1269 Arts and sciences poems

To say screw them, to be screw-them bent on one thing all but lost, one music or mystery, beyond all the necessary incidental snaggings of the heart; to train the whole soul’s beam on a solitary hill, or on it a special kind of rock or creeper; to be sated just by saxophone; to want nothing but your eyes lifelong to study Scottish otters: the snub, slippery-whiskered snout; the way they intertwine in threes at play, indistinguishably bound, long sleek backs submerging away... To make of this your being’s aim, its joy, and know by pulse and viscus the word joy. No gifts but thine to thyself: thou canst, if thou list, single out, make good, one wish. This from the dumb lips of an old god who with one endless, misty hand holds out to us too much to love, and with the other—crooked-fingered, crazed with veins—some nights and days.

for my father 1 When the thought came to him it was so simple he shook his head. People are always looking for kidneys when their kidneys go bad. But why wait? Why not look when you’re healthy? If two good kidneys do the trick, wouldn’t three do the job even better?

Some motionless conflict in the sky As of Milton’s angels painted there In all their radiance and red malice It is a special happiness and universal Simply to know the names of colors And to see them said She mixed the colors for house painters That was Binghamton Rochester Indianapolis I’ll take less luck if it means less stink she said A special happiness When clouds contest with clouds In fixed flamboyance Good versus Evil or beautiful cold hair God loosed angels on us and they are the air

‘That creep Tolstoy,’ she sobbed. ‘He. . . He. . . couldn’t even. . .’ Something about his brother dying. The serfs’ punishments have not ceased to suppurate on their backs. Woodlots. People. Someone crying under the yellow autumn birchgrove drove him wild: A new set of resolves: When gambling, that almost obsolete fever, or three days with the gypsies sparked him into pure ego, he could, just the same, write home, ‘Sell them.’ It’s true. ‘Still,’ (someone who loved her said, cold and firm while she dissolved, hypocrite, in self disgust,lectrice) ‘Still, he kept on. He wrote all that he wrote; and seems to have understood better than most of us: to be human isn’t easy. It’s not easy to be a serf or a master and learn that art. It takes nerve. Bastard. Fink. Yet the grief trudging behind his funeral, he earned.’

Untitled, from the Silueta series, 1980, by Ana Mendieta For Ana Mendieta Mud learns to live with mites, worms, beetles, and ticks. And Lioness digs up the earth where a warthog cowers in his den. You know you are loved when she tears you to bits, brittle thing. The lioness tongue softens you up all the way to her bottom. Roots, straw, weeds, rain your crown,hija de Ochun. Even Earth’s suffering arises from pangs of  love. When Lioness fangs diffuse the blood we call it liberation. Wax hisses from the smoldering wick, curtains you draw go shoosh. The last earth imprint you ever left on asphalt from thirty floors up. A shoe curved from the work your instep leaves behind. The breath of the lioness heats up your shoulders and your neck. A genetic photograph of every cell that ever lives exists in a lioness mouth. She tears into the riverbed and root hairs clog her claws. Ancient bacteria get all up in you. Control the fire and it burns deeper, flashing life into sleeping embers.

Columns, arches, vaults: how he knew The ways you promise what you lack; And that your bodies, like your souls, Always slip from our grasping hands. Space is such a lure . . . Swift to disappoint, As they raise and topple clouds, the sky's Architects still offer more than ours, Who only build a scaffolding of dreams. He dreamed, all the same; but on that day, He gave a better use to beauty's shapes: He understood that form means to die. And this, his final work, is a coin With both sides bare. He made in stone, Of this great room, the arrow and the bow.

1. INSIDE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A TREE Beautiful women in smoky blue culottes lying around on fluffy pink pillows beneath windows onto charming views, sea views, seasonal leaves and trees. Inside is outside and outside inside. Smell of saltwater swimming in the room. 2. OUTSIDE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A ROCKING CHAIR Shadow of lighthouse along the beach. Whales spotted every day lately though winter’s two months yet. The evening is as warm as an interior. Silverlight lagoonlight, snorkeling light. And a line of joggers against last light. Blue smoke snaking up the pink sky.

I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares. To make, you first have to create materials. Re: man , we know the rib removed. But,before— ? Forget ash to ash, dust & c. Stick a floating rib (i.e. thoracic 11–12, y’know — “Edenic”) in a glass of  water with the promise it’ll grow roots like leek or fur like chia. The joke’s Crusoe astride the bone or   Jim & Huck paddling rustic as a ballpoint pen will go. —Nn- o. (That’s not a plank

The cinema is a specific language. — Christian Metz What the body might guess, what the hand requests, what language assumes becomes amulet, which is to say I am carrying your face in a locket in a box to a virtual location guarded by kestrels, suggesting the scene’s geography of love and dirt, trees ripe with darkness and bones’ white luster. In the moonlit blue house, where snow won’t fall unless called upon, grace enters as requested, lands next to you, grasped, as if love were a reflex simple as weather.

There will be no edges, but curves. Clean lines pointing only forward. History, with its hard spine & dog-eared Corners, will be replaced with nuance, Just like the dinosaurs gave way To mounds and mounds of ice. Women will still be women, but The distinction will be empty. Sex, Having outlived every threat, will gratify Only the mind, which is where it will exist. For kicks, we'll dance for ourselves Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs. The oldest among us will recognize that glow— But the word sun will have been re-assigned To the Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device Found in households and nursing homes. And yes, we'll live to be much older, thanks To popular consensus. Weightless, unhinged, Eons from even our own moon, we'll drift In the haze of space, which will be, once And for all, scrutable and safe.