1269 Arts and sciences poems

Uncles who burst on childhood, from the East, Blown from air, like bearded ghosts arriving, And are, indeed, a kind of guessed-at ghost Through mumbled names at dinner-tables moving, Bearers of parrots, bonfires of blazing stones, Their pockets fat with riches out of reason, Meerschaum and sharks’-teeth, ropes of China coins, And weeds and seeds and berries blowzed with poison— So, from the baleful Kimberleys of thought, From the mad continent of dreams, you wander, Spending your trophies at our bloodless feet, Mocking our fortunes with more desperate plunder; So with your boomerangs of rhyme you come, With blossoms wrenched from sweet and deadly branches, And we, pale Crusoes in the moment’s tomb, Watch, turn aside, and touch again those riches, Nor ask what beaches of the mind you trod, What skies endured, and unimagined rivers, Or whiteness trenched by what mysterious tide, And aching silence of the Never-Nevers; Watch, turn aside, and touch with easy faith Your chest of miracles, but counting nothing, Or dumbly, that you stole them out of death, Out of death’s pyramids, to prove us breathing. We breathe, who beat the sides of emptiness, We live, who die by statute in steel hearses, We dance, whose only posture gives us grace To squeeze the greasy udders of our purses— (Look in this harsher glass, and I will show you The daylight after the darkness, and the morning After the midnight, and after the night the day After the year after, terribly returning). We live by these, your masks and images, We breathe in this, your quick and borrowed body; But you take passage on the ruffian seas, And you are vanished in the dark already.

Pray thee, take care, that tak’st my book in hand, To read it well: that is, to understand.

I want you with me, and yet you are the end of my privacy. Do you see how these rooms have become public? How we glance to see if— who? Who did you imagine? Surely we’re not here alone, you and I. I’ve been wandering where the cold tracks of language collapse into cinders, unburnable trash. Beyond that, all I can see is the remote cold of meteors before their avalanches of farewell. If you asked me what words a voice like this one says in parting, I’d say,I’m sweeping an empty factory toward which I feel neither hostility nor nostalgia. I’m just a broom, sweeping.

Mute is thy wild harp, now, O Bard sublime! Who, amid Scotia’s mountain solitude, Great Nature taught to “build the lofty rhyme,” And even beneath the daily pressure, rude, Of laboring Poverty, thy generous blood, Fired with the love of freedom—Not subdued Wert thou by thy low fortune: But a time Like this we live in, when the abject chime Of echoing Parasite is best approved, Was not for thee—Indignantly is fled Thy noble Spirit; and no longer moved By all the ills o’er which thine heart has bled, Associate worthy of the illustrious dead, Enjoys with them “the Liberty it loved.”

If thou dislik’st the piece thou light’st on first, Think that of all that I have writ the worst; But if thou read’st my book unto the end, And still dost this and that verse reprehend, O perverse man! If all disgustful be, The extreme scab take thee and thine, for me.

