1269 Arts and sciences poems

And move and hold back entering by the highroad through the words and fall like a person hit by sleep arriving at the place without light And fall like a dead body falls and find there the great enemy and come to a tower all of stones such that through it the earth opens We pass between the martyrs and the high walls even up there water is pouring out then turning and fording again sling the noose from the roof of the house And each and every vapor spent over winning and not losing in which it stands caught out fleet then catapults like a stone Filling our view whereupon another valley is revealed

There was a vase that held the world’s riches, but it wasn’t cheap. It cost a dime — and this in a time and place when dimes were sizable, especially for a girl of eight whose construction-worker father was unemployed. The old metaphor was literal in this case and she counted her pennies till there were ten — then embarked on a mission of great secrecy, a purchase whose joys ran so deep, seventy years later, as she told the tale again, her face flushed. It was a birthday gift for her mother. There was a race of people heretofore glimpsed only on hanging scrolls in library books. They were on the vase — the smallest whole figures imaginable, purposeful and industrious as they fished or planted rice or hiked a hill whose spiral trail led to a temple perched upon a crag between cloud and waterfall. They were a vision exported from Japan — a country far as the moon, and far more beautiful, whose artists grasped an eight-year-old girl’s soul’s need for the minutely amplitudinous. There was a place (Detroit, the thirties) now slipped from sight, though here and there I’ll catch some holdover trace — maybe the grille on an old apartment door, or a slumped block of  houses, draped in torn sheets of rain, apparently posing for black-and-white photographs. Even the out- of-a-job, men like my grandfather, donned hats back then before leaving the house — to circle endlessly about, as if a lost job were a lost coin that might yet be found on the street where it had been dropped, making them whole again. There was a face, rucked with care, that would dreamily soften if  talk floated off toward some remote someplace beyond the seas. My grandmother had a yen for the faraway (which she imparted to her daughter), even as her life was tethered between a gray icy motionless Midwestern city — stalled like a car with a frozen ignition — and a Tennessee farm without electricity. (She did once see Washington — cherry season — and often spoke of  those long pink walkways beside the water that were  Japan’s gift to a grateful nation.) There is a vase — a piece of gimcrack that somehow made its way to a crowded curio case in a small souvenir shop in Detroit, seventy-plus years ago — which today stands atop the mantel in the apartment in DC where my fading mother is now living. When she was eight, in 1933, she gave it to my grandmother, who for all her poverty bequeathed her daughter so rich a bounty, including a taste for giving: the gift of grace. It seems a little miracle almost — that it’s intact, the little vase, conveying what its makers set out to convey: an inward island spared by Time, by the times. These days, she can scarcely say who she gave it to, or on what occasion. A — birthday? The pilgrim climbs the winding hill forever, station by station, and “Isn’t it beautiful?” she asks. “You bought it for a dime,” I tell her. It holds the world’s riches still.

gives joy only if read in a broken rhythm, pausing at every period, parting your lips a little at the colons What: a pity to die my love. To say: "I don't love you anymore" with no one listening. What: a shame the irritated voice the haste. The distance between the first passionate whisper and this new timbre. How little shame I have. to have killed you and put you here. beneath the very expanse you created. The: expanse. Is: a cloth. Is: white. Is: a sheet. Is: a land on which snow has fallen. Ssh. you'll be alone there. No longer on top. but. under. as is proper for the dead, as is proper for seed. and. for lilies yet to sprout. You'll feel something like moving scratches: those are birds mice my own bony hands that you adored my tongue with its thirst. Brr. love. how. painful for me to see you shrunken by this chill so stripped of your gifts in this tomb where I can't grieve for you but can only dig down to the earth down to its iron to the fire that now embraces the earth and celebrates me.

