1269 Arts and sciences poems

Dried beans in a muslin sack, tied shut with greasy string. An ounce of ginger root to brew digestif, Procured on physician's advice from an "Oriental" grocer at remarkable expense, desiccated now almost Past recognition. Half a pound of sowbelly wrapped in cheesecloth. Hard cheese. A licorice twist. A box of sugar cubes to meliorate bitter tea—with these you could construct a model of the odd granite tomb He insisted on for his own final habitation. There in his beloved Camden he rests in a blank box. You may count there twelve thoracic vertebrae, two lunate bones, two trapeziums, a coccyx, And all the rest, to the final mystic number two hundred and six. His book is a homemade Bible. His tomb is a homemade Blake. Here is the skull-cup that held the brain his doctors lifted. He was the catalog of his perfect body. In love with health, He ate grim food. Behold his ounce of flour, cut with weevils. Behold his dried orange peel, studded with a sorry clove. This pantry is a compost now. It is small; it contains millipedes. The bottom shelf reveals this lunar dust, a Kosmos in it Writ in groceries.Here, as he never said. I hold it toward you.

Isn't the moon dark too, most of the time? And doesn't the white page seem unfinished without the dark stain of alphabets? When God demanded light, he didn't banish darkness. Instead he invented ebony and crows and that small mole on your left cheekbone. Or did you mean to ask "Why are you sad so often?" Ask the moon. Ask what it has witnessed.

Man on Fire, 1969, by Luis Jiménez Because the facial features burn fastest. Because the sun sets in Tibet before it ever rises in the West. Because Tsering Tashi’s mother told him to dress in the thickest, 
finest, llama wool chuba. For I find no flattering explanation for the murder of everyone. Flames consume the head, hands, and feet in the mural by Orozco. Because monks don’t even eat meat. His clothes made him torch; still Thích Quảng Đức’s heart would not fire. Because his remains stiffened when they tried to place him in a tomb. Because what is the point of murdering everyone in the world? Since the sun sets in Vietnam before it reaches the West. Because aren’t the faceless Mexicans always the ones we martyr? Why do heretic Indians hurry to incinerate themselves at the stake? Are you awake enough to remember how we clarify the skin of our slaves? To feel the fingers of the children of thread flame stitching your voluminous rugs? The candles in the basilica flicker when they channel the nightmares of the dead. Because Jiménez wept when the mammoth blue mustang leg fell from heaven, rupturing the artery in his leg. Because of Chinese soldiers armed to protect Tiananmen Square from monks burning to set themselves ablaze. Luis says he’s sorry for the pain he caused you having to finish his stallion.

It’s about to rain, suddenly and without mercy. The rain will be brief, I can tell. but I will be driven inside within earshot of those anxious sounds bent on occluding my mind like a pile of unpaid bills —perhaps I will even see the pile of bills. The rain will be brief, but no matter—I won’t get back outside tonight. ~ So, I have maybe ten minutes for this to get said before all is wet and after the fact ~ because I have only a succession of chances, most missed. ~ Cal is finally fast asleep; the machine that makes the mist that keeps his trach moist rattles like an idling truck. Simone is plotting something, standing and yelling in her crib, jumping now, her sleep a bad joke. Ten years since last I was alone. My mind is not my own. ~ Reading the new poems tonight of my old teacher —she was never taken with me, not particularly—I admire her lifelong pursuit of childhood through art. She has pursued art as though it is as serious as childhood, which we all pursue to the end. ~ And yet, if her poems—ornate as stained glass leaning against a wall in the glass shop, windows looking in on almost nothing—say anything, it is,I am alone; beauty is everything except company, so beauty is nothing, almost. ~ Does she want what I have? Do I? My poems lie. The rain is coming. A few drops more and I’ll lose these letters. Simone still won’t sleep.

How tense it makes me, reading poetry, knowing how much I miss, misunderstand, how only some of the words resolve under my eyes into sentences while others slip by unnoticed, like a note inscribed on a greeting card by an aunt who never knew me well. What I mean is the job is never done, I’m never through. And I’m not made for tasks that linger; some of me is always considering all the money I owe to banks and credit card companies and the kid who kindly bought me most of my high school lunches because my dad forgot to send me to school with a couple of bucks. Which is of course to say reading poetry is a metaphor. Nothing ever finishes. ~ So why did I choose poetry? Maybe because it acknowledges right away what scares me most, how the line breaks before the thought is done, how the line, a partial thing, is the measure, and it’s never enough. My college love never did come running back after I sent her that photocopied pamphlet of heartbroke verses, and my lamentation did not un-injure my son or get me back my job. ~ I woke up panting and confused from the same nightmare over and over through childhood—I can’t remember when it stopped: my task was to build with colored blocks atop a floating green island a kind of little city; this was urgent—there would be no forgiveness if it was not complete. The dream ended with me standing before this hovering shard of land as it hovered away, my job still undone, and I was dropped back into my bed to beg my mother for something she could understand but not give. It’s hard now not to see it as a premonition, maybe a preparation for her dying only a few years later, her life, my life like all lives, unfinished. ~ And so I came to poetry.

