1269 Arts and sciences poems

Although what glitters on the trees, row after perfect row, is merely the injustice of the world, the chips on the bark of each beech tree catching the light, the sum of these delays is the beautiful, the human beautiful, body of flaws. The dead would give anything I’m sure, to step again onto the leafrot, into the avenue of mottled shadows, the speckled broken skins. The dead in their sheer open parenthesis, what they wouldn’t give for something to lean on that won’t give way. I think I would weep for the moral nature of this world, for right and wrong like pools of shadow and light you can step in and out of crossing this yellow beech forest, this buchen-wald, one autumn afternoon, late in the twentieth century, in hollow light, in gaseous light. . . . To receive the light and return it and stand in rows, anonymous, is a sweet secret even the air wishes it could unlock. See how it pokes at them in little hooks, the blue air, the yellow trees. Why be afraid? They say when Klimt died suddenly a painting, still incomplete, was found in his studio, a woman’s body open at its point of entry, rendered in graphic, pornographic, detail—something like a scream between her legs. Slowly, feathery, he had begun to paint a delicate garment (his trademark) over this mouth of her body. The mouth of her face is genteel, bored, feigning a need for sleep. The fabric defines the surface, the story, so we are drawn to it, its blues and yellows glittering like a stand of beech trees late one afternoon in Germany, in fall. It is called Buchenwald, it is 1890. In the finished painting the argument has something to do with pleasure.

1 A French scholar says he affected the Chinese manner. When he took his friends into the countryside To look at blossoms, they all saw Chinese blossoms. He dressed accordingly and wept for the wild geese of Shosho. 2 One year after making love through the short midsummer night He walked home at dawn and noticed that the river Oi Had sunk two feet. The following year was better. He saw bubbles of crab-froth among the river reeds.

Puddings don’t have lungs, melons don’t have riders Listen—a female seal, a seaport, and a social world Come day’s end the top of the tree hesitates, pauses, then sweeps on like a blackboard eraser to clear the horizon Sit, Shep, incognito The lid of the sun is heavy, its lashes blink on the horizon, brushing the curve of the sea So now they want to grant federal coal subsidies I heard “suspected pipe bomb” as “suspected python” The first nest empty and deep, at child’s eye level, in a young fir tree, of twigs Pathos is at the front line of defense against worries as they approach I remember almost nothing, only that I am in a room with others and we are reading through sacks of mail, trying to ferret out spies She will never believe she’s too old to join a band or make quick vertical moves on the playing field to really quiet music—she is that still Then the sparrow went to sleep in a lumber castle And so we come to chapter LIX, in which I learn that I have failed Can you believe this shit

One thing I’m not doing in my poems: reporting on anything that really happened. When I say I’m from New York, Glaswegians say, “Oh, I love Woody Allen.” They cannot construe how large a state can be. I just happen to actually be from Manhattan. How impractical, to imagine that a structure like a government would be responsive to the needs of such a lot of people. Held like in a holding pen. In the early 1990s I saw a yellow Indian drunk in a tattoo parlor in Seattle. He literally said he could literally see right through me. If he said it figuratively I took it literally. A lot of people in America do not want regulation from the government. In principle: our forefathers, our persecution. Ideally we wouldn’t need industries and individual actions to be regulated. We wouldn’t even need laws. People, including people who run corporations or work for them, would just behave responsibly. Corporations would take the responsibility of personhood seriously. My mother cannot be trusted to restrict me from buying R-rated videogames at the porn store. My mother struggled to love me—the firstborn had been so tractable—she still struggles to love me—can she be commanded to love me? Now I see what those commandments are about. There must be a God. Objectively we could expect that our family members would go out of their way to behave toward us with extra care, concern, and with love. Sometimes there is a harsh disjunction between what objective perception would suggest to us we might expect and what really takes place, or “occurs,” within the framework of what we call “our lives.” I really saw the other day for the first time that my mother did not naturally take to me—I am not much like her. It would take an effort for her to understand what matters to me. (Her love will come around.) My own daughter is quite different from me—I think—it’s hard to tell, she is only five years old. But she looks different — t akes after her father, as I took after mine—and so far her concerns are not my own. She loves pink. I hate pink. (My love moves faster.) Where would that moral activity come from, to behave responsibly toward others? Not to overcharge, not to seek loopholes, not to dominate, not to oppress. Does anyone consciously oppress? I guess some spousal abuse comes from the pure urge to dominate, and the ire that results when that domination is resisted, or thwarted . . . But is it a pure urge or is it coming from an inscribed narrative of gendered hierarchy? Like a man wearing a wife-beater has been told too many times that his wife is supposed to listen to him and obey him. Now if he can be told by the government that “My Strength Is Not for Hurting,” a local billboard campaign, maybe that will ring in his ears when he lifts his fist. If the government doesn’t do it, who will do it? The church used to do it, and still does. The one time I went to church, with my mother, in Tennessee, when we were at a family reunion and the whole family had certain activities, and one of them was “church on Sunday,” I was brought to tears by the simple goodness of the message that the pastor, or reverend —minister?—this was a Methodist church—was preaching. It was Father’s Day, actually, and he talked about how fathers ought to make sure to spend time with their kids. Turn off the TV, he said, and spend some time with your kids. I was crying because I am not used to an experience of shared instruction in goodness. It was very moving to be in a room with real people all receiving the same instruction.