for David Kalstone Stand to one side. No, over here with me: out of the light but out of darkness too, where everything that is not odd or old is gold and subjugates the shadows. There, now you will be no trouble and behold none— anything but trouble, at first glance, last chance to see what I say is worth a look. This whole palazzo is the property of a middle-aged and penniless dilettante, Pen Browning (Robert’s son), who has made terms —palatial terms, in fact—with towering premises afforded by the tact of his New York heiress, Fannie Coddington Browning, dutiful daughter-in-law, doubtful wife. Yet who would not be full of doubts, perplexed at having to define Pen’s talents and finance his tastes? Their Ca’ Rezzonico itself is dubious. The ripened fruit of centuries, rat- and roach-infested, peeling, rank, withers with each tide that rots the piles, though apt withal to weather these tenants as well ... He is painting from the model:Dryope, undressed of course but draped against the draft in a looping swathe of silver-printed stuff that seems to move, glistening over flesh— it does move! lapped in its silver mesh are coils of a python wrapped in loving torpor round the contadina’s undistracted torso. The afternoon is numb: Dryope sleeps in her pose, the python slips a little down the umber slope of her thigh, and Pen, spired, slaps a dashing curlicue across his canvas. “I had the Jew come by with this brocaded velvet yesterday— I bargained some old clothes against it, Fan, so you needn’t ask how much it cost in dollars.” To whom does Pen speak, his eyes intent, his hands “working busily”? Beyond his “subject,” look past the unimposing Dryope, look through the tufts of pampas grass extending up to the tufa vault whose patination casts a pall of watery splendor on the scene— if you manage to overlook the sumptuous junk, jasper urns, a suit of Japanese armor, two stuffed bears, on the divan bearskins too— there, or in this atmosphere let me say lo! on that very divan Robert Browning lolls, a short and foreshortened colossus with feet of clay but the hardest imaginable cranium, among his son’s possessions slightly ill at ease though well bestowed on slippery pelts, and plays (against the wealthy Fannie—see her white shawl?) at draughts with agate pieces, red and green, like a page from some old parchment of kings and queens. In approbation of his son’s economies the old man smiles now—but does she? The skull interfering with our view of Fannie is, I believe, or was the Mahdi’s which Pen keeps beside his easel (Victorians could make anything into a tobacco jar). “I took my pipe through Cannareggio on a long tramp yesterday morning, right into the Ghetto, looking for likely faces, which I found! Didn’t you say, Father, a satisfactory Jew is worth a dozen Gentiles? The one who sold that velvet to me is sure to be ready by Spring: for Lear, you know, or Lazarus at least ...” Pen chatters on to charm the python, not Dryope or Fannie who look up only when the poet, roused, exclaims— as rapt before himself as a child in front of the Christmas tree: “A satisfactory Jew! Setting mere Rothschildsplay aside, Pen, I never saw but one in all my life: Dizzy, I mean—the potent wizard himself, at Hampton Court a dozen years ago, murmuring at the Queen’s ear like a wasp who hoped to buzz his way into the diamonds ... With that olive cast and those glowing-coal-black eyes and the mighty dome of his forehead (to be sure, no Christian temple), as unlike a living man as any waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s: he had a face more mocking than a domino— I would as soon have thought of sitting down to tea with Hamlet or Ahasuerus ...” As if on cue, the poet’s high voice fades, the lights on his tree go out. Yet we have seen enough and heard enough: the secret of losing listeners—did Browning never learn?— is to tell them everything. We lose details. The Mahdi’s skull and Fannie’s coincide ... The scene blurs and the sounds become no more than exaggerated silence. Stand with me another moment till our presence is sacrificed to transitions altogether. Time will not console—at best it orders into a kind of seasonable chaos. Let me tell you, it will not take much longer than a medical prescription— give you ingredients, no cure ... Visitors to the palazzo used to speak of the dangerous ménage—the menagerie! yet the Costa Rican python that cost Pen (or Fannie) sixteen pounds was the first to go, untempted by the rats of Rezzonico; Dryope followed Dryope underground, the girl carried off by a chill and buried at San Michele, the great daub interred in the cellars of the Metropolitan ... “Dear dead women, with such hair, too,” we quote, and notice that hair is the first of ourselves to decay before—last after—death. In a year Robert Browning too was dead, immortal; in another, Fannie dropped her shawl and took the veil and vows of an Episcopalian nun; and Pen? Oh, Pen went on painting, of course— buono di cuore, in yellow chamois gloves, obese, oblivious, dithering into debt and an easy death. The sale of what we saw or saw through in Venice realized, as they say, some thirty thousand pounds at Sotheby’s. I told you: first glance is last chance. Darkness slides over the waters—oil sludge spreading under, till even Venice dies, immortally immerded. Earth has no other way, our provisional earth, than to become invisible in us and rise again. Rezzonico ... Disraeli ... We realize our task. It is to print earth so deep in memory that a meaning reaches the surface. Nothing but darkness abides, darkness demanding not illumination—not from the likes of us— but only that we yield. And we yield.

Down the long hall she glistens like a star, The foam-born mother of Love, transfixed to stone, Yet none the less immortal, breathing on. Time's brutal hand hath maimed but could not mar. When first the enthralled enchantress from afar Dazzled mine eyes, I saw not her alone, Serenely poised on her world-worshipped throne, As when she guided once her dove-drawn car,— But at her feet a pale, death-stricken Jew, Her life adorer, sobbed farewell to love. Here Heine wept! Here still he weeps anew, Nor ever shall his shadow lift or move, While mourns one ardent heart, one poet-brain, For vanished Hellas and Hebraic pain.

