1269 Arts and sciences poems

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: "loot." WILLIAM DALRYMPLE It sits with a fork made from a lotus on an ivory chair eating an elephant steak in the company of bears and feral nautch girls on a monsoon evening incandescent with an appetite as mighty as railroads spann’d across seas and reclines, its cheeks burnished, its ass varnished by suns setting on bronze and sugared with saltpetre, its torso a tableaux for the annals of rectitude, the theatre for roiling or robust passage, a veritable Suez Canal towards missionary victories which thrust from such bejeweled and oiled loins anointed by coin— that emission of plump plums, lump sums into the Ganges, that coiling coy virgin maiden winding her languid locks, batting her lashes to its lashes— its spine a gentle wire. Supine, its belly swells with salt and figs with meat and treaties, it corks open a profound song—itself it sings into books heavy with truths on the chair dressed with leather and raw hides kissed by ox blood smeared with beef dung lined with raw silk woven from worms plucked from boughs basted across its pious beaming eyes its spidery ghosted lids, and its byzantine glance unmoors from its Chinese porcelain and crosses the ebony table polished with lac secreted from the cloaca of the kerria lacca set with glazed cakes eaten by pinked mouths wearing crimson robes, to its guests polished and glossed and stained by the ooze drawn to color the uncolored raw linen, the wood, the human. Then its wrist cuffed by gold and cowries and studded with coral draws a whisper- thin muslin veil dyed carmine— sucked from crushed scale of cochineal boiled in ammonia and bled into curds and rouge glinting sanguineous and turbid between bug and rug snug a thug in redcoat or a turncoat carrying urns of this stuff— from estates of cocoa coconut calico— across its face while soft éclairs of chocolate bumble out from its plumed rump choked with gum and linseed flax and cassia cinnamon and pepper like so many lines of blood underwriting the mutton and not the goat so it can sell them with a name of a place like scarves or garlanded whores moored to wharves suckled by mother of pearl or teas named after Earls and they with whole scores to settle settle for homemade cures nettles ginger turmeric— a paste or to taste—and it steals and seals in letters scented with sandal sent abroad waxed and pressed with cornelian gems honed from ground it owns and makes stone from their flesh ekes ink from their sweat soaks indigo in lye fermented with time and makes color so it can bid for its own passage, the passage, O of this soul, to India!

I’m waiting for a poem, something rough, not elaborate or out of control, something undisturbed by curses, a white raven released from darkness. Words that come naturally, without aiming at anything, a bullet without a target, warning shots to the sky in newly occupied lands. A poem that will well up in my chest and until it arrives I will listen to my children fighting in the next room and cast my gaze down at the table at an empty glass of milk with a trace of white along its rim my throat wrapped in silver a napkin in a napkin ring waiting for late guests to arrive. . . .

Julius Caesar’s head was cut off and fed to the barbarians waiting outside the walls of Rome. Salvador Dali wore one orange sock and a white one on days he went to eat breakfast in cafes. On days he stared at the wall, he did not wear socks. Yukio Mishima sheathed his knives in wall of whale oil, claiming such creatures were the only ones that understood the art of sacrifice. The last thing John Lennon saw before he was gunned down was the brick wall of his apartment house. Sitting Bull had fourteen wives he lined up against the cliff walls. He would close his eyes and walk blindly to them with an erection, promising he would take the first one his erection touched. Crazy Horse watched silently from the cliff walls above. J. D. Salinger scribbled on his bedroom walls as a boy, promising his mother to whitewash the figures the first time he was caught. Joan of Arc climbed over the walls and fell on top of a castle guard, the commotion bringing soldiers who swore the wall opened and she escaped by stepping through. Nikita Khrushchev stared at the wall of nuclear buttons and knew it was a green one they told him to push, but the triggers were every color except green. Hernán Cortés’ men met a wall of arrows, then turned and ran. Montezuma’s men met a wall of armor, wept, then stoned their chief off the wall for helping the conquistadores. Carl Jung opened his eyes to find himself sleeping against a wall of flowers, the beautiful smell giving him the answer he had been looking for. Charlie Chaplin ordered his crew to remove the hidden mirror from the wall, footage of his latest lover overflowing onto the studio floor. Sor Juana de la Cruz hid her new poem in a hole in the wall, but when a fellow nun went to retrieve it after Sor Juana’s death, it was gone. The Dalai Lama stopped in the snow and bowed his head to pray before the wall of dead monks killed by the Chinese. Virginia Woolf’s last memory before drowning was the wall of family portraits, the photographs of her father and brothers so radiant in the river fog. Billy the Kid simply dug a hole in the adobe wall of the jail with his bare hands and walked away. Janis Joplin was found dead of an overdose in her Los Angeles hotel, her face facing the wall. Federico García Lorca did not face any walls when he was shot under the trees. No one knows how Tu Fu encased himself in a wall of bamboo, staying inside the tube for ten years, never saying a word, his feet becoming the roots of bamboo within the first few months of his silence. Al Capone stared at the walls of his cell in Alcatraz and added the bank figures again, trying to get them right. Babe Ruth heard a thud against the wall of his hotel suite, the baseball rolling down the hallways as a signal his tryst with the team owner’s wife about to be revealed. William Shakespeare stared at the empty walls of the theatre, stood there without saying a word, and stared at the empty walls of the theatre. Geronimo extended his arms over the walls of rock, the approaching sound of the cavalry troops echoing down the canyon, the pictograph Geronimo carved high on the wall, years ago, lifting him to safety. Two days before Salvador Allende was assassinated, Pablo Neruda, dying of cancer, woke at Isla Negra to find the walls of the room where he lay were covered in hundreds of clinging starfish.

