1269 Arts and sciences poems

I would be A painter with words Creating sharp portraits On the wide canvas of your mind Images of those things Shaped through my eyes That interest me; But being a Tenth American In this democracy I sometimes sketch a miniature Though I contract for a mural. Of course You understand this democracy; One man as good as another, From log cabin to White House, Poor boy to corporation president, Hoover and Browder with one vote each, A free country, Complete equality— Yeah— And the rich get tax refunds, The poor get relief checks. As for myself I pay five cents for a daily synopsis of current history, Two bits and the late lowdown on Hollywood, Twist a dial for Stardust or Shostakovich, And with each bleacher stub I reserve the right to shout “kill the bum” at the umpire— Wherefore am I different From nine other Americans? But listen, you Don’t worry about me I rate! I’m Convert 4711 at Beulah Baptist Church, I’m Social Security No. 337-16-3458 in Washington, Thank you Mister God and Mister Roosevelt! And another thing:— No matter what happens I too can always call in a policeman!

Paul lost his footing, turned out a spectacular corkscrew. It looked like he was acting out a series of renga in the air. The general theme was prevenient grace. But the white rim broke his form, and he hit the bathtub water like a big charred bough of a tree. A semicircle of his shoes—Oxfords, monk straps, bluchers, a lone boot—crowded in to get a look. After that, Morphy was only surface. You can look into anything and see what you want. For example, Pierre swore he could read stock returns in the little channels of Morphy’s pruned thumbs. He even called in Schiaparelli’s niece. She entered with a shoe on her head, I swear. There are pictures, look it up. My uncle, my unfortunate uncle, says the whole event—Morphy in the tub—looked floral, with shoe petals. Just to be difficult, I said “saucer of milk”: a teacup on a dish, alone in the quiet, waiting for a cougar to come by. I always bank on something parched and ambling to make my point. Or else something with a broken heel, covered in wet newspaper and huddled up next to the highway. All thumbs.

for Sophie Hawkes I (Weapons) doubled corners of the situation the words duped by this dialectic know the pose of “brushing against” insistence on detail severe eyelashes the weapons must be kept in order (take the game of courtesy of charm) her knees crossed over the manner of his undressing her a chord (deceptively resonant) a strength of image but scanty provisions interrupt her concerns for doors into sleep focuses the story can be carried in two hands finale: I have turned on with shifting strands of light

Ain’t nothing more beautiful than a French diplomat in an Italian suit discussing the intimate ties between poetry and constipation with a United States Senator in a discount blazer from the Men’s Wearhouse bought especially for the occasion of proposing the Anti-Chimera Act, a prime indicator that if children were once the future, they are not the past, which is growing hairier every moment, so as to keep us from penetrating its insides, which we must nibble on as if nibbling on donuts, by which I mean rubrics, glittering rubrics in the dry heat of an empty test bank full of raccoons with flexible snouts and long tails that materialize in the shrubbery as thick-set stocky fraternity brothers suicide bomb colleges full of free thinking mavericks with tuning forks in their ears and rubber dicks in their pockets, a veritable cure for loneliness and its side effects, including the desire to fantasize about mythological genitalia in the pants of pundits who declare that to be alive is fundamentally okay as long as poets test their verses on guinea pigs before submitting them to us humans as we exit the amalgamated marshland of surplus value and enter an ordinary evening on which ordinary people dream of lubricated condoms for dogs, of mules who practice the pull-out method, of birth control pills for cats, of floating trousers that haunt city squares in search of red-walled boutiques where silk stockings and boot-cut chinos fight for the attention of disembodied legs while merchants masturbate, aroused by visions of painless castration, aroused by hands without arms scribbling conjunctions into dusty ceilings, aroused by hands without arms stirring infinite bowls of soup, aroused by module-makers who insist only on the metaphorical value of money as represented in the hieroglyphics painted on the walls of financiers who accumulate capital through the unjustified sexual behavior of adulterous women who appear asymmetrically—legs over heads, hands coming out of butts—in public ceremonies in which syringes suck out erroneous feelings from their bodies while suits and ties stuff bones and ears into decorative bottles and jars.

After Don McKay I crawl back       he unpacks his tools oils the wooden handles        rinses the metal fragrant       his thighs fragrant his sneer koi & eternity inked on his skin          an ecstatic blue a bewildered green some wounds are ovals some wounds are opals the ears of a white wolf pivot        toward the moon I flee now & then         alone in the desert for months a nomad in a kimono of pressed-together dust beautiful his throat his words         even more beautiful “it’s my turn to ask for a bit more from you” he likes it when I bleed         strangers once gently he hammers gold into a sentence       gently the sentence enters me