Every seaworthy vessel a woman whose mate, eloquent of how she handled under the worst of weathers, hailed his goddess of wet fire, handmaid and dockside whore. Over the courtyard’s dry dock, linens snapped. Brisk was the wind that claimed divine right to salvage whatever tore loose, brisk at the docks the trade in foreign plumage, and the milliner, arms full of wings, who tripped in a puddle that brimmed with sky. Past the known world, past the map that decorated a room with scalloped waters where ships the size of fingernail parings were never snagged by the dragon-sharp islands, a keel of leaf scraped across a pane. A branch scratched endearments on the air it then brushed clean as sand. Had the woman rereading a letter looked to the window casting her light, she could have seen almost to land’s end, the salt sea broken into semaphore flashing its glassy code for tears back to shore, seen almost to the cage on deck, the pigeons gray as the mind, some to bear messages home the first days out, the rest to fatten in the hold.

In this poem all artifice is stripped away but you are held under water. In this poem you enter a mirrored dressing room lit so that you look more beautiful than you have ever looked. I recognize you with surprise. In this poem you are by yourself.

After Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” triptych right panel But all dark notes are dismantled there from the middle ear downward. Voyaged mind, cauldron skin. Can you claim anything is yours? The burning salt hour throws its black broken-glass frame skyward. Left behind the mum orchestra, body parts in peril and animals dizzy for lust past all lost astronomy and wipeout, this naked edible overjoy, a kind of suicide in syllables, fifth panic, fourth stall’s birds-fermata, this half ocean’s susurrus is coming over us in the picture. Can you akin? Can you hear it, pinned to the unseasonable underearth, an option for music and water constantly changing shape, an answer in dissonance? To hear desire is to wake yourself inside, upturned, long enough to know tomorrow is exile. Chaos, body harp, and painted butt music, crowd-crawl, rose crowned to the chest, rabbit call and playing cards    ...    listen, I’m hell-humming in your direction, giddy, I am too taken to leave it alone, the will locked in as if it is already inside of me now: to fall. Let’s be clear, my darling, in the reeling crave, spilled gut-platter of enclosed bones, in the final flesh-clean drop, it sounds like fire rising with the cliff’s updraft.

after Hokusai and Hiroshige I dreamt half my life was spent in wonder, and never suspected. So immersed in the moment I forgot I was ever there. Red-tailed hawk turning resistance into ecstasy. The patrolmen joking with the drunk whose butt seemed glued to the sidewalk. A coral quince blossom in winter, pink as a lover’s present. And tilting my bamboo umbrella against the warm slant of rain, was I not a happy peasant crossing the great bay on a bridge that began who knows when, and will end who knows when?