Were it not for that photograph, disaster in its final stages, matchbox houses coming down, rubble of streets, uprooted trees, lives we somehow could not envision, removed from us and not our own, on distant coasts the fall of night, we might never have thought of Darwin, remembered what we had forgotten, nothing but desert at our backs, somewhere the light gone grey, gone green, the very texture of the air evoking strangeness in us, distance, deepwater harbor on the rim of an island whose aspirations, despite itself, assume proportions hemispheric, continental, set adrift in uncharted waters where a wind from the Timor Sea smacks of Celebes, of Java, celebrates archipelagoes for which no names have been devised, where rain runs green, and rocks dream gold, where every morning, on our tongues, we taste the raging of the dust gathering at abandoned stations and know, or come to know, the life, the littoral on which we wait, though not yet clearly its true name, not precisely its purpose with us; where, naked, night to night, inventing names for our nakedness, we lie suspended under the Equator between the wastes of self and weather, trying to learn ourselves, our names, what to make of this emptiness, this sense of absence which afflicts us, forgetting what we must remember, the great Australian coast spun out beyond our scrutiny in shales, corals, limestones, salt scrub, sand, discovery at every turn and, this far south, no turning back, latitudes of impossible dimensions bleaching the horizon, mapping what will not quite stay mapped, nothing but desert at our backs, nothing but darkness to advance on, night on the routes that enter strangeness more dangerously, in the evening, than we can bring ourselves to say, darkness and an interior for which, of course, there is no name except, unmapped, unknown, ourselves.

The first hot April day the granite step was warm. Flies droned in the grass. When a car went past they rose in unison, then dropped back down. . . . I saw that a yellow crocus bud had pierced a dead oak leaf, then opened wide. How strong its appetite for the luxury of the sun! Everyone longs for love’s tense joy and red delights. And then I spied an ant dragging a ragged, disembodied wing up the warm brick walk. It must have been the Methodist in me that leaned forward, preceded by my shadow, to put a twig just where the ant was struggling with its own desire.

Seed corn strung like scalps, Dil's tree with its crossed foxtrot legs. A story about habitations carved from snow. Fallen snow, not falling, Buttonwood, peavey. When Alvaro and Christina die they become two doors: one black; next, sky. They are also, perhaps, the cast-iron skillet, the string-bikini girl poised to sow beans. So sometimes the world is made still. Sometimes you're home and it's thaw. Sometimes a swashbuckler with a dry brush bivouacs to catch the salt breeze that bristles the lace. Hush. Honest men sleep with their shoes on. We love things for what they are. Texture of shingles, say. Lobster trap elegies. The way a hung coat suggests a general's death on the banks of the Monongahela, and dinner guests, toreadors. How, sixteen years before he kills himself, Allan's handlebar streamers and foxtail fly. Everything birthing its vanishing point. Even the sycamore, which is to say, even the man, is due to be shot, skinned and tanned. But seedpods are sachets or paper balloons and an oil drum serves to roast nuts. Meantime: Arabella Cleveland, her chin returning to slop, grows blue flax in clumps. Cooling sheds, phrenology. Moose racks, buckets. The smoothness of a plank box and the irregularity of hay. I think it's very cold there. I think Andrew loves his wife: her posture beneath a flat-crowned hat.

