1269 Arts and sciences poems

the greatest living poet in new york city was born in Puerto Rico his name is Jorge Brandon (1902-1995) he is over 70 years old he carries his metaphor in brown shopping bags inside steel shopping cart he travels around with on the streets of manhattan he recites his poetry to whoever listens & when nobody is around he recites to himself he speaks the wisdom of unforgettable palm trees the vocabulary of coconuts that wear overcoats the traffic lights of his poems function without boring advice from ac or dc current book stores & libraries are deprived of his vibes to become familiar with this immortal poet you have to hang-out on street corners building stoops rooftops fire escapes bars parks subway train stations bodegas botanicas iglesias pawn shops card games cock fights funerals valencia bakery hunts point palace pool halls orchard beach & cuchifrito stands on the lower eastside the admission is free his presence is poetry

I want to believe we can’t see anything we don’t have a word for. When I look out the window and say green, I mean sea green, I mean moss green, I mean gray, I mean pale and also electrically flecked with white and I mean green in its damp way of glowing off a leaf. Scheele’s green, the green of Renaissance painters, is a sodium carbonate solution heated to ninety degrees as arsenious oxide is stirred in. Sodium displaces copper, resulting in a green precipitate that is sometimes used as insecticide. When I say green I mean a shiny green bug eating a yellow leaf. Before synthetics, not every painter could afford a swathe of blue. Shocking pink, aka neon, aka kinky pink, wasn’t even on the market. I want to believe Andy Warhol invented it in 1967 and ever since no one’s eyes have been the same. There were sunsets before, but without that hot shocking neon Marilyn, a desert sky was just cataract smears. I want to believe this. The pale green of lichen and half-finished leaves filling my window is a palette very far from carnation or bougainvillea, but to look out is to understand it is not, is to understand what it is not. I stare out the window a lot. Between the beginning and the end the leaves unfolded. I looked out one morning and everything was unfamiliar as if I was looking at the green you could only see if you’d never known synthetic colors existed. I’ve drawn into myself people say. We understand, they say. There are people who only have words for red and black and white, and I wonder if they even see the trees at the edge of the grass or the green storms coming out of the west. There are people who use the same word for green and red and brown, and I wonder if red seems so urgently bright pouring from the body when there is no green for it to fall against. In his treatise on color Wittgenstein asked, “Can’t we imagine certain people having a different geometry of colour than we do?” I want to believe the eye doesn’t see green until it has a name, because I don’t want anything to look the way it did before. Van Gogh painted pink flowers, but the pink faded and curators labeled the work “White Roses” by mistake. The world in my window is a color the Greeks called chlorol. When I learned the word I was newly pregnant and the first pale lichens had just speckled the silver branches. The pines and the lichens in the chill drizzle were glowing green and a book in my lap said chlorol was one of the untranslatable words. The vibrating glow pleased me then, as a finger dipped in sugar pleased me then. I said the word aloud for the baby to hear. Chlorol. I imagined the baby could only see hot pink and crimson inside its tiny universe, but if you can see what I’m seeing, the word for it is chlorol. It’s one of the things you’ll like out here. Nineteenth century critics mocked painters who cast shadows in unexpected colors. After noticing green cypresses do drop red shadows, Goethe chastised them. “The eye demands completeness and seeks to eke out the colorific circle in itself.” He tells of a trick of light that had him pacing a row of poppies to see the flaming petals again and figure out why. Over and over again Wittgenstein frets the problem of translucence. Why is there no clear white? He wants to see the world through white-tinted glasses, but all he finds is mist. At first I felt as if the baby had fallen away like a blue shadow on the snow. Then I felt like I killed the baby in the way you can be thinking about something else and drop a heavy platter by mistake. Sometimes I feel like I was stupid to have thought I was pregnant at all. Color is an illusion, a response to the vibrating universe of electrons. Light strikes a leaf and there’s an explosion where it lands. When colors change, electromagnetic fields are colliding. The wind is not the only thing moving the trees. Once when I went into those woods I saw a single hot pink orchid on the hillside and I had to keep reminding myself not to tell the baby about the beautiful small things I was seeing. So, hot pink has been here forever and I don’t even care about that color or how Andy Warhol showed me an orchid. I hate pink. It makes my eyes burn.

