1269 Arts and sciences poems

Then it was the future, though what’s arrived isn’t what we had in mind, all chrome and cybernetics, when we set up exhibits in the cafeteria for the judges to review what we’d made of our hypotheses. The class skeptic (he later refused to sign anyone’s yearbook, calling it a sentimental degradation of language) chloroformed mice, weighing the bodies before and after to catch the weight of the soul, wanting to prove the invisible real as a bagful of nails. A girl who knew it all made cookies from euglena, a one-celled compromise between animal and plant, she had cultured in a flask. We’re smart enough, she concluded, to survive our mistakes, showing photos of farmland, poisoned, gouged, eroded. No one believed he really had built it when a kid no one knew showed up with an atom smasher, confirming that the tiniest particles could be changed into something even harder to break. And one whose mother had cancer (hard to admit now, it was me) distilled the tar of cigarettes to paint it on the backs of shaven mice. She wanted to know what it took, a little vial of sure malignancy, to prove a daily intake smaller than a single aspirin could finish something as large as a life. I thought of this because, today, the dusky seaside sparrow became extinct. It may never be as famous as the pterodactyl or the dodo, but the last one died today, a resident of Walt Disney World where now its tissue samples lie frozen, in case someday we learn to clone one from a few cells. Like those instant dinosaurs that come in a gelatin capsule—just add water and they inflate. One other thing this brings to mind. The euglena girl won first prize both for science and, I think, in retrospect, for hope.

Just now I touched my chest And felt my heart quivering there. This must be one of the bad times. I think it is quivering with remorse And exhaustion. Once I saw a heart Beating in a documentary. I was a very Little girl and the sight disgusted me. Throbbing and not stopping my heart betrays Me and yet remains sure and true, a thing Of nature. Earth bleeding Its guts out on the sea floor exhausts Me with remorse and shame, and yet I have to trust it As wealth is proven by how terribly it devastates Itself, and I am but one symptom among billions of the wealth Of Earth. A tired feeling that is recuperated by a passing spaceship Or an infinitude like fame but more universal. I will have to miss you Earth; I miss you already. And yet when I touch myself whom I should Not trust it is still only the heaviest and most jealous feelings that bind me to you, like blood.

Of course I chose the terry cloth surrogate. Milkless artifice. False idol. Everyone, I’m told, has a mother, but Master bred me in a laboratory, his colony of orphans. Rhesus macaque.Macaca mulatta. Old World monkeys, my matriarchs ruled the grasslands and forests long before white men like him weaned their whiteness and maleness from our chromosomes, slashed and burned our home, what they once called The Orient. French Indochina. Việt Nam. Master, like a good despot, besotted and dumbstruck, dying to discern the genesis of allegiance, the science of love and loss, nature versus nurture, segregated me at birth from my maker, pelt sopping with placental blood. In a chamber where he kept track of me, his pupils recorded my every movement, my every utterance, hoping I might evince to them a part of themselves. But I wasn’t stupid. I knew famine and emaciation, and nevertheless I picked that lifeless piece of shit because it was soft to hold. Who wouldn’t want that? Though it couldn’t hold me, I clung to the yellow-face devil as though it was my true mother and I grasped the function of motherhood: witness to my suffering, companion in hell. Unlike infants with wire mothers I didn’t hurl myself on the floor in terror or tantrum, rocking back and forth, colder than a corpse. I had what Master believed to be a psychological base of operations. Emotional attachment. Autonomy. Everything he denied and did to me, his ceaseless cruelty concealed as inquisition, unthinkable until it was thought, I endured by keeping for myself the wisdom he yearned to discover and take credit for. Love, like me, is a beast no master can maim, no dungeon can discipline. Love is at once master and dungeon. So don’t underestimate me. Simple- minded and subservient as I might appear to be, I gathered more about Master than he did about me, which, I guess, is a kind of fidelity conceived not from fondness but fear magnified by fascination. Master made me his terry cloth surrogate, his red-clawed god, nursing his id on my tits, and for that, I pitied him. All this time he was the animal. All this time he belonged to me.

Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound; A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound; With it Camöens soothed an exile's grief; The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp, It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew Soul-animating strains—alas, too few!