When this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave. —John Keats 1. You are here on the underside of the page, writing in water, anachronist, showing your head with its delicate fuses, its fatal telemetry, a moundful of triggers and gunpowder like a field-mine, your sixty-one inches and your gem-cutter’s fingers, anonymous, taking the weight of a “roomful of people” but making no mark, pressing the page as I write, while the traffic in Rome, demotic with engines and klaxons, circles the Pyramid of Cestius, crosses a graveyard, and submerges again like the fin of a shark. 2. I write, in the posthumous way, on the flat of a headstone with a quarrier’s ink, like yourself: an anthologist’s date and an asterisk, a parenthetical mark in the gas of the pyramid-builders, an obelisk whirling with Vespas in a poisonous motorcade. I make your surgeon’s incision for solitude—one living hand, two poets strangled in seawater and phlegm, an incestuous ego to reach for the heart in the funeral ashes, a deathbed with friends. 3. Something murderous flows from the page to my hand— a silence that wars with the letters, a fist that closes on paper: a blow with the straight edge of a razor that falls with a madman’s monotony; or the adze of a sleepwalking Sumerian nicking the wet of the clay, hacking a wedge in a tablet in the blood and the mica, till all glistens with language. The criminal folds up his claspknife. The shutters slam down on the streets.Nobody listens. 4. Out of breath with the climb, and tasting a hashish of blood, what did he see on the brink of the Piazza di Spagna? A hand in the frame of a cithara where beggars and sunbathers clotted the levels like musical signatures, a Wordsworthian dream of “degree,” “unimaginable time” touched by an axe blade—or a pram on the Steps of Odessa torn from the hands of its mother, gathering speed for the plunge and rocking its tires in the rifling, like a gun barrel, smashing its way through the Tzar’s executioners, to a scream at the bottom? 5. A failed solitude... The bees in the Protestant grass speak of it delicately in the sweat of a Palatine summer, guiding my hand through the Braille of the letters. Violet, bluet, or squill— what was it I picked under the epitaph, what rose to my touch in the thirst of the marble, a cup from the well of your grave in the noonday miasma, a hieroglyph in the water, saying: solitude, solitude, solitude: you have it at last—your solitude writing on water, alone with its failure. 6. You are there on the underside of the page, a blue flower in my Baedeker, writing on water. I know it. The paper pulls under my pen peaks into waves running strongly into the horizon. The emptiness hardens with balustrades, risers, and levels, a staircase of Roman azaleas. I slip on the blood and the ink toward the exigent bed of a poet. All is precarious. A maniac waits on the streets. Nobody listens. What must I do? I am writing on water, blazing with failures, ascending, descending among lovers and trippers. You are pressing me hard under the paper. At Santa Trinità dei Monti the stairway parts like an estuary, rises and falls like a fountain. There is nothing to see but a death-mask, your room in an island of risers and treads, oddly gregarious, an invisible hand in the granite. 7. The tidal salts drain on a living horizon, leaving a glare on the blemishing paper. The silence is mortal. Nobody answers. for Joan Hutton Landis

Those various sounds, consistently indistinct, like intermingled echoes struck from thin glasses successively at random— the inflection disguised: your hair, the tails of two fighting-cocks head to head in stone— like sculptured scimitars repeating the curve of your ears in reverse order: your eyes, flowers of ice and snow sown by tearing winds on the cordage of disabled ships: your raised hand an ambiguous signature: your cheeks, those rosettes of blood on the stone floors of French châteaux, with regard to which the guides are so affirmative— your other hand a bundle of lances all alike, partly hid by emeralds from Persia and the fractional magnificence of Florentine goldwork—a collection of little objects— sapphires set with emeralds, and pearls with a moonstone, made fine with enamel in gray, yellow, and dragonfly blue; a lemon, a pear and three bunches of grapes, tied with silver: your dress, a magnificent square cathedral tower of uniform and at the same time diverse appearance—a species of vertical vineyard, rustling in the storm of conventional opinion—are they weapons or scalpels? Whetted to brilliance by the hard majesty of that sophistication which is superior to opportunity, these things are rich instruments with which to experiment. But why dissect destiny with instruments more highly specialized than the components of destiny itself?

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock And ever after called him a curse, Then why did he hurry to let him in? He could have hid in the house. It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong (But often we all do wrong) As the truth is I think he was already stuck With Kubla Khan. He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished, I shall never write another word of it, When along comes the Person from Porlock And takes the blame for it. It was not right, it was wrong, But often we all do wrong. * May we inquire the name of the Person from Porlock? Why, Porson, didn’t you know? He lived at the bottom of Porlock Hill So had a long way to go, He wasn’t much in the social sense Though his grandmother was a Warlock, One of the Rutlandshire ones I fancy And nothing to do with Porlock, And he lived at the bottom of the hill as I said And had a cat named Flo, And had a cat named Flo. I long for the Person from Porlock To bring my thoughts to an end, I am becoming impatient to see him I think of him as a friend, Often I look out of the window Often I run to the gate I think, He will come this evening, I think it is rather late. I am hungry to be interrupted For ever and ever amen O Person from Porlock come quickly And bring my thoughts to an end. * I felicitate the people who have a Person from Porlock To break up everything and throw it away Because then there will be nothing to keep them And they need not stay. * Why do they grumble so much? He comes like a benison They should be glad he has not forgotten them They might have had to go on. * These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing, I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant, Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting With various mixtures of human character which goes best, All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us. There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to do Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.