Arp might have done a version in white marble, the model held aloft, in approximate awe: this tough cross-section oval of tusk, dense and cool as fossil cranium— preliminary bloodshed condonable if Inupiat hunters on King Island may follow as their fathers did the bark of a husky, echoes ricocheted from roughed-up eskers on the glacier, a resonance salt-cured and stained deep green by Arctic seas, whose tilting floor mirrors the mainland’s snowcapped amphitheater. Which of his elders set Mike Saclamana the task and taught him to decide, in scrimshaw, what was so? Netted incisions black as an etching saw a way to scratch in living infinitives known since the Miocene to have animated the Bering Strait: one humpback whale, plump, and bardic; an orca caught on the ascending arc, salt droplets flung from a flange of soot-black fin ... Farther along the bone conveyor belt a small ringed seal will never not be swimming, part-time landlubber, who may feel overshadowed by the donor walrus ahead. And by his scribal tusk, which stands in direct correspondence to the draftsman’s burin, skillful enough to score their tapeloop ostinato, no harp sonata, but, instead, the humpback whale’s yearning bassoon (still audible if you cup the keepsake to your ear and let it sound the depths).

The whole world was there, plucking their linen, half-bald, mumbling, sucking on their moustache tips. Broadway was still in business and they asked no favors. All the cracked ribs of Fredericksburg, the boys who held their tongues at Chancellorsville as the bandages, mule shit, skin and shot overran the Rappahannock’s banks and poured it in our mouths that summer. He sat up half the night reading to the Army of the Potomac poems about trooping goats and crazy fathers chewing grass in the wilderness. It’s me that saved his life, dear mother, he had dysentery, bronchitis, and something else the doctors couldn

. . . life which does not give the preference to any other life, of any previous period, which therefore prefers its own existence . . . Ortega y Gasset Neither on horseback nor seated, But like himself, squarely on two feet, The poet of death and lilacs Loafs by the footpath. Even the bronze looks alive Where it is folded like cloth. And he seems friendly. “Where is the Mississippi panorama And the girl who played the piano? Where are you, Walt? The Open Road goes to the used-car lot. “Where is the nation you promised? These houses built of wood sustain Colossal snows, And the light above the street is sick to death. “As for the people—see how they neglect you! Only a poet pauses to read the inscription.” “I am here,” he answered. “It seems you have found me out. Yet did I not warn you that it was Myself I advertised? Were my words not sufficiently plain? I gave no prescriptions, And those who have taken my moods for prophecies Mistake the matter.” Then, vastly amused—“Why do you reproach me? I freely confess I am wholly disreputable. Yet I am happy, because you found me out.” A crocodile in wrinkled metal loafing . . . Then all the realtors, Pickpockets, salesmen and the actors performing Official scenarios, Turned a deaf ear, for they had contracted American dreams. But the man who keeps a store on a lonely road, And the housewife who knows she’s dumb, And the earth, are relieved. All that grave weight of America Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome. The future in ruins! The castles, the prisons, the cathedrals Unbuilding, and roses Blossoming from the stones that are not there . . . The clouds are lifting from the high Sierras, The Bay mists clearing, And the angel in the gate, the flowering plum, Dances like Italy, imagining red.

Luis Buñuel A white bull, a cassock, an antique mirror The famous ones have passed hours in front of, A midnight blue tuxedo, a fainting couch, a key To a box of lewd photographs, a swastika, Twelve bales of hay, three grave plots, a statue Of Christ holding a heart pierced by a dagger, A black patch, all kinds of utensils for the sick— Including thirty-nine feet of catheter tubing, A houseboat, a dog, a baby grand, an oar Said to have been carved from a lovely river And a woman’s hat by Alfred Jarry, a mattress, A shotgun, a diving helmet, an essay on The Art Of Taxidermy and a clitoris mounted on a ring Like quartz, a crescent wrench, a bulldozer.