. . . some days ago I saw the picture of an Angel who, in making the Annunciation, seemed to be trying to chase Mary out of her room with movements showing the sort of attack one might make on some hated enemy; and Mary, as if desperate, seemed to be trying to throw herself out of the window. Do not fall into errors like these. — Leonardo da Vinci It is time to speak of the lies of images, omissions, insertions — imitations of reality, but whose reality, Leonardo? For you she’s in nature — you’ve lavished so much attention on rock formations along your raised horizon varieties of grass in the lawn cloud convocations and the shadow the archangel casts obliterating most of what’s imagined growing there and she, lovely, composed —“ great grace of shadows and of lights is added to the faces of those who sit” beside the darkness of brown plasterwork — her right arm almost deformed, too far forward, reaching out at an impossible angle— FOR WHAT — Botticelli, Campin, van Eyck — for you she’s indoors all decked out in luscious silk and satin, surrounded by finery — tied-back drapery, carved benches, a rug or tiled floor, loggias and archways beyond her wildest ken windows revealing hortus conclusi and winding paths slogging toward the sea And what of all those blues and golds, so rife with wealth in her life there’s only red from madder juice and yellow from kaolin clay and a linen shift all frayed The truth also is a small opening high up on the wall A floor that’s hard-packed dirt And beyond the room, villagers working the fields, donkeys dragging threshing boards over newly harvested wheat AND EVERYWHERE, INSIDE AND OUT,WORLD-MOTHETING DUST For all of you this is an event reduced to a book she cannot read a lily she does not smell a lectern she never owned She might as well comb her hair with a stiletto heel Make of her body a cloud of white tulle Carry a watering can and wear shapely wooden clogs Fake glamour in a black bare-back gown Crouch on the ground flipping coins Pop a pogo stick between her legs and levitate SHE COULD BE ANYONE            ANYWHERE             ANYTIME She could be sitting in her slip, bored, bored to death, the intercom image appearing out of nowhere, announcing a stranger (prima materia, take a deep breath (for divinity to enter the world, your mystery must be experienced Her eyes will go wide, not expecting this Her ears have encountered only silence and the soft moan of a dove (OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO The trees thin The cumulus sky crackles ever so quietly Somewhere a rainbow breaks too loud now too strident He’s gotten in Hail comes in pellets (heavy hitters She will be patient and hear him out though what she really wants is to get back under the covers that are damask, but a lie— (rough-hewn flax is what she’d have) Or she could be blending a batch of myrrh and roses to deodorize the foul stench of the room that opens out not on a vista of budding poplars but on sewage, piles of it come to rot at the side of the road just there, in front of her door where broken planks of wood lean and bleating sheep wait to be herded up the hill But here’s this guy breezing in (Titan, El Greco paint his feet unplanted on the ground (is he preparing for a quick getaway or must he be higher on the picture plane (Tintoretto catches him in mid-flight, a show-off, he (Martini and Crivelli force him to his knees The breeze may be the whisper of something she is in danger of losing (the breeze may be her destiny or his feathers could begin to moult (transaction of feathers, (light as a feather in the face of all that dust she can’t escape or she could cringe at wings, voracious, unfurled, trying to scoop her up, knock her down, drown her in their soft pile, snuff out any NO she stashes in her mind, or the wind could whip his feathers and blow the townsfolk quickly to her side (Today, she knows no one will arrive in time . . . ) Certainly not those people tending their gardens, (as if anyone had topiary trees as Rogier van der Weyden (possibly Memling) shows (read fields of barley and wheat and plows, plenty of plows In his eyes, pools of light map no pollution, only flame In hers, no flecks, no threads mar the cobalt calm until his hail scumbles their surface What is she to make of it Her lids lower Chrysalises, her eyes close on their private dusk (she’s already seen her share of Roman crucifixions (perhaps the future is there and her eyes seek the great above where son and mother will be united (perhaps she conjugates the months— (nine is real— (a number done on her (perhaps she dabbles with using rue to end the thing SHE’S GOT A CHOICE AFTER ALL For the child she will have boundless love For posterity the memory of being For her life no proper translation

