1269 Arts and sciences poems

You carve and sculpt, the deft chisel in a soft shapely hand. I beat my head against the marble to knock it into shape, my hands work for a living. I am still a long way from myself, but I want to become Me! There is someone deep in my blood who cries out for homemade Olympuses and worlds for humans. My mother is such a poor wretch, you’d laugh if you saw her, we live in a tight annex, built onto the end of the village. My youth is like a scab: under it there is a wound that every day leaks blood. It disfigures me. I don’t need sleep, food just enough to keep from starving. An implacable struggle and the world bristling with sword points. Each one hungers for my heart. Each one, I, unarmed, must melt in my blood.

A small wheel Incandescent, Shivering like A pinned butterfly. Hands thrown up In all directions: The crossroads One arrives at In a nightmare. Higher than that Number 12 presides Like a beekeeper Over the swarming honeycomb Of the open watch. Other wheels That could fit Inside a raindrop. Tools That must be splinters Of arctic starlight. Tiny golden mills Grinding invisible Coffee beans. When the coffee’s boiling Cautiously, So it doesn’t burn us, We raise it To the lips Of the nearest Ear.

The whole trick of this thing    ...    is to get out of your own light. — Marianne Faithfull She said she sang very close to the mike to change the space. And I changed the space by striding down the Boulevard Raspail at dusk in tight jeans until an Algerian engineer plucked the pen from my back pocket. As if you’re inside my head and you’re hearing the song from in there. He came from the desert, I came from green suburbs. We understood nothing of one another over glasses of metallic red wine. I was playing Girl. He played Man. Several plots were afoot, all misfiring. One had to do with my skimpy black shirt and light hair, his broad shoulders and hunger after months on an oil rig. Another was untranslatable. Apollinaire burned his fingers on June’s smoldering lyre but I had lost my pen. The engineer read only construction manuals. His room was dim and narrow and no, the story didn’t slide that way though there are many ways to throw oneself away. One singer did it by living by a broken wall until she shredded her voice but still she offered each song, she said, like an Appalachian artifact. Like trash along the riverbank chafing at the quay plastic bottles a torn shirt fractured dolls through which the current chortles an intimate tune.

There were words I had to leave behind, moonlight, backward ponies. Leaving flowers out seemed safest. Trying for something surreal, A trouble free rise of smoke and lavender. No not lavender. Any shade of purple is best left alone. Perhaps a jaundiced smoke rising in my poetry would be best, although I like violet haze. Many a summer morning, while other folks are eating bagels, lox, cinnamon rolls, I rummage through old cider houses, find words like obdurate, bipolar, manic, cold heeled. But writing about love, well, not even searches to junkyards as far away as Peking turn up the slightest unused vowel. So, I make words up, create my own language. You Chinese me in the roofy mornings. You Japanese my legs in the spidery evenings. Our children are the leggy offspring of centipede afternoons. Our bedroom is the Acropolis. You temple me backward. I could bless you all the way to shadowland. If we were not already steepled there, our undergarments ruffianed off onto chairs. You catapulted silence, dogkissed, catlicked my paws held my squeaks and rattles. Where the rest had said, What’s this? You said, it’s mine.

the difference between a cigarette holder and cigarette case, the pleasure of a lorgnette over spectacles, of a fortnight over two weeks, of a spiral over graduated stairs, of the frisson of crying like pouty boys, and of the way to walk a lobster on a leash: drag it, its exoskeleton rapping on the cobbles through the rabble of Montparnasse, as if lugging luggage. We did what could not gain us a week of rent or even a plate of fish, yet we managed to eat sickening amounts, to hate on our patroness, the Princess de Polignac, though, and I am sorry, she had bought us wine. Once, in the chamber before an evening concert, I hid a sack of bees in the white baby grand, and when ball-gowned Polignac raised the leaf they swarmed through the strings to the chandelier and the Princess saw a living sun and felt a little less dreary and a little less proud of being bored.

On Tyrone Geter’s “The Basket Maker #2” Weave me closer to you with hands dyed indigo that rake oyster beds awake Smell you long before I see you Vanilla sweet Sweetgrass weaving wares that keep Yankees coming on ferries, no bridge Waters been troubled Makes you wonder who put the root on whom first with doors dyed indigo Pray the evil spirits away at the praise house Make John Hop to stave off John Deere We migrants fighting to stay put Even nomads come home for a Lowcountry boil a feast for hungry prodigal sons and daughters with hearts dyed indigo Dying for you to weave us closer

