1269 Arts and sciences poems

1 As so-called quarks, so atoms before and through And after molecules, which too Constitute us awhile, pluming Through our slowly changing shapes Like beachscapes Through a duneless sandglass, say (I said, once) — all these So utterly forgetful, wiped clean As numbers with each new use, lint-free. How not so words, which pass our minds And mouths and ears from hind- Most elsewhere, on their way to elsewhere — why So? Words are the sum of their histories: rose And roke and no and blanketing snow. 2 So much less LEGO-like, click- Click together than like slick Tentacular Colonial hydrozoans tossed Together in the copper pots Of   predication — all cross- Shock and shimmery tangle — How can Anyone calculate semantic Sets so dervishly complex? How can we not expect not less but hellish Much more than to mean what we say? Then guess: How can we better but Hope to become in sum what We say when we say again love?

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The trouble with paradise is you never want to be away from home. I make what calls me out. All gone before you know it. Words may drop passing color yet seeing you here now are born again, and again. Closing a word in the mouth feels the sound until the tongue can't stay still. To unmask is to go silent. Language makes no promise to communicate. An articulated sound has its own dream in the ear. Her presence in the room gives aroma to the syllables I voice. Now she's ready to draw eros from foreign bodies. It starts by focusing on the sounds beyond hearing, still felt. By she I mean who speaking animate configures. This is the time of alternative obscurities to see through. Through thoroughly, as a word weighs.

Federico Garcia Lorca used to uncork a bottle or two of wine whenever the duende dwindled for a line. James Joyce would have preferred a choice of brandies in decanters made by Tiffany’s, but rotgut was the shortcut to epiphanies. The Later Henry James bet shots of rum against himself in games of how much can we pyramid upon a given donné. Little Dylan Thomas didn’t keep his promise to stay out of Milk Wood. He tried to drown the fact as best he could. Anna Akhmatova Eyed the last shot of a Pre-war cognac de champagne. “So much for you, little brandy.Do svidanya.” T. S. Eliot used to belly it up to the nearest bar, then make for a correlative objective in his car. Proust used to too.

Once Phidias stood, with hammer in his hand, Carving Minerva from the breathing stone, Tracing with love the winding of a hair, A single hair upon her head, whereon A youth of Athens cried, “O Phidias, Why do you dally on a hidden hair? When she is lifted to the lofty front Of the Parthenon, no human eye will see.” And Phidias thundered on him: “Silence, slave: Men will not see, but the Immortals will!”

1 It opens as a long lamplit evening with Rembrandt, stretched out with the glossy book of his Works on Paper. Brown-petal etchings and drawings: nut-brown, browner, irreclaimable rills of iron-gall ink sucked and feathered into the paper's wan cusps and culverts. The ink...it's as if there's no pulling away from the wet, flowing line to the tiny hedge-village perched on the edge of the cliff and the paper. Here the ink's overwatered and we barely, down in the forested loam, disengage the gentle saint, his rounded hat molding his crown like thatch on low rooftrees...St. Jerome. 2 Hunched, sunk in a deep-toned wash, he cares only for the huge, softleaved book propped on his knees. At nightfall Jerome swallowed up by his Bible misses the wistful look of his lion withdrawn to the forested ridge, the drawing's diagonal. And from there, one can say that landscape exists: prowls and spinnies where a lion might wind a lioness, or his prey... He looks out on tree-clouded peaks, tiny hamlets, two lambs in a wattle-fold. What the lion sees, we see. For Jerome, though, the lion is Judah, his seal and seed— Jesse's stem drops thickset leaves for him to read. 3 Saskia, of course, thrones in painting. Still, tiny sketches tumble from odd cabinets: the dear in a lopsided turban or twilled garden hat, sketched "on my wedding-day"— Saskia. A cluster of lines, a rippled race of curls and cloudsets. And, for a rarity, in Rembrandt, flowers. The simple, surprised, smiling face of Saskia as Flora...After her fourth lying-in (she was dying), he took to long walks on the city's outskirts; his sketchbook came home with mere touches of charcoal, a reed, a waterfowl, estuarial shallows unfolding to the rim. 4 Now life is meaner, chaotic. Rushes of arousal, lawsuits, debts...this print of a kitchen drab, eyes wandering, mouth a vacant, uptilted half-lune, her work-swollen hands on Saskia's velvet shawl, The thighs parted, abdomen pear-pendulant, the pulled-off stocking-stays grooved in the flab to her copse of cross-hatchings—No one wants to see this. But his hand made this stock, of himself the substance and seed. Fine- spun cosmos, brown tangle, soft sign: the old man spares us nothing. The book, the look, the lieu, the end of the Line.

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters these by themselves delight, even without a meaning, in a foreign language, in Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve all day across the lake, scoring their white records in ice. Being intelligible, these winding ways with their audacities and delicate hesitations, they become miraculous, so intimately, out there at the pen’s point or brush’s tip, do world and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist balance against great skeletons of stars exactly; the blind bat surveys his way by echo alone. Still, the point of style is character. The universe induces a different tremor in every hand, from the check-forger’s to that of the Emperor Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy the ‘Slender Gold.’ A nervous man writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on. Miraculous. It is as though the world were a great writing. Having said so much, let us allow there is more to the world than writing: continental faults are not bare convoluted fissures in the brain. Not only must the skaters soon go home; also the hard inscription of their skates is scored across the open water, which long remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.

After the gossip one returns to grammar. Almost to say that speech compares us renting that   as a fact the case stands firm for what we own. Pragma by relations instance this as the index of my slab.  Your slap at it. The clouds pastiche aubade Sid’s bakery delivers                                symmetry inside an adult formula for Saturdays. Our poppies in history.

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