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations It is old school custom It is old school custom Regarding the title, “trenta-sei” is Italian for the number “thirty-six.” Ciardi uses the number in the title to give name to a new poetic form for a 36 line poem he himself created. In a letter to Vince Clemente, Ciardi defines the poetic form when discussing an earlier poem titled “A Trente-sei for the Boat People”: “A trente-sei is six six-line stanzas, the second of which begins with the second line of stanza one, the third with the third line, the fourth with the fourth line, etc. Them Eyetralian troubadors forgot to invent it, but I did it because it is a natural form and because it just came out that way. I may even try it again.” to pretend to be sad when we think about the early death of Keats the early death of Keats English Poet John Keats died in 1821, from tuberculosis, at the age of 25. . The species-truth of the matter is we are glad. Psilanthropic Psilanthropic A word Ciardi makes up here, meaning something like ‘merely human,’ taken from the Greek psilos(mere) and anthropos(man)” among exegetes exegetes People who interpret scripture; skilled interpreters , I am so moved that when the plate the plate The collection plate in which church goers may drop a monetary offering for the church and pass along to others comes by I almost think to pay the God—but why? When we think about the early death of Keats we are glad to be spared the bother of dying ourselves. His poems are a candy store of bitter-sweets His poems are a candy store of bitter-sweets Echoes John Keats’ sonnet “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again”: “once more humbly assay / The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit” (lines 7-8) . We munch whole flights of angels whole flights of angels An echo of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Following Hamlet’s death, Horatio says, “Now cracks a noble heart.—Good-night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” (Act 5, Scene 2, lines 359-360) from his shelves drooling a sticky glut glut An excessive, abundant supply; a surplus , almost enough to sicken us. But what delicious stuff! The species-truth of the matter is we are glad to have a death to munch on. Truth to tell, we are also glad to pretend it makes us sad. When it comes to dying, Keats did it so well we thrill to the performance. Safely here, this side of the fallen curtain, we stand and cheer. Psilanthropic among exegetes, as once in a miles-high turret turret A castle tower spitting flame, I watched boys flower through orange winding sheets and shammed shammed Faked, pretended a mourning because it put a name to a death I might have taken—which in a way made me immortal for another day— I was so moved that when the plate came by I had my dollar in hand to give to death but changed to a penny—enough for the old guy a penny—enough for the old guy A Greek mythological reference to the fee for the boatman Charon, ferryman of Hades, to transport the dead to the underworld was two pennies, one for each eye. The line also echoes T.S. Eliot’s epigraph to “The Hollow Men”: “A penny for the Old Guy” (1925). , and almost enough saved to sweeten my breath with a toast I will pledge to the Ape of the Divine Ape of the Divine Possible reference to Hanuman, a Hindu monkey deity. The god of death, Rama, protected him and prevented him from the experience of death. in thanks for every death that spares me mine. I almost thought of paying the God—but why? Had the boy lived, he might have grown as dull as Tennyson Tennyson The English poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) . Far better, I say, to die and leave us a formed feeling. O beautiful, pale, dying poet, fading as soft as rhyme, the saddest music keeps the sweetest time the saddest music keeps the sweetest time Echoes Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “To a Skylark”: “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought” (line 90) .

frangelico It slops from coppery glass Dominican cassocks thicker than water, thinned syrup crackling and smoking over ice, pale as hearts of  hazelnuts half-caramelized or relics lit in cabinets. Angelic alcoholic for kids, all quickening sweetness without the burnt palate, it’s praline, gilt, milk chocolate. Don’t knock it. Also, don’t drink a lot of it. Handy mnemonic for nuts and Alps, the Piedmont and Languedoc,Our Father, fluent Occitan, Orthodox baroque brass fixtures, all the schmaltzy terror of Christmas    ... Bright liqueur, maple sap, throat’s lacquer, misnomer, namesake— couldn’t quench a thirst, of course, but gives occasion for it. lametta Fuck me, I love that stuff — tinsel stripped like a tarragon stalk of its million radial tines, nervy with static in shredded cascades, angle-confounding and biddable as a fistful of grasshoppers. It implicates itself perpetually in socks, hell-bent as Japanese knotweed on travel, and infiltrates the kitchenette, which seems, beside its disco stooks, too much of a muchness, too matter-of-fact. Could we dress all utilities in spangles of lametta, revel in the vulgar Italian TV indestructible attention-splatter, the cat-bewitching twitch and dangle, the dross? Would things be worse or better? periptero Apparently peripatetic, it pops up wherever I go, glistening on my shoulder, a gold epaulette, a stuffed piñata albatross of bubble-gum, filter tips, and lottery tickets, glossy cascades of laminated sleaze difficult to care about, much harder to reject. Less explicably there are sewing patterns, puzzle books, and tiny plastic helicopters bearing stigmata from the molds where they were cast. The proprietor slams the shutters up and locks himself inside like a djinn in a lamp, a night-busy, helping-hand kobold in a kitchen, utterly invested in the enterprise, inseparable from it. What is the epicenter everyone reports but the staple through the nipple of a centerfold?

