1269 Arts and sciences poems

Drew down the curse of heaven on her umbrella furled and smelling of wet cigarettes, Jo ran off in rain one pitchy night, one bloody a.m. found her staring, snoring. “Why do we all stay up so late?” Jo queried. “Though I don’t stay up so late as my friends.” She tripped the little bomb of wasps. They got her. Tears for Jo, four, each perfect, waspish. A silver tongue and piss-blond hair decants a funeral oblation for the mouse. “She was a rare sight, a winning wonder. Jo cultivates her toothaches elsewhere.”

The Doctor is glimpsed among his mulberry trees. The dark fruits disfigure the sward like contusions. He is at once aloof, timid, intolerant Of all banalities of village life, And yet is stupefied by loneliness. Continually he dreams of the company he craves for, But he challenges it and bores it to tears whenever It swims uncertainly into his narrow orbit. Meetings, however relished in their prospect, Seem only to be arrangements for departures. Exemplum: the spruce Captain and his vampire wife With her token fur hat and veil, like a bandage Extemporised by a bat. It seems that exercise Keeps the Captain’s horse in a permanent lather. The wife suffers from a disabling ennui. What more likely than a harmless liaison? At their first meeting the scenario is as obvious As a cheese. Her eyes, half-lidded, turn away, The cup lifted to her lips. The Captain has questions About the flooding of the water-meadow. A furious but undirected energy governs her soul, Listless as she seems on the surface. It is A libido on auto-destruct. Opportunities Occur, but the Doctor, in complacent rectitude, Bows himself off the stage of further meetings. He devotes himself to his patients. They, however, Begin to avoid him as if he has some dreadful disease. When the Captain is lost on the glacier, his horse Riderless, returning to graze on the bowling-green, The Doctor is suspected. It is most unfair. Meanwhile, his orphaned cousins go ahead With their threatened law-suit. At first he is amused. He meets their legal representative over A schnapps in the Bahnhof Buffet, and is compromised By the leather luggage of the absconding wife. He claims to have found a cure for the epidemic of goitres But only succeeds in killing two maids and a barley farmer. The Captain’s wife is staying at Interlaken With the Schoolmaster’s wastrel son. Her insane letters Are read out in court, evidence of the Doctor’s malpractice. Only his good old Nurse refuses to disbelieve him. On her death-bed she grips his fingers tightly And mutters inaudibly about the lost diaries. There is nothing now to prevent the red-haired cousins From taking complete control of his estate. The Doctor has lost everything and gained nothing. At the back of his mind there is still the slight hope That time will explain to him his crucial role. He becomes a cutter of peat, and realises That it is never quite easy enough to disappear.

"Give me some light!" cries Hamlet's uncle midway through the murder of Gonzago. "Light! Light!" cry scattering courtesans. Here, as in Denmark, it's dark at four, and even the moon shines with only half a heart. The ornaments go down into the box: the silver spaniel,My Darling on its collar, from Mother's childhood in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack my brother and I fought over, pulling limb from limb. Mother drew it together again with thread while I watched, feeling depraved at the age of ten. With something more than caution I handle them, and the lights, with their tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along from house to house, their pasteboard toy suitcases increasingly flimsy. Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop. By suppertime all that remains is the scent of balsam fir. If it's darkness we're having, let it be extravagant.

All right, I admit it: It was just a dream I had last night. I was trudging along a muddy path in a column of downcast men on the blackened outskirts of New York, the twilight dingy and ruined, the future without hope as we marched along in our soiled, proletarian rags. To my left was Mayakovsky, head shaved, and next to him his friend with gray beard and dark cap. "You've got to admit," Mayakovsky was saying, "that this is a pretty good way to write a poem." "Yes," I said, "the momentum is sustained by our walking forward, the desolate landscape seeps into every word, and you're free to say anything you want." "That's because we're inside the poem," he said, "not outside." Puddles of oily water gleamed dully beneath the low clouds. "That's why my poems were so big: there's more room inside." The hard line of his jaw flexed and the men dispersed. I followed his friend behind a wall to hear the poem go on in the lecture the friend was giving on history, but no, the real poem had finished. I went back to the spot where the poem had finished. Vladimir had left the poem.

—for Pilar Coover Me, when I think of you I see Alley cats in your kitchen, God weeping at your openings, Individual acts of imagination, never Culligan men under Floorboards slipping hallucinogens into your water. Let me say I have imagined you Undressing guests before mirrors To let their dragonfly bodies Escape from human shells.