All day she stands before her loom; The flying shuttles come and go: By grassy fields, and trees in bloom, She sees the winding river flow: And fancy’s shuttle flieth wide, And faster than the waters glide. Is she entangled in her dreams, Like that fair-weaver of Shalott, Who left her mystic mirror’s gleams, To gaze on light Sir Lancelot? Her heart, a mirror sadly true, Brings gloomier visions into view. “I weave, and weave, the livelong day: The woof is strong, the warp is good: I weave, to be my mother’s stay; I weave, to win my daily food: But ever as I weave,” saith she, “The world of women haunteth me. “The river glides along, one thread In nature’s mesh, so beautiful! The stars are woven in; the red Of sunrise; and the rain-cloud dull. Each seems a separate wonder wrought; Each blends with some more wondrous thought. “So, at the loom of life, we weave Our separate shreds, that varying fall, Some strained, some fair: and, passing, leave To God the gathering up of all, In that full pattern wherein man Works blindly out the eternal plan. “In his vast work, for good or ill, The undone and the done he blends: With whatsoever woof we fill, To our weak hands His might He lends, And gives the threads beneath His eye The texture of eternity. “Wind on, by willow and by pine, Thou blue, untroubled Merrimack! Afar, by sunnier streams than thine, My sisters toil, with foreheads black; And water with their blood this root, Whereof we gather bounteous fruit. “There be sad women, sick and poor: And those who walk in garments soiled: Their shame, their sorrow, I endure; By their defect my hope is foiled: The blot they bear is on my name; Who sins, and I am not to blame? “And how much of your wrong is mine, Dark women slaving at the South? Of your stolen grapes I quaff the wine; The bread you starve for fills my mouth: The beam unwinds, but every thread With blood of strangled souls is red. “If this be so, we win and wear A Nessus-robe of poisoned cloth; Or weave them shrouds they may not wear,— Fathers and brothers falling both On ghastly, death-sown fields, that lie Beneath the tearless Southern sky. “Alas! the weft has lost its white. It grows a hideous tapestry, That pictures war’s abhorrent sight:— Unroll not, web of destiny! Be the dark volume left unread,— The tale untold,—the curse unsaid!” So up and down before her loom She paces on, and to and fro, Till sunset fills the dusty room, And makes the water redly glow, As if the Merrimack’s calm flood Were changed into a stream of blood. Too soon fulfilled, and all too true The words she murmured as she wrought: But, weary weaver, not to you Alone was war’s stern message brought: “Woman!” it knelled from heart to heart, “Thy sister’s keeper know thou art!”

Granite Weaving, 1988, by Jesús Moroles “He” grates across the throat, the “h” a dry abrasion on the tongue — Across the throat, the “h” in “she” is tucked behind the folded muscle. In “she” is tucked the “e” the lips unpurse to say, same as saying “we.” My lips unpurse to say the names of  God, of    Love, and they are “She.” The names of   God, of   Love are, too, old explosions coded into granite. Too, old explosions cooled to stone warm to the touch of  light, as she, Stone-warmed and glowing, let my lips brush velvet shadows onto hers. Let my lips brush the story soft, forget that “he” was scrape and struggle. The story soft forgets that “he” was heavy, wrestled into “we,” and weaving “He” heavy, wrestled (strands of  granite yarned like fabric) into “we,” Strands of granite halt their dry abrasion, interlock, and become “She.”

In the next room, Peter’s gloved hands crack cordoned-off spines: he has been granted permission, his agent’s call his pedigree. So the tour itself is only the docent and me. He is docile, eager to please, leads me up the stairs and takes me to the bed. The coverlet is authentic, he says. He lectures me on the heating system, offers an anecdote of a broken casserole, recites all of the Welty lore he has rehearsed. She taught him when he was young, and now he serves her legend, lets me lean in toward the books—I cross the line of what’s allowed, never touching. He shows me photos—two loves lost, one a married man—then on the way down, pauses before a feather in a box, reciting Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” He begins to weep at Let her drop, adds, Like Welty’s loves! Now I stop— is he comparing her to the god, or Leda? He cannot bear her, her Unfulfilled Love. I cannot bear this either—how dare he conjure up for her such disappointment, such wasted longing? I want to be the mirror of her photographs, to be her figure of my own conjuring. I want to believe I, too, could be happy here, in this solitary house, in this small town, amidst the rows and stacks of books. Untouched.

for Fabbio Doplicher We were supposed to do a job in Italy and, full of our feeling for ourselves (our sense of being Poets from America) we went from Rome to Fano, met the mayor, mulled a couple matters over (what's a cheap date, they asked us; what's flat drink). Among Italian literati we could recognize our counterparts: the academic, the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous, the brazen and the glib—and there was one administrator (the conservative), in suit of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated sights and histories the hired van hauled us past. Of all, he was the most politic and least poetic, so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome (when all but three of the New World Bards had flown) I found a book of poems this unprepossessing one had written: it was there in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended) where it must have been abandoned by the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn't read Italian, either, so I put the book back into the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till, sensible it was our last big chance to be poetic, make our mark, one of us asked "What's poetry?" Is it the fruits and vegetables and marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or the statue there?" Because I was the glib one, I identified the answer instantly, I didn't have to think—"The truth is both, it's both," I blurted out. But that was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed taught me something about difficulty, for our underestimated host spoke out, all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said: The statue represents Giordano Bruno, brought to be burned in the public square because of his offense against authority, which is to say the Church. His crime was his belief the universe does not revolve around the human being: God is no fixed point or central government, but rather is poured in waves through all things. All things move. "If God is not the soul itself, He is the soul of the soul of the world." Such was his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die, they feared he might incite the crowd (the man was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors placed upon his face an iron mask, in which he could not speak. That's how they burned him. That is how he died: without a word, in front of everyone. And poetry— (we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to the man in gray; he went on softly)— poetry is what he thought, but did not say.