Is this what you intended, Vincent that we take our rest at the end of the grove nestled into our portion beneath the bird’s migration saying, who and how am I made better through struggle. Or why am I I inside this empty arboretum this inward spiral of whoop ass and vision the leafy vine twisting and choking the tree. O, dear heaven, if you are indeed that or if you can indeed hear what I might say heal me and grant me laughter’s bounty of eyes and smiles, of eyes and affection. To not be naive and think of silly answers only not to imagine answers would be the only destination nor is questioning color even useful now now that the white ray in the distant tree beacons. That the sun can do this to us, every one of us that the sun can do this to everything inside the broken light refracted through leaves. What the ancients called peace, no clearer example what our fathers called the good, what better celebration. Leaves shine in the body and in the head alike the sun touches deeper than thought. O to be useful, of use, to the actual seen thing to be in some way related by one’s actions in the world. There might be nothing greater than this nothing truer to the good feelings that vibrate within like in the middle of the flower I call your name. To correspond, to be in equanimity with organic stuff to toil and to reflect and to home and to paint father, and further, the migration of things. The homing action of geese and wood mice. The ample evidence of the sun inside all life inside all life seen and felt and all the atomic pieces too. But felt things exist in shadow, let us reflect. The darkness bears a shine as yet unpunished by clarity but perhaps a depth that outshines clarity and is true. The dark is close to doubt and therefore close to the sun at least what the old books called science or bowed down to. The dark is not evil for it has indigo and cobalt inside and let us never forget indigo and the warmth of that the warmth of the mind reflected in a dark time in the time of pictures and refracted light. Ah, the sun is here too in the polar region of night the animal proximity of another and of nigh. To step into it as into a large surf in late August to go out underneath it all above and sparkling. To wonder and to dream and to look up at it wondrous and strange companion to all our days and the toil and worry and animal fear always with us. The night sky, the deep sense of space, actual bodies of light the gemstone brushstrokes in rays and shimmers to be held tight, wound tighter in the act of seeing. The sheer vertical act of feeling caught up in it the sky, the moon, the many heavenly forms these starry nights alone and connected alive at the edge. Now to think of the silver and the almost blue in pewter. To feel these hues down deep, feel color wax and wane and yellow, yellows are the tonality of work and bread. The deep abiding sun touching down and making its impression making so much more of itself here than where it signals the great burning orb installed at the center of each and every thing. Isn’t it comforting this notion of each and every thing though nothing might be the final and actual expression of it that nothing at the center of something alive and burning green then mint, blue then shale, gray and gray into violet into luminous dusk into dust then scattered now gone. But what is the use now of this narrow ray, this door ajar the narrow path canopied in dense wood calling what of the striated purposelessness in lapidary shading and line. To move on, to push forward, to take the next step, to die. The circles grow large and ripple in the hatch-marked forever the circle on the horizon rolling over and over into paint into the not near, the now far, the distant long-off line of daylight. That light was my enemy and one great source of agony one great solace in paint and brotherhood the sky and grass. The fragrant hills spoke in flowering tones I could hear the gnarled cut stumps tearing the sky, eating the sun. The gnarled cut stumps tearing the sky, eating the sun the fragrant hills spoke in flowering tones I could hear one great solace in paint and brotherhood the sky and grass. That light was my enemy and one great source of agony into the not near, the now far, the distant long-off line of daylight the circle on the horizon rolling over and over into paint. The circles grow large and ripple in the hatch-marked forever. To move on, to push forward, to take the next step, to die. What of the striated purposelessness in lapidary shading and line the narrow path canopied in dense wood calling but what is the use now of this narrow ray, this door ajar. Into luminous dusk into dust then scattered now gone green then mint, blue then shale, gray and gray into violet that nothing at the center of something alive and burning though nothing might be the final and actual expression of it. Isn’t it comforting this notion of each and every thing the great burning orb installed at the center of each and every thing making so much more of itself here than where it signals. The deep abiding sun touching down and making its impression and yellow, yellows are the tonality of work and bread. To feel these hues down deep, feel color wax and wane now to think of the silver and the almost blue in pewter. These starry nights alone and connected alive at the edge the sky, the moon, the many heavenly forms the sheer vertical act of feeling caught up in it. To be held tight, wound tighter in the act of seeing the gemstone brushstrokes in rays and shimmers. The night sky, the deep sense of space, actual bodies of light and the toil and worry and animal fear always with us wondrous and strange companion to all our days. To wonder and to dream and to look up at it to go out underneath it all above and sparkling to step into it as into a large surf in late August. The animal proximity of another and of nigh. Ah, the sun is here too in the polar region of night in the time of pictures and refracted light the warmth of the mind reflected in a dark time and let us never forget indigo and the warmth of that. The dark is not evil for it has indigo and cobalt inside at least what the old books called science or bowed down to. The dark is close to doubt and therefore close to the sun but perhaps a depth that outshines clarity and is true. The darkness bears a shine as yet unpunished by clarity but felt things exist in shadow, let us reflect. Inside all life seen and felt and all the atomic pieces too the ample evidence of the sun inside all life the homing action of geese and wood mice father, and further, the migration of things. To toil and to reflect and to home and to paint to correspond, to be in equanimity with organic stuff like in the middle of the flower I call your name. Nothing truer to the good feelings that vibrate within there might be nothing greater than this to be in some way related by one’s actions in the world. O to be useful, of use, to the actual seen thing. The sun touches deeper than thought leaves shine in the body and in the head alike what our fathers called the good, what better celebration. What the ancients called peace, no clearer example the broken light refracted through leaves. That the sun can do this to everything inside that the sun can do this to us, every one of us now that the white ray in the distant tree beacons. Nor is questioning color even useful now nor to imagine answers would be the only destination to not be naive and think of silly answers only. Of eyes and smiles, of eyes and affection heal me and grant me laughter’s bounty. Or if you can indeed hear what I might say O, dear heaven, if you are indeed that the leafy vine twisting and choking the tree this inward spiral of whoop ass and vision. Or why am I I inside this empty arboretum saying, who and how am I made better through struggle nestled into our portion beneath the bird’s migration that we take our rest at the end of the grove is this what you intended, Vincent.