1269 Arts and sciences poems

I knew that James Whistler was part of the Paris scene, but I was still surprised when I found the painting of his mother at the Musée d'Orsay among all the colored dots and mobile brushstrokes of the French Impressionists. And I was surprised to notice after a few minutes of benign staring, how that woman, stark in profile and fixed forever in her chair, began to resemble my own ancient mother who was now fixed forever in the stars, the air, the earth. You can understand why he titled the painting "Arrangement in Gray and Black" instead of what everyone naturally calls it, but afterward, as I walked along the river bank, I imagined how it might have broken the woman's heart to be demoted from mother to a mere composition, a study in colorlessness. As the summer couples leaned into each other along the quay and the wide, low-slung boats full of spectators slid up and down the Seine between the carved stone bridges and their watery reflections, I thought: how ridiculous, how off-base. It would be like Botticelli calling "The Birth of Venus" "Composition in Blue, Ochre, Green, and Pink," or the other way around like Rothko titling one of his sandwiches of color "Fishing Boats Leaving Falmouth Harbor at Dawn." Or, as I scanned the menu at the cafe where I now had come to rest, it would be like painting something laughable, like a chef turning on a spit over a blazing fire in front of an audience of ducks and calling it "Study in Orange and White." But by that time, a waiter had appeared with my glass of Pernod and a clear pitcher of water, and I sat there thinking of nothing but the women and men passing by— mothers and sons walking their small fragile dogs— and about myself, a kind of composition in blue and khaki, and, now that I had poured some water into the glass, milky-green.

The 3-D printer worked overtime sculpting lemon trees complete with bees on budding flowers. The overheated machine filled the cardboard orchard with the scent of hot plastic. The 12th nightingale arrived like a prophet in a cloud of smoke, considering the same hand that pushed “print” remained destined to strike a single match and wave goodbye to a paradise of paper. Translated from the Persian

Artemisia Gentileschi A woman in a man's world, a woman making a claim, choosing her own body as the source of inspiration, wearing, as Pittura did, a gold chain bearing the mask of imitation: her tousled hair and muscled arms, the shifting gold-green colors of her dress, her sleeve rolled to the elbow, the light striking  her brow and the shadow made by the mask-shaped charm against flesh, the double mirrors she used to paint herself, the act of it captured mid-gesture, the paint laid out as her father taught her: white near the thumb then red, brown, green, her well-curved body bending around the canvas, the calculated self-image occupying the full height of the picture, her unromanticized face, dramatically lit, composed, the bare bodice, the rolled-up sleeve, her eyes turned upward, her right arm raised, its movement frozen, the mind in motion, her wide, searching gaze.

instead of entrance Goodbye means Avoir Sved’s dream said from nowhere of aliquant angles some spindle of the sun empirically facted deafening skin open and afterwards a cough is a couch idled into without rain an island easily a third worse Indigo with a flame-red tongue

A vision as of crowded city streets, With human life in endless overflow; Thunder of thoroughfares; trumpets that blow To battle; clamor, in obscure retreats, Of sailors landed from their anchored fleets; Tolling of bells in turrets, and below Voices of children, and bright flowers that throw O'er garden-walls their intermingled sweets! This vision comes to me when I unfold The volume of the Poet paramount, Whom all the Muses loved, not one alone; — Into his hands they put the lyre of gold, And, crowned with sacred laurel at their fount, Placed him as Musagetes on their throne.

I dragged my twelve-year-old cousin to see the Broadway production of ARaisin in the Sun

The King saith, and his arm swept the landscape’s foliage into bloom where he hath inscribed the secret mysteries of his love before at last taking himself away. His head away. His recording hand. So his worshipful subjects must imagine themselves in his loving fulfillment, who were no more than instruments of his creation. Pawns. Apparati. Away, he took himself and left us studying the smudged sky. Soft pencil lead. Once he was not a king, only a pale boy staring down from the high dive. The contest was seriousness he decided, who shaped himself for genus genius and nothing less. Among genii, whoever dies first wins. Or so he thought. He wanted the web browsers to ping his name in literary mention everywhere on the world wide web. He wanted relief from his head, which acted as spider and inner web weaver. The boy was a live thing tumbled in its thread and tapped and fed off, siphoned from. His head kecked back and howling from inside the bone castle from whence he came to hate the court he held. He was crowned with loneliness and suffered for friendship, for fealty of the noblest sort. The invisible crown rounded his temples tighter than any turban, more binding than a wedding band, and he sat in his round tower on the rounding earth. Read these, saith the King, and put down his pen, hearing himself inwardly holding forth on the dullest aspects of the human heart with the sharpest possible wit. Unreadable as Pound on usury or Aquinas on sex. I know the noose made an oval portrait frame for his face. And duct tape around the base of the Ziploc bag was an air-tight chamber for the regal head—most serious relic, breathlessly lecturing in the hall of silence.

We arrive eight hours before morning but the Sound luminesces enough to gloss jabbed brushstrokes of cedar, the strand prickled with fringes of eelgrass, and the world's baby teeth ground down to this pall of sand. It's gusting so strong I can barely pee straight — You can see in each stunted and strung-out live oak the shape of the wind's hands. On this last stand before the Outer Banks Sharon makes camp while I pay twenty quarters to shelter stunned and out-of-context. Such bare slubs of land the memoir I'm reading calls griefscapes. The groove fits my tongue so for forty more pages I keep the light on, pulled by a man oaring his way through childhood to a stung and moondamp first place, all slap and vowel and grunt-pine punctuation, the no-way-satisfied lessing & moring of the tideshore. I knew in advance of reason this freight of rain, salt in my hair. That child I was, what was she mourning before death charged his first fare? We wake and hurry to slip our moorings. The ferry's there.

In the hermetic almost dark under the fluorescent dizz I found her broken nerves, smoke coming off the dashes, the caps like jolts to the neck, the pried-open spaces between vowels where the teeth bit off twine and the tongue was raw then cool with ice. The air of the stockroom after lunch was the marbleized silence of the small blank pages she stitched into privacy. Air of paper and faint glue bond, carbon, graph, yellow pads, in the stockroom I could read alone— the confetti of money dissolved on the blank wall. After work, I slid the numbered poems on blue mimeo into my playbook, and felt the open field the zig-zagging past cornerbacks, the white lines skewed to heaven. Excuse my mood—unbridled, chemical, her scrawled messages smooth to the mind, excuse my absence, again and yes, then, too— the cold stone of the Palisades was there after we split— alone naked in the Hudson, the water greasing me in the tepid, chemical mix, before I returned to the cement of 9W in my father’s Skylark the night black and soundless within.

* If sound, then why not the full reach of mind, and if that cantilever then why not the whole keyboard with its totality of partials? But then one meets the dragon, pipes up a bright disciple,whose two dramas, lieber Meister, are suicide and the founding of the state. My name is a household word