People can ... read Braille with their lips and their tongue ... — David J. Linden, The Kojo Nnamdi Show Whitman is a foot-long sub of grass-fed beef, Falstaff, a fat onion ring, Ophelia, a wailing wine. Judas Iscariot’s kiss turns my lips against themselves. Emily D makes my tongue want to fly a kite. The tongues of angels, I cannot swallow.

What had you been thinking about the face studiously bloodied heaven blotted region I go on loving you like water but there is a terrible breath in the way all of this You were not elected president, yet won the race All the way through fog and drizzle When you read it was sincere the coasts stammered with unintentional villages the horse strains fatigued I guess . . . the calls . . . I worry the water beetle head why of course reflecting all then you redid you were breathing I thought going down to mail this of the kettle you jabbered as easily in the yard you come through but are incomparable the lovely tent mystery you don’t want surrounded the real you dance in the spring there was clouds The mulatress approached in the hall—the lettering easily visible along the edge of the Times in a moment the bell would ring but there was time for the carnation laughed here are a couple of “other” to one in yon house The doctor and Philip had come over the road Turning in toward the corner of the wall his hat on reading it carelessly as if to tell you your fears were justified the blood shifted you know those walls wind off the earth had made him shrink undeniably an oboe now the young were there there was candy to decide the sharp edge of the garment like a particular cry not intervening called the dog “he’s coming! he’s coming” with an emotion felt it sink into peace there was no turning back but the end was in sight he chose this moment to ask her in detail about her family and the others The person.   pleaded—“have more of these not stripes on the tunic—or the porch chairs will teach you about men—what it means” to be one in a million pink stripe and now could go away the three approached the doghouse the reef.   Your daughter’s dream of my son understand prejudice darkness in the hole the patient finished They could all go home now the hole was dark lilacs blowing across his face glad he brought you

After  Jean-Michel Basquiat Crows and more crows. One crow with a rat hanging from its beak, sloppy and beautiful. Another crow with its wings plucked empty. I wanted so much of today to be peaceful but the empty crow untethers something in me: a feral yearning for love or a love that is so full of  power, of  tenderness, the words fall to their knees begging for mercy like tulips in wind. I don’t wear the crown for the times power has tainted my body, but I can tell the difference between giving up and giving in. If  you can’t, ask the crow that watches me through the window, laughing as I drink my third bottle of wine. Ask the sound the tree makes when the crow has grown disgusted with my whining. After years of repression, I can come clean. I was a boy with a hole other boys stuffed themselves into. I have wanted nothing to do with blackness or laughter or my life. But about love, who owns the right, really? Who owns the crow who loves fresh meat or the crow who loves the vibration of its own throat? Everything around me is black for its own good, I suppose. The widow, the picture of the boy crying on the wall, the mirror with its taunting, the crows that belong to their scripture. Can you imagine being so tied to blackness that even your wings cannot help you escape? About my life, every needle, a small prayer. Every pill, a funeral hymn. I wanted the end several times but thought, Who owns this body, really? God? Dirt? The silly insects that will feast on my decay? Is it the boy who entered first or the boy who wanted everything to last?

Poetry, Wordsworth wrote, will have no easy time of it when the discriminating powers of the mind are so blunted that all voluntary exertion dies, and the general public is reduced to a state of near savage torpor, morose, stuporous, with no attention span whatsoever; nor will the tranquil rustling of the lyric, drowned out by the heavy, dull coagulation of persons in cities, where a uniformity of occupations breeds cravings for sensation which hourly visual communication of instant intelligence gratifies like crazy, likely survive this age.

What do you mean by rashes of ash? Is industry systematic work, assiduous activity, or ownership of factories? Is ripple agitate lightly? Are we tossed in tune when we write poems? And what or who emboss with gloss insignias of air? Is the Fabric about which you write in the epigraph of your poem an edifice, a symbol of heaven? Does freight refer to cargo of lading carried for pay by water, land or air? Or does it mean payment for such transportation? Or a freight train? When you say a commoded journey, do you mean a comfortable journey or a good train with well-equipped commodoties? But, then, why do you drop the ‘a’ before slumberous friend? And when you write, in “Why I Am Not a Christian” You always throw it down / But you never pick it up