1269 Arts and sciences poems

Simonides, whose bitterness yoked art to memory stayed unimpressed with host and god alike. Suppose the dropped crust had occurred at your table, the tremor floored your rowdy hall of praise. Loss provokes economy: sound to scale, word to fee. Ghosts learn death from threnody.

VII Sing the song of the moment in careless carols, in the transient light of the day; Sing of the fleeting smiles that vanish and never look back; Sing of the flowers that bloom and fade without regret. Weave not in memory’s thread the days that would glide into nights. To the guests that must go bid God-speed, and wipe away all traces of their steps. Let the moments end in moments with their cargo of fugitive songs. With both hands snap the fetters you made with your own heart chords; Take to your breast with a smile what is easy and simple and near. Today is the festival of phantoms that know not when they die. Let your laughter flush in meaningless mirth like twinkles of light on the ripples; Let your life lightly dance on the verge of Time like a dew on the tip of a leaf. Strike in the chords of your harp the fitful murmurs of moments.

Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear; Much favoured in my birthplace, and no less In that beloved Vale to which, erelong, I was transplanted ... —WILLIAM WORDSWORTH , The Prelude He [the stable-boy] had a book of Orange rhymes, and the days when we read them together in the hay-loft gave me the pleasure of rhyme for the first time. Later on I can remember being told, when there was a rumour of a Fenian rising, that rifles were being handed out to the Orangemen; and presently, when I began to dream of my future life, I thought I would like to die fighting the Fenians. — W. B. YEATS , Autobiographies 1. The Ministry of Fear for Seamus Deane Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived In important places. The lonely scarp Of St Columb’s College, where I billeted For six years, overlooked your Bogside. I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack, The throttle of the hare. In the first week I was so homesick I couldn’t even eat The biscuits left to sweeten my exile. I threw them over the fence one night In September 1951 When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road Were amber in the fog. It was an act Of stealth. Then Belfast, and then Berkeley. Here’s two on’s are sophisticated, Dabbling in verses till they have become A life: from bulky envelopes arriving In vacation time to slim volumes Despatched `with the author’s compliments’. Those poems in longhand, ripped from the wire spine Of your exercise book, bewildered me— Vowels and ideas bandied free As the seed-pods blowing off our sycamores. I tried to write about the sycamores And innovated a South Derry rhyme With hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled. Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain Were walking, by God, all over the fine Lawns of elocution. Have our accents Changed? ‘Catholics, in general, don’t speak As well as students from the Protestant schools.’ Remember that stuff? Inferiority Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on. ‘What’s your name, Heaney?’ ‘Heaney, Father.’ ‘Fair Enough.’ On my first day, the leather strap Went epileptic in the Big Study, Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads, But I still wrote home that a boarder’s life Was not so bad, shying as usual. On long vacations, then, I came to life In the kissing seat of an Austin 16 Parked at a gable, the engine running, My fingers tight as ivy on her shoulders, A light left burning for her in the kitchen. And heading back for home, the summer’s Freedom dwindling night by night, the air All moonlight and a scent of hay, policemen Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing The muzzle of a Sten gun in my eye: ‘What’s your name, driver?’ ‘Seamus ...’ Seamus? They once read my letters at a roadblock And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics, ‘Svelte dictions’ in a very florid hand. Ulster was British, but with no rights on The English lyric: all around us, though We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear. 2. A Constable Calls His bicycle stood at the window-sill, The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher Skirting the front mudguard, Its fat black handlegrips Heating in sunlight, the ‘spud’ Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back, The pedal treads hanging relieved Of the boot of the law. His cap was upside down On the floor, next his chair. The line of its pressure ran like a bevel In his slightly sweating hair. He had unstrapped The heavy ledger, and my father Was making tillage returns In acres, roods, and perches. Arithmetic and fear. I sat staring at the polished holster With its buttoned flap, the braid cord Looped into the revolver butt. ‘Any other root crops? Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?’ ‘No.’ But was there not a line Of turnips where the seed ran out In the potato field? I assumed Small guilts and sat Imagining the black hole in the barracks. He stood up, shifted the baton-case Farther round on his belt, Closed the domesday book, Fitted his cap back with two hands, And looked at me as he said goodbye. A shadow bobbed in the window. He was snapping the carrier spring Over the ledger. His boot pushed off And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked. 3. Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966 The lambeg balloons at his belly, weighs Him back on his haunches, lodging thunder Grossly there between his chin and his knees. He is raised up by what he buckles under. Each arm extended by a seasoned rod, He parades behind it. And though the drummers Are granted passage through the nodding crowd, It is the drums preside, like giant tumours. To every cocked ear, expert in its greed, His battered signature subscribes ‘No Pope’. The goatskin’s sometimes plastered with his blood. The air is pounding like a stethoscope. 4. Summer 1969 While the Constabulary covered the mob Firing into the Falls, I was suffering Only the bullying sun of Madrid. Each afternoon, in the casserole heat Of the flat, as I sweated my way through The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket Rose like the reek off a flax-dam. At night on the balcony, gules of wine, A sense of children in their dark corners, Old women in black shawls near open windows, The air a canyon rivering in Spanish. We talked our way home over starlit plains Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters. ‘Go back,’ one said, ‘try to touch the people.’ Another conjured Lorca from his hill. We sat through death-counts and bullfight reports On the television, celebrities Arrived from where the real thing still happened. I retreated to the cool of the Prado. Goya’s ‘Shootings of the Third of May’ Covered a wall—the thrown-up arms And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted And knapsacked military, the efficient Rake of the fusillade. In the next room, His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall— Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn Jewelled in the blood of his own children, Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips Over the world. Also, that holmgang Where two berserks club each other to death For honour’s sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking. He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished The stained cape of his heart as history charged. 5. Fosterage for Michael McLaverty ‘Description is revelation!’ Royal Avenue, Belfast, 1962, A Saturday afternoon, glad to meet Me, newly cubbed in language, he gripped My elbow. ‘Listen. Go your own way. Do your own work. Remember Katherine Mansfield—I will tell How the laundry basket squeaked