1    As an archaeologist unearths a mask with opercular teeth and abalone eyes, someone throws a broken fan and extension cords into a dumpster. A point of coincidence exists in the mind resembling the tension between a denotation and its stretch of definition: aurora: a luminous phenomenon consisting of streamers or arches of light appearing in the upper atmosphere of a planet’s polar regions, caused by the emission of light from atoms excited by electrons accelerated along the planet’s magnetic field lines. The mind’s magnetic field lines. When the red shimmering in the huge dome of sky stops, a violet flare is already arcing up and across, while a man foraging a dumpster in Cleveland finds some celery and charred fat. Hunger, angst: the blue shimmer of emotion, water speeding through a canyon; to see only to know: to wake finding a lug nut, ticket stub, string, personal card, ink smear, $2.76. 2    A Kwiakiutl wooden dish with a double-headed wolf is missing from a museum collection. And as the director checks to see if it was deaccessioned, a man sitting on a stool under bright lights shouts: a pachinko ball dropped vertiginously but struck a chiming ring and ricocheted to the left. We had no sense that a peony was opening, that a thousand white buds of a Kyoto camellia had opened at dusk and had closed at dawn. When the man steps out of the pachinko parlor, he will find himself vertiginously dropping in starless space. When he discovers that his daughter was cooking over smoking oil and shrieked in a fatal asthma attack, he will walk the bright streets in an implosion of grief, his mind will become an imploding star, he will know he is searching among bright gold threads for a black pattern in the weave. 3    Set a string loop into a figure of two diamonds, four diamonds, one diamond: as a woman tightens her hand into a fist and rubs it in a circular motion over her heart, a bewildered man considering the semantics of set decides no through-line exists: to sink the head of a nail below the surface, to fix as a distinguishing imprint, sign, or appearance, to incite, put on a fine edge by grinding, to adjust, adorn, put in motion, make unyielding, to bend slightly the tooth points of a saw alternately in opposite directions. As the woman using her index finger makes spiral after spiral from her aorta up over her head, see the possibilities for transcendence: you have to die and die in your mind before you can begin to see the empty spaces the configuration of string defines. 4    A restorer examines the pieces of a tin chandelier, and notices the breaks in the arms are along old solder lines, and that cheap epoxy was used. He will have to scrape off the epoxy, scrub some flux, heat up the chandelier and use a proper solder. A pair of rough-legged hawks are circling over a pasture; one hawk cuts off the rabbit’s path of retreat while the other swoops with sharp angle and curve of wings. Cirrus, cirrostratus, cirrocumulus, altostratus, altocumulus, stratocumulus, nimbostratus, cumlus, cumulonimbus, stratus: is there no end? Memories stored in the body begin to glow. A woman seals basil in brown bags and hangs them from the ceiling. A dead sturgeon washes to shore. The sun is at the horizon, but another sun is rippling in water. It’s not that the angle of reflection equals the angle of incidence, but there’s exultation, pleasure, distress, death, love. 5    The world resembles a cuttlefish changing colors and shimmering. An apprentice archer has stretched the bowstring properly, but does not know he will miss the target because he is not aiming in the hips. He will learn to hit the target without aiming when he has died in his mind. I am not scared of death, though I am appalled at how obsession with security yields a pin-pushing, pencil-shaving existence. You can descend to the swimming level of sharks, be a giant kelp growing from the ocean bottom up to the surface light, but the critical moment is to die feeling the infinite stillness of the passions, to revel in the touch of hips, hair, lips, hands, feel the collapse of space in December light. When I know I am no longer trying to know the spectral lines of the earth, I can point to a cuttlefish and say, “Here it is sepia,” already it is deep-brown, and exult, “Here it is deep-brown,” already it is white. 6    Red koi swim toward us, and black carp are rising out of the depths of the pond, but our sustenance is a laugh, a grief, a walk at night in the snow, seeing the pure gold of a flickering candle - a moment at dusk when we see that deer have been staring at us, we did not see them edge out of the brush, a moment when someone turns on a light and turns a window into a mirror, a moment when a child asks, “When will it be tomorrow?” To say “A bell cannot be red and violet at the same place and time because of the logical structure of color” is true but is a dot that must enlarge into a zero: a void,enso, red shimmer, breath, endless beginning, pure body, pure mind.

He was trying to teach me to economize with my language.Strindberg gray he said, instead of and I thought, sad stuff; plays. Okay: born, rented room, to Dad & Mom business & bar, how could you not? Or thought, I cannot be your Lithuania nor her other Armenia, emptied into river if not skein-tangled senseless. He won’t say her name and not a word of the thitherings. Only that she was lost. Don’t speak the heavy hinges, the crushed-bud breaking of taste from language. That sort of excess has no place in the new economy. Strindberg gray, say, when one thinks only January, January, January. Of the Occurrence as recurrent. A single gunshot in Dempster’s cistern, the echo chambers of sleep. The gray lot of days in low-light hospitals, Strindberg. I’ll call him gray, his sitting heavy. And her so Strindberg with veil and rose, her poised in shadow at the door. Funereal nails sunk into knees would be dripping were they not so goddamn gray. Excess was for days when my mother sat turning grape leaves with three sets of pockets: Turkish, English, & Armenian, plus lemon to dry it all out. By ten, they’d sewn up two; said one is more than enough. “English, only, Sanossian. You will speak what we speak.” I don’t know what it’s like to lose a language. Instead, Strindberg gray, I say, when I want to bring his lost girl back. Strindberg gray, though I cannot take from him January, July, or the months of coping between. When my mother leafs through me in her memory banks, bits of face are missing; sometimes I’m limbless or smear. Gray even scentless, and still all Strindberg. I tell him, I raise her: be darlings and come scream with me from all the pockets sewn over. Maybe by late summer we’ll be humming: Tennessee yellow; Tennessee, Tennessee.

