1269 Arts and sciences poems

We have a microsopic anatomy of the whale this gives Man assurance William Carlos Williams We have a map of the universe for microbes, we have a map of a microbe for the universe. we have a Grand Master of chess made of electronic circuits. But above all we have the ability to sort peas, to cup water in our hands, to seek the right screw under the sofa for hours This gives us wings.

as horses as for as purple as we go as heartbeat as if as silverware as it were as onion as I can as cherries as feared as combustion as want as dog collar as expected as oboes as anyone as umbrella as catch can as penmanship as it gets as narcosis as could be as hit parade as all that as icebox as far as I know as fax machine as one can imagine as cyclones as hoped as dictionary as you like as shadow as promised as drinking fountain as well as grassfire as myself as mirror as is as never as this

Never instead put the bales in the bounty, resize the type to provide ALLURE. Look how the picture seems to tell a story. Mother, I’m all dolled up in HOPE. My breastplate hinge needs a little oil, I’m hobbling along to kick your crutch. Mother, I’m all doped up with DESIRE. I’ve cleaned the machine with delicate hand, scrubbed the data within an inch of its life. Mother, I’m all diary today, feeling PENSIVE. The returns keep disappearing, I can’t get my hands around even one. I keep clicking through the channels, the links, little vortex displays all the characteristics of a MOTIVE, Mother, but someone’s just reported that the election has been made OFFICIAL. The results seem promising. In one version you get to keep the crown. The twin diamonds sparkling your eyes sparkle harder, the LIGHT takes on a decadence like that of old snow. In the other, your garland consumes itself, your hair falls out like nuclear, your elisions lisp the windows shut, breaking the view in half. Your face becomes but a VAGARY and there are no backups in storage. I AM a cosmos if I am still breathing. Wind breaks at my neck and spells your name acrostically. Spells your name like my BELOVED. Repetition of facts and figures keeps me apprised. Dogs mass in the streets, shaking bones, slurping scrap lifted from the MALFEASANCE of silver plates hung to dry from row house clotheslines, the tread’s worn down on the spires sagging from the GLORIOUS peaks of this great sky! Can you hear the clicking through the air vents? Did you notice the picture twitch on the bedroom wall? Leaves turn pink and blue, SUPERNATURAL is not dead, is rippling through me, I can feel my toes, I can see you staring at my nape, I can see you vivid in the dark corner of the day, taking your damask gown off one strap at a time, as if I were watching. I have a MANDATE. Nobody else would bother to see you this way.

What every painter knows, but most others forget is how bright colors dim in artificial light and lobster tastes most fresh the nearer to death you set your teeth into the lobster’s flesh.

As dawn breaks he enters A room with the odor of acid. He lays the copper plate on the table. And reaches for the shaft of the burin. Dublin wakes to horses and rain. Street hawkers call. All the news is famine and famine. The flat graver, the round graver, The angle tint tool wait for him. He bends to his work and begins. He starts with the head, cutting in To the line of the cheek, finding The slope of the skull, incising The shape of a face that becomes A foundry of shadows, rendering — With a deeper cut into copper — The whole woman as a skeleton, The rags of  her skirt, her wrist In a bony line forever severing Her body from its native air until She is ready for the page, For the street vendor, for A new inventory which now To loss and to laissez-faire adds The odor of acid and the little, Pitiless tragedy of  being imagined. He puts his tools away, One by one; lays them out carefully On the deal table, his work done.

There's a word you've met but once and now forgotten for the spoon-shaped concave under your Adam's apple: a small pouch that must be kissed and kissed again by lovers learning the ins and outs of one another and where last night in the sleeping dark a lone mosquito inserted itself and drew fresh blood and left venom and a couple of love-bites then left without waking you although this morning you'll blaze with the minute but unassuageable pain of them—which only that word that's vanished into the mud of memory might be the right cooling balm for.