In memory of John Ashbery (1927–2017) A girl moaning:I don’t understand “Wave.”

1. The ice hook untwists inside the whirlwind like a tail. A raven’s rib ripped from the electric socket heats the palm, its rusted core bound by the apple’s shaven hide. Like a concussion cushioned between fingertips— egg batter congeals in cracks of concrete. The fourth generation of bees flee the unlocked mouth. The stoplight blinks midway between wing, beak, and worm unwinding inside braided corn husk, pulsing near the foot of the interrogator as he slams the gate shut. The interrogator, Every atom belonging to him, says: You there—hook and worm, you there—carved pebbles tucked under the glacier, your apathy grows like gray hair in these untied shoes. The tundra’s anvil and spine are flung back into the quarried pockets of the pilgrim. The “safe feeling” blossoms next to the caged wren. Motor oil trickles from the harpooned log. The Milky Way backbones the nervous system of the stream the deer sips. This is where I broke the ice, broke the sun’s neck, and the city raised its sunflower above a pond of gathered lice. The storm took care of it! Reached down, hammered them flat. Walls erected, stoned down, down, and as we fled, we unbraided our hair from the fan belt of the exhumed engine. One twin kissed the other in the uncovered wagon. 2. We watched them unravel from their neckties, and took the shape of rain clouds blotting out the noon sun. In their houses— The long night gloved the mist inside our gills. And I stained the plaques clean, memorized each brick flung from the window, while roosters crowed the grip loose. Who made them leap from shelves unnamed? Made them buckle down low, pulled out by their tails from between each lie cupped inside another one? A spear was driven into it— Underneath the pilgrim’s skirt: the skyline of a missing tooth.

Henri Rouseeau, 1897 In the heat of her dream, she hears The iron kettle boiling, its scuttle and hum As hurried as hoofbeats across a plain. She drops in two guinea hens. Dancing In a ring round her skirts, the children Cheer, “Auntie, the English song!”  Lifting Her lute, she sings of the cat and the fiddle, The cow jumping over the moon.  How the little Ones hoot when the dish runs away With the spoon.  Ah, spoon — an uncloaked Lute, it waits to be strummed. The temptation of London, of Paris, Of bumping along in the carriage with M. Philippe In his top hat and greatcoat to visit The peacocks, turquoise and gold and green, each Roaming the Bois de Boulogne with one hundred eyes. She sleeps in the desert, under a smiling full moon That shines in the teal night. Quiet behind her, A lion stands, tail erect, having sniffed At her onyx flesh, at the ribbony stripes His color-blindness darkens on her muslin dress, All rainbow hues. She is lost in a dream, Always happiest out of doors, without shoes.

