures, pistils from pustules, to hear them tell it. They foregather and make pitty pat with each other in Latin and in their private pig Latin, very ofay. They give with passwords. “Who cometh?” “A kumquat cometh.” “And how cometh the kumquat?” “On an abbadabba, ancient and honorable sire, ever and ever on an abbadabba.” Do they have fun? Sure—their fun is being what they are, like our fun is being what we are—only they are more sorry for us being what we are than we are for them being what they are. Pointing at you, at us, at the rabble, they sigh and say, these abracadabra boys, “They lack jargons. They fail to distinguish between pustules and pistils. They knoweth not how the kumquat cometh.”

RED The skim on the surface of your soup, or the cut on your plate in the Café des Anges, juices swamping the willow-pattern skiff as she dabs her mouth with her napkin, your blind, blind date, leaving a smudge, lipstick-and-gore, though there’s still a worm of gristle in the gap between her teeth. Mood music, candlelight, wine, low voices in a world of harm, the creature brought down, hindquarters heavy, hind legs broken by the dogs, its head held up, eyes wide, the tangle and drag as a gralloch knife unpegs the bulk, all slippage and seepage, and the way she thumbs a morsel into your mouth, or smiles your smile back at you, lets you know that everything’s just as it seems, then back at the small hotel, she strips off quicker than you might have hoped, pink as a new-skinned cat, all too eager to have you by heart. Her cry tells you nothing new.

but for the askance in her but for the biding in abeyance of her but for the clairvoyance that came to her like a grandmother but for the expanse of love in her the lark in the clear air but for the auld acquaintedness with violence in her

Light was on its way from nothing to nowhere. Light was all business Light was full speed when it got interrupted. Interrupted by what? When it got tangled up and broke into opposite broke into brand new things. What kinds of things? Drinking Cup “Thinking of you! Convenience Valet” How could speed take shape? * Hush! Do you want me to start over? * The fading laser pulse Information describing the fading laser pulse is stored is encoded in the spin states of atoms. God is balancing his checkbook God is encrypting his account. This is taking forever!

The Poet: Fugitive lung, prodigal intestine— where’s the pink crimp in my side where they took you out? The Octopus: It must be a dull world, indeed, where everything appears to be a version or extrapolation of you. The birds are you. The springtime is you. Snails, hurricanes, saddles, elevators— everything becomes you. I, with a shift of my skin, divest my self to become the rock that shadows it. Think of when your reading eyes momentarily drift, and in that instant you see the maddening swarm of alien ciphers submerged within the text gone before you can focus. That’s me. Or your dozing revelation on the subway that you are slowly being digested. Me again. I am the fever dream in which you see your loved ones as executioners. I am also their axe. Friend, while you’re exhausting the end of a day with your sad approximations, I’m a mile deep in the earth, vamping my most flawless impression of the abyss to the wild applause of eels.

Right hand graced with writing, my left arm my secondhand new suit bestrode, from the auto I say, “Antinous, perched like a parakeet cracking sunflower seeds in a hot ice cave or cage, you’re an apogee. Acid pennies will fill your mouth, your head bowl at a soldiers’ revel. Fly the safety you despise and seek, a butcher with a butcher’s knife peers. The lice are fast. Ta ta.”

Although most are totally naked and too scant for even the slightest color and although they have no voice that I’ve ever heard for cry or song, they are, nevertheless, more than mirage, more than hallucination, more than falsehood. They have confronted sulfuric boiling black sea bottoms and stayed, held on under ten tons of polar ice, established themselves in dense salts and acids, survived eating metal ions. They are more committed than oblivion, more prolific than stars. Far too ancient for scripture, each one bears in its one cell one text— the first whit of alpha, the first jot of bearing, beneath the riling sun the first nourishing of self. Too lavish for saints, too trifling for baptism, they have existed throughout never gaining girth enough to hold a firm hope of salvation. Too meager in heart for compassion, too lean for tears, less in substance than sacrifice, not one has ever carried a cross anywhere. And not one of their trillions has ever been given a tombstone. I’ve never noticed a lessening of light in the ceasing of any one of them. They are more mutable than mere breathing and vanishing, more mysterious than resurrection, too minimal for death.

A book i don't fully understand but keep reading anyway because understanding isn't always the first step sometimes it's the last one

The library smells like old paper and good decisions i go there to think the thinking works better there