After a Nick Cave “Soundsuit” made from buttons and found vintage abacus When George Washington became president in 1789 he had only one tooth in his head, a single premolar poking up from his gums. His dent- ures were fashioned from lead, gold wire springs, brass screws, the teeth of humans and cows, ele- phant ivory, and hippopotamus bone. It is a myth that he had false teeth made of wood. A mis- perception put forth by those misled by the hair- line fractures that ivory and bone possess. Just as cherry wine will stain cloth with a rust-hued vein, Washington’s fondness for dark wine blemished his teeth. The fractures eventually darkening, un- til resembling the grain in a piece of wood. The darkening of fractures is rather curious. The makeup of the flesh, the constitution of origin, the trackers of bloodlines thrown off the trail. It is difficult to determine what discolor- ations have tunneled their way through the body. Spider veins climbing the back of my legs like a winding river mapping the trauma. An unspoken collective of ephemeral bits and bytes, suffering most eloquently preserved in the mouth. The skin of one’s teeth decides many a fate. A black woman’s incisor settling down inside a white man’s maw. Overall, a quizzical look, an off-color joke about progress, the very blood a trick of the eye, an ocean blue on the outside of the skin, a blushing red if viewed just beneath the sheath. • A tooth is made up of the crown and the root, all the King’s Men destined to revolt. There are many ways to worm your way inside, many open- ings in the body of an animal. Some orifices gated with white entryways. A wooden portcullis, a pick- et fence, a laced corset secured tightly by a maid, a pointed geode just waiting to be pulled, the cavern wall glittering in the dark. Sharp crystals ornament the cave’s jawbone.Cave canem, quite naturally speak- ing. A hooded hole a place for some to hide or go seek. A toothless whistle the signal for the slave hunting bloodhounds, with canines fanged like water moccasins. The swamp mud gushing like the suppertime mush sloshing between the gums of a Confederate soldier. The terror of limbs at odds with the self. In World War I, trench foot meant frequent amputations, the blade sliding like floss between each toe. Some diseases attack the foot or mouth, gums left inflamed in the cross fire. A grieving mother wears dog tags around her neck. Her son’s baby shoes and teeth cast in bronze. The pulp at the center is how the tooth receives nourishment, how it transmits signals to the brain. The forgetting makes the present tense possible. Memory is the gravity of the mind. All the icebergs have started to melt, milky objects left hanging by a string, the doorknobs means to an end. • The keyboard’s toothy smile splayed wide, the flatlined cursor blinks impatiently on the screen, my fingers struggle to tap into word processing. I monitor all of the track changes. Even the computer is a slave to death. Its in- nards already bygone, its body obsolete upon year of purchase. I am a librarian, swimming the digital divide, my predecessor’s paddles — a mass of floppy disks in an office closet. They pile up like the teeth of slaves waiting for sale. An affluent businessman at the door, his hands panning the saliva for white gold. His fingers parting the cavity, pursed lips cooing, I need something of yours to call my own. The desire to chew and smile at will. My grandmother lost her mind before her teeth, lost the memories be- fore the enamel gave way to rot. My face has my mother’s abacus features. We are, in fact, diphyo- dont. In one lifetime we develop two sets of teeth. The missing space filled with air, a hollow exile before the native tongue. I pray my unborn child will have a gap. What the French call “dents du bonheur” or lucky teeth. The womb’s peephole is rather impressionable. I will fasten the buttons of time. I will take the baby’s body in my own, whisper a plea in its discriminating ear: Try to keep your wits about you, my love. Memory is about the future, not the past.

The word comes along out of the mountain every once in awhile to chill me. Undercurrent of an unwillingness to believe all is well in early spring beside a molten river riven by sun, its loud hush and glug through leafless aspens split by a gravel bar’s pulled switch. A bull trout with fluorescent red dorsal fin eddies in a pool between a sloughed-off root clump and caved-in grassy bank. Last year’s downed trees, slash piles, busted garden gate. Heed me and hear my loneliness. Split by a desire to be known by a crowd of solitaires and by one word split. A raven falls out of the yellow flame of a willow. Its wings purely black buff sunlight. It paces the gravel bar, lifts into westerly sun. Wing flash. Black luster. Gone. It is hope that tricks. Belief that when this now shines, this now shines with or without us. Then why scribble the veery’s mid-morning marshal song? Soon Rick will arrive to help burn wood piles: gasoline newspaper cedar shakes to start the blaze in this emptiness searching for godwords. The ones God hears when priests without shoes without socks with their shawls stretched over their heads arms out make forts of light. Their backs to the congregation, their faces toward the ark, they rock. Their white wings so pure that this now is no more than then with its barbells of silence, with its task of burning.

The simple contact with a wooden spoon and the word recovered itself, began to spread as grass, forced as it lay sprawling to consider the monument where patience looked at grief, where warfare ceased eyes curled outside themes to search the paper now gleaming and potent, wise and resilient, word entered its continent eager to find another as capable as a thorn. The nearest possession would house them both, they being then two might glide into this house and presently create a rather larger mansion filled with spoons and condiments, gracious as a newly laid table where related objects might gather to enjoy the interplay of gravity upon facetious hints, the chocolate dish presuming an endowment, the ladle of galactic rhythm primed as a relish dish, curved knives, finger bowls, morsel carriages words might choose and savor before swallowing so much was the sumptuousness and substance of a rented house where words placed dressing gowns as rosemary entered their scent percipient as elder branches in the night where words gathered, warped, then straightened, marking new wands.

We are spendthrifts with words, We squander them, Toss them like pennies in the air– Arrogant words, Angry words, Cruel words, Comradely words, Shy words tiptoeing from mouth to ear. But the slowly wrought words of love and the thunderous words of heartbreak– Those we hoard.