I have to leave early in the dark and hungry to avoid crossing the snow as the noon burns the crust into an un-servable lake slush instead of the crisp bridge that would be in order to get me over the ridge My journal is already laundered clean of my words and my instructions have dissolved into a white mash a washed bone ball rolled into itself of all I have in the world in my pocket The ink is thin the paper is poor my eyes balance on the pale words around which a stream flows almost erasing the way across the idea Shadows the black flowers of the light self -sowing through the trees dark gardens of midnight for the gray-white morning hour of blindness in print miles before I am to arrive here To approach the waiting milestone dims whatever else of its lantern ‘til only the placed light there is on me. In this light barely but used to it I can make out the staggered columns of my account as if back through weren’t the real distance: the thin chest flag pinned on by each ridge the titled introduction taking your coat each storm. My letters and ribbons have been the natural— strengths on their way to the more— natural weaknesses— and loss. yet— I wonder where I thought I was going— to ’ ve done what you must pass examinations for before I took any.

Tip their mouths open to the sky. Turquoise, amber, the deep green with fluted handle, pitcher the size of two thumbs, tiny lip and graceful waist. Here we place the smallest flower which could have lived invisibly in loose soil beside the road, sprig of succulent rosemary, bowing mint. They grow deeper in the center of the table. Here we entrust the small life, thread, fragment, breath. And it bends. It waits all day. As the bread cools and the children open their gray copybooks to shape the letter that looks like a chimney rising out of a house. And what do the headlines say? Nothing of the smaller petal perfectly arranged inside the larger petal or the way tinted glass filters light. Men and boys, praying when they died, fall out of their skins. The whole alphabet of living, heads and tails of words, sentences, the way they said, “Ya’Allah!” when astonished, or “ya’ani” for “I mean”— a crushed glass under the feet still shines. But the child of Hebron sleeps with the thud of her brothers falling and the long sorrow of the color red.

They have left behind the established cave with its well-worn floor. Scholarship impels them in hundreds, but generally one by one, to find an unknown passage or scrape out their own. Proto-Semitic linguistic theory, Hittite stratigraphic anomalies, microclimatic economics. "What do you see?" invisible followers ask in their ears, and they whisper "Wonderful things" as they quarry a grain of rock at a time, or examine a fleck of ore, or measure the acidity of a trickle of water. See! Behold! Look! Lo! they cry in season, rapt, in love, chipping away with their pocketknives, pencils, rulers, fingernails, but some have tunneled so narrowly and deep that those behind see nothing but slivers of light around an excavator's haunches. A battered piece of a tablet is all that remains of the so-called Singer of Nab. Circa 1200 BCE, he impressed, or had impressed, some words in clay. He may have composed a religious hymn, praise to the king, a poem of love, an inventory of cattle. (He may have been she, but this is unlikely.) The lines we have could be the beginning or the middle; there may have been ten more, or hundreds. The word before this gap, in fact, means "hundreds." Hundreds led in battle, hundreds slain? A thousand times beloved, nine hundred sheep? And the standard translation of this word, here, is either "desire" or "need." But did he write of a boundless yearning, or mercantile requirements? Was he a "singer"? The scholars who care disagree. Look at them, crouched in a long tunnel dug by means of argument over an antique syntax, warming their hands at a chunk of brick baked maybe in the time of the Trojan War, broken some moment between then and now— peering at it with penlights, squandering eyesight. They know they may crawl out hungry, mumbling, aged and gray, clutching a secret message of small import or nothing, nothing. They seem lost. They seem happy.

Afterward, to tell how it was possible to identify absolute space, a matter of great difficulty, keeping in mind always that not all old music is beautiful and therefore it’s necessary to choose. Ice loading and unloading as the ice caps wax and wither. Brutal and uncouth from the beginning even unto time, space, place, motion. How are we to obtain true motion? I predict a fiasco—and a fiasco with catcalls. Wind circulation in the case of plants, predators in the case of animals, affecting their distribution on the ancient land masses. And who will conduct the chorus and orchestra? Many things exist at once. Predilection and preference. Begin with the storm. A very agile, beautiful voice. With tremendous temperament. The earth’s magnetic field weakening. Even the princess is drawn into the violence of the action, extremes of joy, mad ravings, almost requiring the conventions of opera. Thus, thus; we parted, thus to meet again. Thus in a ship, under sail, since the sun itself is moving, supposing Infinite Space to be (as it were) Sensorium of the Omnipresent. Reduced to a few feet of ground, we begin with great delight to plant a garden. The Czar is in that garden. Quiet eruptions, safe enough to attract tourists. We suppose other bodies annihilated. Upon any conditions supposed, taught to describe accurately, I detest everything that smells of theory. If we look at similar coral reefs, the past location of the same precise environment can be traced. But there the comparison breaks. And from these relative motions will arise the relative motion of a body on the earth.