1 On a wall shadowed by lights from the distance is the screen. Icons come to it dressed in capes and their eyes reflect the journeys their nomadic eyes reach from level earth. Narratives are in the room where the screen waits suspended like the frame of a girder the worker will place upon an axis and thus make a frame which he fills with a plot or a quarter inch of poetry to encourage nature into his building and the tree leaning against it, the tree casting language upon the screen. 2 The telephone is Flaubert’s parrot and it flitters from perch to perch across the city. Or someone is holding the dead thing in her hand in a remote hotel. A sensitive person with a disability who speaks to the inanimate. She may even resemble Louise Colet or the helpful niece. She hasn’t sent her meaning and I am absent in these reminiscences of her. The telephone is the guignol of messages. It may have been cold moving down from roofs, a continental wind caught between buildings. Leaves and pollen blowing onto fire escapes. Windstruck hambones lying in a gutter. Equinoc- tial changes the body knows, the hand feels, the truck passes without notice and buildings con- tinue their nervous commitments. The earth may have been moaning underneath this junk. I am caught in the wind’s draft. 3 At night viewing the screen of distance with shadowy icons framed by light I understood the rasping interior was rearing other icons, No longer gentle they flashed ripened clauses, or images raised formidable projections of ice, the wall was placed in a temporary position where words glittered from a dark cover, Narcissism lived in a silver hut. 4 In the lighter time of year words arrived concealed in branches. Flaubert exchanged himself for words, night became a night of words and a journey a journey of words, and so on. Words became “a superior joke”, I trembled under a revolutionary weight, a coward fleeing from a cloud. The ego of words stretched to the room’s borders assuming the sonorous movement of a poem. 5 I entice this novice poem with a mineral,Beryl. The dictionary bestows on Beryl a skittish description, like a sequence in which a car moves over ruptured roads and slices into ghost veins of color— a camera follows each turn, examines the exits where rock protects a visionary tool that prods it:— “A light greenish blue that is bluer and deeper than average aqua, greener than robin’s eggs blue, bluer and paler than turquoise blue and greener and deeper than beryl blue—a light greenish blue that is bluer and paler than beryl or average turquoise blue— bluer and slightly paler than aqua.”

I sit here in a shelter behind the words Of what I’m writing, looking out as if Through a dim curtain of rain, that keeps me in here. The words are like a scrim upon a page, Obscuring what might be there beyond the scrim. I can dimly see there’s something or someone there. But I can’t tell if it’s God, or one of his angels, Or the past, or future, or who it is I love, My mother or father lost, or my lost sister, Or my wife lost when I was too late to get there, I only know that there’s something, or somebody, there. Tell me your name. How was it that I knew you?

Chekhov, at Yalta A winter evening at the cottage by the bay, And I sat in the black and gold of the dead garden Wrapped in blankets, eating my sister’s suet pudding. The fountain was wrapped in dirty straw and Just below my property in the old Tartar cemetery There was a small funeral in progress: the widow Is wearing a purple shawl, the children are bare around The shoulders and the girls are wearing orange petals At their throats. The ashen white beards of the men Are like immaculate vests from this distance. There is nothing more intolerable than suet pudding, Unless it is the visitors. The drunken visitors laughing In my kitchen, eating my duck and venison, while I hide From them here in the dark garden. The daughter of one of these gentlemen is pretty. I saw her through the window drinking Champagne from a clay mug—just under her thin blouse I saw the blue points of her breasts that turn, In opposition, both out and up like the azure slippers Of the priest who is now singing in the cemetery below my house. Once the family has gone off with its torches I’ll Climb down to the fresh grave and drop some coins For flowers, even wooden teeth for the widow so she can Attract a new husband? The black, turned soil Or our garden reminds me Of the common grave given to the children Of the Godunov Orphanage after that horrible fire: A charred horse was thrown in with them, Bags of lime, and what I understood to be a large ham That the authorities, nevertheless, declared The torso of a male child of nine or ten. The Czar, In their memory, placed a tiny trout pond over them And this inscription:A blue blanket for my little ones. My wife goes nearly naked to parties in Moscow. My sister here, at Yalta, goes sea bathing with a rope Around her that runs back to the beach where it is Attached to a donkey who is commanded by a servant With a long switch. The sea tows her out and then the donkey is whipped Sorrowfully until he has dragged her back to them. I named the donkey, Moon, after the mystery of his service To my sister. This winter He has been an excellent friend. I read to this poor beast from Three Sisters. He is a better Critic and audience than I could find in the cities. I have won an Award that will save me from arrest anywhere Inside Russia. I am going to refuse it! And then travel To Nice or Paris. My tuberculosis is worse. Tolstoi reads my stories To his family after supper. And reads them badly, I suppose! I did walk that evening all the way down to the cemetery Only to discover that my pockets were empty. I screamed up to the house for coins, for plenty Of coins! The visitors, laughing and singing, ran down To me without coats and with a lantern swinging— My sister trailed behind them On her donkey. Her square black hat Bobbing like a steamer way out in the bay. And when they reached me— I said, “Sister, pack the trunks! You hurt me! I will write that we have departed for France, for Italy.”