After Leonardo da Vinci 1 The long incision. The incipient voyage from aortic arch to thoracic inlet. Small-particled is the corpuscled city. (Bustling opuscula.) A city of animal electricity. A lowing cycling mass. Calm the cowed heart. Still the browbeating heart. Cool the controversial hearthstone. Let the blade intervene where the divine intersects bovinity. 2 Pour wax into the gate of an ox’s heart. Close the small doors of the heart via a template of hardened wax, a 
temple of vital gases, water with grass seed suspension, glass blown through a cast of calcined gypsum, plaster of Santo Spirito. Spiritous dissection, blood-sooty vapors, the dense dance of the Renaissance counts down a Galenic pulse.Musculo vivicare. Transit the venous. Bypass the 
arterial. Underscore the two-part cantus firmus in heat and motion. (The fixed heart burns slow, spurns fervor.)

I Imperia I saw a plaster hand, on view In sculptor’s studio, set apart... Aspasia’s? Cleopatra’s?... Who? This fragment’s human work of art? Like lily silvered by the dawn, Frozen in kiss of snow, its light Loveliness dazzled me, and shone In poetry of purest white. Though pallid, wan, yet striking, it Spread over velvet, graceful, slender Fingers—delicate, exquisite— Decked thick with rings of weighty splendor. Thumb high, in serpentine-like pose, Arched in a svelte and shapely line, It lay, fine set, like one of those Hands held with proud air Florentine. Did it comb out the sultan’s beard On jeweled caftan? Or, with twirls And twistings, when Don Juan appeared, Play in his lustrous, glistening curls? A courtesan’s? A queen’s? Did this Wrought hand a scepter wield? Which one? The paragon of fleshly bliss? Sovereignty’s beauteous paragon? Doubtless, by little starts and fits, It lit, poised, in its fluttering, On the she-lion croup of its Chimera-dream, caught on the wing; The Empire’s fantasies; bombastic Love of fantastic, sumptuous schemes; Voluptuous frenzies orgiastic; Impossible and futile dreams; Wild tales; poetic escapades Of hashish, Rhine-wine sorcery; Dashing Bohemian cavalcades On steeds unbridled, coursing free... Such are the things the eyes divines In that white book, by Venus written: Blank palm where she has traced the signs One reads, a-tremble, terror-smitten. II Lacenaire Close by, in contrast, lying there, Encushioned, was the severed hand— Pungent-embalmed—of Lacenaire, Assassin and scourge of the land; Curio most depraved! But, though Repulsed, I reached and touched it, still Barely cleansed of its horrors! Oh! That flesh, red-downed and deathly chill! Sallow hand, like a mummy’s wrought, All yellowed, laid-out pharaoh-wise, Spreading its faun-like fingers, taut, As if to seize its tempting prize; Exuding from their tips, an itching Lusting for living flesh and gold, About to writhe, convulsed, and twitching Before their victims, as of old. Vice clawed vile hieroglyph designs Of heinous wrongs—most foul, most fell— In all its wrinkles, all its lines, Signs that the executioner knew well! One see its scabrous deeds large writ In the palm’s bestial creases, and The boiling cauldron scalding it With every crime at sin’s command; Capri’s debauches libertine, Of fleshpot brothels orgy-rife Stained through with blot of blood and wine Like the old Caesar’s blasé life. At once both soft and savage, its Shape shows a curious elegance, A fearsome grace that counterfeits The gladiator’s graceful stance! Crime’s aristocracy! No plane, No hammer’s labors ever made Its flesh tough time and time again! Its only tool, the dagger-blade... Work’s honest calluses! For you We look in vain, no sign we see: Evil’s false poet, butcher true— A Manfred of the gutter, he!

On “Sueño No. 5: Botella del mar,” a photograph by Grete Stern (1950) The woman sits clutching her knees inside a short-necked bottle on a beach, looks up smiling at a mouth above all imagined itineraries. We like to think she volunteered to be lowered into the bottle. On her own idea, even her own craftiness, lured into being enrobed with the thick glass that is the gray-blue of a ukiyo-e sky of flying cranes who breathe the steam of that bluish gray ideation and end of autumn, or a plume of smoke from a train in the middle distance. Swells of warm seawater push wet sand against spun tips of seashells that sit on the warmed strand like nobility on a plush settee. The bottle’s bottom edge lists in the hot sand, the heat of the morning sunlight penetrates the bottle walls, and foam and breeze coax a juddering creature from underneath. From inside the woman argues with herself that the horizon is another of the world’s ambitions. Those ships slipped into bottles with volition and self-responsibility, acquiesce so marvelously, like the glass fitting so smoothly around her. She is a person born to be put into this and admired as perfection from the outside, which is how we love flowers and dreams, though our desires may suffocate them.