Titled after Satie I. Three pears ripen On the ledge. Weeks pass. They are a marriage. The middle one’s the conversation The other two are having. He is their condition. Three wings without birds, Three feelings. How can they help themselves? They can’t. How can they stay like that? They can. II. The pears are consulting. Business is bad this year, D’Anjou, Bartlett. They are psychiatrists, Patient and slick. Hunger reaches the hard stem. It will get rid of them. III. The pears are old women; They are the same. Slight rouge, Green braille dresses, They blush in unison. They will stay young. They will not ripen. In the new world, Ripeness is nothing.

Just for this evening, let's not mock them. Not their curtsies or cross-garters or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens promising, promising. At least they had ideas about love. All day we've driven past cornfields, past cows poking their heads through metal contraptions to eat. We've followed West 84, and what else? Irrigation sprinklers fly past us, huge wooden spools in the fields, lounging sheep, telephone wires, yellowing flowering shrubs. Before us, above us, the clouds swell, layers of them, the violet underneath of clouds. Every idea I have is nostalgia. Look up: there is the sky that passenger pigeons darkened and filled— darkened for days, eclipsing sun, eclipsing all other sound with the thunder of their wings. After a while, it must have seemed that they followed not instinct or pattern but only one another. When they stopped, Audubon observed, they broke the limbs of stout trees by the weight of the numbers. And when we stop we'll follow—what? Our hearts? The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love only through miracle, but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through, how to make themselves shrines to their own longing. The spectacular was never behind them. Think of days of those scarlet-breasted, blue-winged birds above you. Think of me in the garden, humming quietly to myself in my blue dress, a blue darker than the sky above us, a blue dark enough for storms, though cloudless. At what point is something gone completely? The last of the sunlight is disappearing even as it swells— Just for this evening, won't you put me before you until I'm far enough away you can believe in me? Then try, try to come closer— my wonderful and less than.

Nicanor Parra I’m not going to lie Through my teeth to you Like the poets from Minnesota, The South, and the West, And New York City. Most of all in life I would like to fuck a thirteen-year-old again, And I don’t have any hesitations About saying I’d rather be Marlon Brando Than I would T. S. Eliot, etc. I have more respect for Muhammad Ali Than any other living man. Of course I’ve tried Esquire, But my shoes aren’t platforms And I don’t know shit about canoes. Although I can’t prove it, Most poets work for the highway dept. There are more of them than there are Flies and engineers. And I stink like a dead mule under an overpass.

Books are door-shaped portals carrying me across oceans and centuries, helping me feel less alone. But my mother believes that girls who read too much are unladylike and ugly, so my father's books are locked in a clear glass cabinet. I gaze at enticing covers and mysterious titles, but I am rarely permitted to touch the enchantment of words. Poems. Stories. Plays. All are forbidden. Girls are not supposed to think, but as soon as my eager mind begins to race, free thoughts rush in to replace the trapped ones. I imagine distant times and faraway places. Ghosts. Vampires. Ancient warriors. Fantasy moves into the tangled maze of lonely confusion. Secretly, I open an invisible book in my mind, and I step through its magical door-shape into a universe of dangerous villains and breathtaking heroes. Many of the heroes are men and boys, but some are girls so tall strong and clever that they rescue other children from monsters.

City life is a whirl of poetry readings and forbidden tertulias, gatherings where young and old, rich and poor, male and female, dark and light— runaway slaves and freed ones, former masters and former servants—all take turns sharing secret verses rooted in startling new ideas. Each evening, I go home with a mind that glows in the light of words, which leap like flames...