Poetry? It’s a hobby. I run model trains. Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons. It’s not work. You dont sweat. Nobody pays for it. You could advertise soap. Art, that’s opera; or repertory— The Desert Song. Nancy was in the chorus. But to ask for twelve pounds a week— married, aren’t you?— you’ve got a nerve. How could I look a bus conductor in the face if I paid you twelve pounds? Who says it’s poetry, anyhow? My ten year old can do it and rhyme. I get three thousand and expenses, a car, vouchers, but I’m an accountant. They do what I tell them, my company. What do you do? Nasty little words, nasty long words, it’s unhealthy. I want to wash when I meet a poet. They’re Reds, addicts, all delinquents. What you write is rot. Mr Hines says so, and he’s a schoolteacher, he ought to know. Go and find work.

1862: Dante Gabriel Rossetti buried his young wife Elizabeth Rossetti with a sheaf of his unpublished poems. . . . and then of course the weeping: some demurely, some flamboyantly. Those elegiac tears, if shed enough, will alter a face and the person behind the face. We all know that erosion is a mighty thing, and even—for example— the seemingly permanent, hard-black Mississippi banks undo and slip south. In a sense, the delta at New Orleans—the land gone silt, and rebuilt— is the Mississippi’s second thought. “My pet, your wiles have altered my earlier obstinacy, and the vision of you in your luxury stateroom beckons; I shall join you for your voyage on the Gigantic —what? oh. Titanic”—is a tragic second thought. A happy one: when Skyler and I decided to try again to “save the marriage.” Now we’re lazing in a pour of Sunday morning light as orangely voluptuous as marmalade. A simile’s a first thought, then an equaled next. She slips back into sleep, and now I’m reading about the night that shady London dandy Charles Augustus Howell (1869) unshoveled the grave at Highgate, broke the coffin, and looted her bone breast of “the book in question, bound in rough gray calf, and with red edges to the leaves,” on eager orders from Rossetti —who’d had second thoughts in seven years, desiring to publish now a volume of his verses (1870, Poems ). Lizzie’s death-stenched pages were saturated with disinfectant by a medical practitioner “who is drying them leaf by leaf”—and then they joined the world of woven radish baskets, bobbered fishing skeins, and god dolls in their second life as art on a museum wall; a world where the “conversion pool” saw swimmers step in white robes from its farther end, reborn to new religion; and the lumbering land animals said no , and gave up legs, and so their legs rolled up like stored-away and useless rugs inside them, and they returned to the waters, and birthed and breached in the waters, and made the waters their orchestral glory, and spouted out their great Ionic columns of air and water in the touch of the changing mind of Earth, that’s sunlit at times and at other times darkened.

(MODERN MACHINERY) We were taken from the ore-bed and the mine, We were melted in the furnace and the pit— We were cast and wrought and hammered to design, We were cut and filed and tooled and gauged to fit. Some water, coal, and oil is all we ask, And a thousandth of an inch to give us play: And now, if you will set us to our task, We will serve you four and twenty hours a day! We can pull and haul and push and lift and drive, We can print and plough and weave and heat and light, We can run and race and swim and fly and dive, We can see and hear and count and read and write! Would you call a friend from half across the world? If you’ll let us have his name and town and state, You shall see and hear your crackling question hurled Across the arch of heaven while you wait. Has he answered? Does he need you at his side? You can start this very evening if you choose, And take the Western Ocean in the stride Of seventy thousand horses and some screws! The boat-express is waiting your command! You will find the Mauretania at the quay, Till her captain turns the lever ’neath his hand, And the monstrous nine-decked city goes to sea. Do you wish to make the mountains bare their head And lay their new-cut forests at your feet? Do you want to turn a river in its bed, Or plant a barren wilderness with wheat? Shall we pipe aloft and bring you water down From the never-failing cisterns of the snows, To work the mills and tramways in your town, And irrigate your orchards as it flows? It is easy! Give us dynamite and drills! Watch the iron-shouldered rocks lie down and quake As the thirsty desert-level floods and fills, And the valley we have dammed becomes a lake. But remember, please, the Law by which we live, We are not built to comprehend a lie, We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die! We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings— Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!- Our touch can alter all created things, We are everything on earth—except The Gods! Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes, It will vanish and the stars will shine again, Because, for all our power and weight and size, We are nothing more than children of your brain!