When I saw his face on a wall at a party in a parlor looking out at the Hudson, at a fundraiser for the winter soldiers over blocks of cheese and baguettes, I had just come from some grainy footage of Dien Bien Phu in a hot black room, where the scratched print showed the hills undulating, bodies and parachutes disappearing in jungle grass. Between decadence and the alien Mao was propped in yellow and rouge with lipstick and eye shadow, a real queen—part décor, part radical something the American lexicon hadn’t filled in yet. From the aerial cameras Haiphong Harbor was liquid light. In liquid light, I saw my draft card float like a giant litho over the highway at 79th the letters popped—selective service system— and morphed into gray rain— anyone could have done it— singed, blurred, laminated— and the bartender poured me another unidentified drink. In the scratched cellulose nitrite, parachutes kept drifting down on the hedges of the Laotian border. On the wall Mao was the punctum in rouge and yellow and smear. Didn’t every myth signify confusion? Confucius, Charlie Chan, Chiang Kai-shek? (An American vision of a place.) The guy behind me in class asked, “Where is this place?” Hanoi was glittering flecks on the nightly news, and the teacher answered, “Every snake of land is someone’s history.” We didn’t know what we didn’t know about the backyard furnaces, the tens of millions. Even if Mao swallowed Darwin and Adam Smith swimming the Yangtze—here on the Upper West in late spring, he was wallpaper, the most recognizable face in the world. There seemed no point in breaking through the mask— I was glued to the colors for a while, until the next war let us out of Asia until the sun went down on the wall.

The Muses are turned gossips; they have lost The buskined step, and clear high-sounding phrase, Language of gods. Come, then, domestic Muse, In slip-shod measure loosely prattling on, Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream, Or droning flies, or shoes lost in the mire By little whimpering boy, with rueful face — Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded washing day. Ye who beneath the yoke of wedlock bend, With bowed soul, full well ye ken the day Which week, smooth sliding after week, brings on Too soon; for to that day nor peace belongs, Nor comfort; ere the first grey streak of dawn, The red-armed washers come and chase repose. Nor pleasant smile, nor quaint device of mirth, Ere visited that day; the very cat, From the wet kitchen scared, and reeking hearth, Visits the parlour, an unwonted guest. The silent breakfast meal is soon despatched, Uninterrupted, save by anxious looks Cast at the louring, if sky should lour. From that last evil, oh preserve us, heavens! For should the skies pour down, adieu to all Remains of quiet; then expect to hear Of sad disasters — dirt and gravel stains Hard to efface, and loaded lines at once Snapped short, and linen-horse by dog thrown down, And all the petty miseries of life. Saints have been calm while stretched upon the rack, And Montezuma smiled on burning coals; But never yet did housewife notable Greet with a smile a rainy washing day. But grant the welkin fair, require not thou Who callest thyself, perchance, the master there, Or study swept, or nicely dusted coat, Or usual ’tendence; ask not, indiscreet, Thy stockings mended, though the yawning rents Gape wide as Erebus; nor hope to find Some snug recess impervious. Shouldst thou try The ’customed garden walks, thine eye shall rue The budding fragrance of thy tender shrubs, Myrtle or rose, all crushed beneath the weight Of coarse-checked apron, with impatient hand Twitched off when showers impend; or crossing lines Shall mar thy musings, as the wet cold sheet Flaps in thy face abrupt. Woe to the friend Whose evil stars have urged him forth to claim On such a dav the hospitable rites; Looks blank at best, and stinted courtesy Shall he receive; vainly he feeds his hopes With dinner of roast chicken, savoury pie, Or tart or pudding; pudding he nor tart That day shall eat; nor, though the husband try — Mending what can’t be helped — to kindle mirth From cheer deficient, shall his consort’s brow Clear up propitious; the unlucky guest In silence dines, and early slinks away. I well remember, when a child, the awe This day struck into me; for then the maids, I scarce knew why, looked cross, and drove me from them; Nor soft caress could I obtain, nor hope Usual indulgencies; jelly or creams, Relic of costly suppers, and set by For me their petted one; or buttered toast, When butter was forbid; or thrilling tale Of ghost, or witch, or murder. So I went And sheltered me beside the parlour fire; There my dear grandmother, eldest of forms, Tended the little ones, and watched from harm; Anxiously fond, though oft her spectacles With elfin cunning hid, and oft the pins Drawn from her ravelled stocking, might have soured One less indulgent. At intervals my mother’s voice was heard, Urging dispatch; briskly the work went on, All hands employed to wash, to rinse, to wring, Or fold, and starch, and clap, and iron, and plait. Then would I sit me down, and ponder much Why washings were; sometimes through hollow hole Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft The floating bubbles; little dreaming then To see, Montgolfier, thy silken ball Ride buoyant through the clouds, so near approach The sports of children and the toils of men. Earth, air, and sky, and ocean hath its bubbles, And verse is one of them — this most of all.

Roman Virgil, thou that singest Ilion's lofty temples robed in fire, Ilion falling, Rome arising, wars, and filial faith, and Dido's pyre; Landscape-lover, lord of language more than he that sang the "Works and Days," All the chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a golden phrase; Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd; All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word; Poet of the happy Tityrus piping underneath his beechen bowers; Poet of the poet-satyr whom the laughing shepherd bound with flowers; Chanter of the Pollio, glorying in the blissful years again to be, Summers of the snakeless meadow, unlaborious earth and oarless sea; Thou that seëst Universal Nature moved by Universal Mind; Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind; Light among the vanish'd ages; star that gildest yet this phantom shore; Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pass to rise no more; Now thy Forum roars no longer, fallen every purple Cæsar's dome— Tho' thine ocean-roll of rhythm sound forever of Imperial Rome— Now the Rome of slaves hath perish'd, and the Rome of freemen holds her place, I, from out the Northern Island sunder'd once from all the human race, I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began, Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.