In response to a student who told me he just “skims” the poetry right before class The barn was in the Netherlands, in a field where fierce night wind caught the straw as if to fuse the winter stars to their coldness. A farmer, woken by the sound, knowing his animals would be agitated, walked to the barn and by lantern brushed the tails of his horses. In calming them he gathered many long, gleaming strands of their nut-brown hair. Given over to what he heard in the swishing of their tails— the lash, the taut string of grief, turned slow, persistence turned to rhythmic movement— he hoped that if he listened long enough the layered sound would become a salve. He rolled the strands together, laid out along the windowsills of the barn. Then, once dry enough in spring, he rolled them in paraffin wax to preserve the sound and left them to absorb all the varied rays of sun, the spills of rain, and then snow flying fast across the latched windows and the slats, the rhythm of other breathing, animals plodding by the barn walls. The wax melted as the years progressed and other horses resided in the stalls, and their tail strands were added to the aging threads.  From that encased sound deepening over years, a rope, pulled strong and taut, would resonate. Then another generation worked the land and waxed the horse-tail cord again, and in turn when it caught that century’s light, was spun into amber. Woven into the cells of hair: the tones of canal and field, pasture, furrows of plough, leaf and shadow, straw and stone, the human calling, the animal uttering. And when melted again, incrementally strands from other horses living there were added until there were enough layers of sound, set with the nourishment of grass and salt, to be given away and the space the hair had occupied would be returned to emptiness. The horse-hair cord was brought by a farmer to a luthier’s shop along a canal, and it was a perfect fit, she said, for a violin bow she had carved a few months earlier, waiting, and for the bow-less violin someone had just given her.  She knew rosin carrying a current through pastures, filled thirst, and the grief of night wind and scavenged apples made the gathered pieces a whole. And now they are together in your hands this moment to make unrehearsed, immediate, after all those animals’ years, when you bring the instrument to your chin, when you raise the hair-strung bow, again their elemental sounding, and then their measured note, their first.

for Milan Kundera This is your foreign correspondent, Aristotle, for The Poetics, reporting live from the Mediterranean where the skulls and bones of a few Egyptians crown the tradeships of His Majesty, wave back and forth: starfish—moons—Februaries. To my right, our military advisor, Hernando Cortez, oversees operations at the Aztec/ Mexican border where to the left of a stone no longer rising from water a dove collects its nest egg upon the skeleton of a hummingbird. To my left, our scribe-in-residence, St. Nickle-and-Dime-‘Em-To-Debt, scribbles furiously to a mortgaged future where the last rites of man and of-man are delivered at the near-twin births of the lyric and gunpowder.

She notes in the poem she's reading where the disembodied voice speaking encounters "an ugly old woman" just momentarily, in part of a single line, in one of the many long corridors and sharp turnings of the poem, so that she's quickly lost to view. That's me, she thinks, I'm an ugly old woman, I who sit here reading this poem and its ugly old woman phrase and the poet, when he stumbled over her splayed, swollen legs, registered her presence, her inheritance, her baggage of limitations-ugly, old, woman-but never knew, couldn't, because who could know, who can stop and know her ... And this reader keeps thinking, loving, understanding, trapped in her eye following the voice on and on while somewhere back in the poem in a blank passage an ugly old woman sits against a wall.

After Alfred Noyes unmount Umber tail mount, Seven bubbles, sad Balk of night, Red tulip lunges. Incandescent felt tips, Small ochre waves In the nape Of greening brick. Simile-clad branches Vascular, the leather Cusp of April Or glass leaves: Nest of pages In a sweep. woof Coil helix rain. Congregation gully up. Cold steel compress Her rosy ways. Rattle a cocoon, Three twins falling Combat lost nap Wool in Woolf. Brittle sheep tossed, Biotic petrol lagoon: Morning sex lyric Ever after umber: Where the knobby Moose pins glisten. perroquet Hooked rug or Gursky’s 99 cent. By the thousand Field, bunch, vase, Swooped pink neckline Tailored as crinoline Fringed, parrot, Rembrandt Ovoid domesticated bowl. Swivel in red Armless white linen, Visualization of unnatural Interactive selection bias: What the daffodil Could not accomplish. swivel Owls curtain his Future, a violent Wave rumbling beneath The brown floorboards. I’m a bad Mother, impatient, tiny- Fisted body crumpled Against my chest, Aquatic gulps of Air, the owls, Prickling our chests. The bad finger Points back, points At the pointer. chisel After Steve McCaffery’s “Tyrolean Night” Suddenness is other, A numerical chill Sphere machine, a Tall Bashō bathes. Pond jumps in To frog, insults Are all sex, Is mute sagas, Is daylight upended, Drunken, you sang The totem up: The wind did What shrewd words So rarely do.

Cortez arrives. he is absolutely lost at an unknown shore. an he is enraptured (this is the nature of poetry The poem: Cortez arrives at an unknown shore he is absolutely lost and he is enraptured Cortez arrives at an unknown shore he is utterly lost but he is enraptured Cortez arrives too late. the shore is absolutely barren, the men lost to starvation and rapture Cortez utters: “lost.” (this is the nature of description Cortez walks upon the beach. the ocean is as still as a map spread out on a table. (he takes a nap. All the Cortezs arrive. all the waves arrive (this is the nature of disaster