1269 Arts and sciences poems

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.

What length of verse can serve brave Mopsa’s good to show, Whose virtues strange, and beauties such, as no man them may know? Thus shrewdly burden, then, how can my Muse escape? The gods must help, and precious things must serve to show her shape. Like great god Saturn, fair, and like fair Venus, chaste; As smooth as Pan, as Juno mild, like goddess Iris fast. With Cupid she foresees, and goes god Vulcan’s pace; And for a taste of all these gifts, she borrows Momus’ grace. Her forehead jacinth-like, her cheeks of opal hue, Her twinkling eyes bedecked with pearl, her lips of sapphire blue, Her hair pure crapall stone, her mouth, O heavenly wide, Her skin like burnished gold, her hands like silver ore untried. As for those parts unknown, which hidden sure are best, Happy be they which believe, and never seek the rest.

They basically grow it out of sand. This is a big help because otherwise it was getting pretty enigmatic. Welcome to the desert of the real, I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen. I do not think the revolution is finished. So during these years, I lived in a country where I was little known, With the thunder of the Gods that protect the Icelandic tundra from advertising, Great red gods, great yellow gods, great green gods, planted at the edges of the speculative tracks along which the mind speeds from one feeling to another, from one idea to its consequence Past the proud apartment houses, fat as a fat money bag. I wish that I might stay in this pleasant, conventional city, A placid form, a modest form, but one with a claim to pleasure, And then vanish in the fogs of hypnoLondon. All are in their proper place in these optical whispering-galleries, The swan-winged horses of the skies with summer’s music in their manes, The basic Los Angeles Dingbat, A housewife in any neighborhood in any city in any part of Mexico on a Saturday night. Every Sunday is too little Sunday, A living grave, the true grave of the head. In one shout desire rises and dies. Composed while I was asleep on horseback I drift, mainly I drift.

b-boy Wordsworth beatbox vocal cord code switching through the wheat fields at daybreak clicking his teeth against the corn’s high yellow thighs prying open like the sunlight’s tear ducts on the morning the moon forgot how to speak Twi the cicadas having screeched all night in Old English like a man who has forgotten his name calling out the leaves of grass as though stalks of letters at right angles have meaning a way of theorizing the rhetoric of beauty a fig tree trembling at the rain’s hungry lick a finch weaving myth into a nested crown of logic the wildflowers’ arms on dial-up internet a virgin using the petals as her service provider he loves me, he loves me not, with every flick of her wrist the wind knowing the typeface her lips are set in pockmark cheeks peppered with salt the politics of resentment seasoning the spittle true poems flee like a slave in Mississippi Googling “home” with no filter or cookies the tuning fork having shorted in the eardrum’s mouth the devil was in the details when he read the star’s hands prongs of a serpent’s embrace, steam dancing on a cloud’s rolled tongue, wet and pregnant with words so soft the dirt could swallow the sound what must we remember, to forget how we were born? when we ask for advice it is rather for permission for we know not what we do when we do it in free will a robot puts a conch shell to its lips and blows a man puts a seashell to his ear and hears the ocean tell a lie long enough and it will surely turn to truth

The wrong words sit beside us Where the flesh is heavy. The right words come most easily To those who sleep. I put my boots in a CVS bag Because the weather demanded it And my jacket over The windshield in the morning To confuse the sun. Of mine own life, I'll tell you One thing the internet Won't tell you—I wear my hair Like a woman sometimes. The project of the snow's To put the sky in lo-fi And the memory of last week's Snow's a gash in the air. The mountains and seas Have a queer look about them. A hoax of golden daffodils Obscures them, you might say. I've been told We should pretend That everything we see is real, That images should try As best they can To come to life. I feel that iron Should take the place of snow In the literature And that silk flowers Should be manufactured like Real ones each spring. I'm reading the letters Of distinguished men to you. A broadside of a bad poem On very good paper. A treatise on how to infuse Brandy with plums. My fat ass Surveys the greensward And when I step In the manner befitting a person Of little station in the world The dandelions seem to Vanish in retrospect As though to die were just To overlook the rituals That accompany The death and life of weeds And to fold oneself Back into one's roots. I am so big I mean my ass is so big I can't fit in this room I'm building. My ass can barely fit Without assistance Through the door of this stanza Which is why I invented The pronoun "you." The streetlamps Seemed to you to want to Break apart the clouds So we left the city, are always In the process Of abandoning a city Somewhere. Some days now You'll find us trolling The hillsides for wildflowers. Other times, sitting at the very center Of our garden, googling "beauty" With the filter off.

Terrible are the rose names ... Stakeholders in a tradition of “Grande Amore” and “True Love” (one carmine, the other blush ... ), their aims are, for the most part, scattershot. “Mothersday” and “Playboy,” “Senior Prom” and “Let’s Enjoy” vie with a lyrical “Lady of Shalott,” while a flyweight “Pink Knockout” comes “Outta the Blue” to mock “Honey Perfume,” “Pillow Talk” — jock Cupid wielding clout. Then maybe a puckish curator pairs “Las Vegas” with “Nearly Wild,” “Buttercream” with “Julia Child,” “Aloha” with “Hello, Neighbor ... ” • Misenus, son of Aeolus, god of the wind, don’t you think it’s bad form to practice trumpet on this platform, what with the dentistry squeal at construction site decibel levels of braking blade shaving molar steel, dropped-in blare of delays and arrivals squelched against granite, at close intervals, while you riff on “Over the Rainbow” — ? You received some negative attention from Triton, after blowing his conch so loud you inadvertently entered yourself in an unwinnable contest; now, stuck in a twenty-first-century translation of hell, you press the stops, and for an obol prepare our burial in an infinite axial scroll with a tinier and tinier turning radius, as if we were those hordes, the unsanctified, who shoved one another along the Cocytus, none led on to the golden bough by Venus’s semaphore, the unloved rock doves, whom Virgil treats so gently in the Aeneid.

In sober mornings do thou not rehearse The holy incantation of a verse; But when that men have both well drunk, and fed, Let my enchantments then be sung, or read. When laurel spurts i' th' fire, and when the hearth Smiles to itself, and gilds the roof with mirth; When up the thyrse is raised, and when the sound Of sacred orgies flies: "A round, a round;" When the rose reigns, and locks with ointments shine, Let rigid Cato read these lines of mine.

When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature. It was soon after my mother died, a brilliant June day, everything blooming. I sat on a gray stone bench in a lovingly planted garden, but the day lilies were as deaf as the ears of drunken sleepers and the roses curved inward. Nothing was black or broken and not a leaf fell and the sun blared endless commercials for summer holidays. I sat on a gray stone bench ringed with the ingenue faces of pink and white impatiens and placed my grief in the mouth of language, the only thing that would grieve with me.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

I blush quicker than a school of blue jack mackerel arranging itself into an orb of dazzle to avoid nips and gulps from the dolphins who’ve been silently trailing them, waiting for them to relax. When I hear her growl—her scratch-thirst and giggle when she drops swear words pressed to wax—I can’t even look him in the eye when I ask him to give it a good listen with me. But he does, ever patient, and we both get a light bless of sweat on, a bright address that still maps us to each other after all this time. When I read him the lyrics, the pink of my cheeks is like the pink of an orchid mantis. Just when you least expect it, the pretend flower will reach out and snatch a butterfly from the air. When I say flower I mean how her song blooms in the cicada-electric Mississippi night. When I say pink I mean nectar I mean a long kiss good and sweet.