The light has traveled unthinkable thousands of miles to be condensed, recharged, and poured off the white white pages of an open Bible the country parson holds in front of this couple in a field, in July, in the sap and the flyswirl of July in upper Wisconsin, where their vows buzz in a ring in the air like the flies, and are as sweet as the sap, in these rich and ritual minutes. Is it sentimental? Oops. And out of that Bible the light continues to rush as if from a faucet. There will be a piecrust cooling out of its own few x’ed-out cuts. And will it make us run for the picklier taste of irony rolled around protectively on our tongues like a grab of Greek olives? My students and I discuss this slippery phenomenon. Does “context” matter? Does “earned” count? If a balled-up fidget of snakes in the underbrush dies in a freeze is it sentimental? No, yes, maybe. What if a litter of cocker spaniels? What if we called them “puppydogs” in the same poem in that same hard, hammering winter? When my father was buried, the gray snow in the cemetery was sheet tin. If I said that? Yes, no, what does “tone” or “history” do to the Hollywood hack violinists who patiently wait to play the taut nerves of the closest human body until from that lush cue alone, the eyes swell moistly, and the griefs we warehouse daily take advantage of this thinning of our systems, then the first sloppy gushes begin . . . Is that “wrong”? Did I tell you the breaths of the gravediggers puffed out like factorysmoke as they bent and straightened, bent and straightened, mechanically? Are wise old (toothless) Black blues singers sentimental?—“gran’ma”? “country cookin’”? But they have their validity, don't they, yes? their sweat-in-the-creases, picking up the lighting in a fine-lined mesh of what it means to have gone through time alive a little bit on this planet. Hands shoot up . . . opinions . . . questions . . . What if the sun wept? the moon? Why, in the face of those open faces, are we so squeamish? Call out the crippled girl and her only friend the up-for-sale foal, and let her tootle her woeful pennywhistle musics. What if some chichi streetwise junkass from the demimonde gave forth with the story of orphans forced through howling storm to the workhouse, letting it swing between the icy-blue quotation marks of cynicism—then? What if I wept? What if I simply put the page down, rocked my head in my own folded elbows, forgot the rest of it all, and wept? What if I stepped into the light of that page, a burnished and uncompromising light, and walked back up to his stone a final time, just that, no drama, and it was so cold, and the air was so brittle, metal buckled out song like a bandsaw, and there, from inside me, where they’d been lost in shame and sophistry all these years now, every last one of my childhood’s heartwormed puppydogs found its natural voice.

Such pejorative deformities of sound Without meaningful speech or musical equipoise, Annoyances none but

Charles Olson wrote, "You can work on the life, or you can work on the work; you can't do both." How can we separate the two? Why would we want to? Denise Newman Elsewhere as internal. A journal a journey. Not geographical, conquering or colonizing. One is always outside. Even this is a distance. The enclosure is temporary, temporal, a noticing. A space interior, represented by room or book.Diurnal — a journal. Small volume containing the services for the little, or day, hours. An exquisite butterfly, as distinguished from a moth. Day after day extinguished and preserved. Distance measured in days, ending in death, or when the book is full. Her notebooks. I want to tell you about this. (You?) To listen secretly to what is said. "The men's tongues are jewels.” The women's ears are jewels. Her husband is described in sovereign terms. Her primary role is hostess. Going out into the world is a matter what is the matter of ominous glimpses No indicators, distinctions of time, in this over and over. The antistrophe is the catastrophe. Route in day. In a given day, whatever is done. From one place to another, whether distant or near. A passage through life, a passage written, epic remains in a room, the female tribe questing. The self-reflections, abruptions, eruptions, the thinking going only so far as it will, ending in midair — or much further than it needs to Travel, because it reveals? Ravels?Ravel itself ambiguous, to ravel and unravel the same and sharing opposite meanings — "to let fall into a tangled mass; to separate or undo the texture of." Tangled and separate. "Hence to entangle, make intricate, involve; Hence to disentangle, make plain." Traveling one sees connection and mystery. One sees? Sightings/sitings. As though there's a hope one could situate, identify, locate. Claim. The first to sight land. If you see it, it is yours. Her slides and the scribbled notes on her typed accompaniment — which accompanied which? (The notion of forefronting she attempts to subvert.) Small chapters, various and repetitive (cumulative, cyclical, consequential, or in-). Typography gives way. The "central" fiction is perhaps hers, yet is continually disrupted. (This word whose connotations I don’t entirely or exclusively intend or negate.) The intimate distance of telephoto lens — The attempt at both. Objectivity without imposing pattern. She "eavesdropping" (a hearing and house word) on her neighbors. Slides of a wounded man, windowed woman. They were without narrative, yet we imposed narrative. We couldn't stay distanced or objective watching — was this a failure — wanting to see what would happen. The new earrings (which otherwise seem an anomaly, not connecting as the other slides connect private with public) — But what more intimate than the jeweled ear, what more public — The point of connection— We hear. The ornamented ear. Up close, a whisper. A construct more complex and inclusive. "Evidence," noticings, of equal value. There is a large painting behind her projector, someone else's artwork — it mirrors the images in her slides — a scarred man, the musical staves of telephone lines traversing empty skies, a house with a vacant window (the woman has left to answer the phone, hoping it is the man, that he is safe). When this painting is pointed out (I point it out) she says, "That's the way life is." The repetitions — not even realizing they’re the same revelations. Accretions and accumulations, if one learns at all it is “eventually.” Journal entries as openings. Misspelling: “entires.” Begin to read The New York Times again — thus the world enters. I did start reading the paper. Manic, middle of the night, on chemo. Moon face, legs that would no longer hold me, fingers that could not cut or turn or grasp. I read. Obsessed with news of a world I was not in. My doctor said, "Give it an hour a day. Limit it." But the prednesone hallucination in my brain, every time I closed my eyes, looked like an explosion, an atom bomb, repeating, ceaselessly. My atoms. I read about Chernobyl. I ate the words. The poisoned milk, the vegetables. My skin was scarred, burned from the inside, red on the surface from treatment that charred my cells. Doctors from my hospital flew there, trying to save lives. Half my head was bald, overnight. Toxic, waste. Waist-length hair covered the bald spot for awhile, till it too fell out in handfuls. My face a moon. My hair no halo. My face a plate. White and pasty, red from exertion which was nothing at all, red from staying awake. Red from burning. Red from sweats, leaning forward and watching it rain on the newspapers . . . The short and the long of it. Containing and erasing all history in this present moment. Every sentence could be threaded together, shuffled direct connections. Integration without the abyss? The world's madness and disintegration do not cause madness and disintegration The blurring disregard of boundaries The water which falls in drops from the eaves of a house. To stand under the eaves, as to listen and learn what is said within doors: "It is beautiful and we are just beginning to recover from it."

Camille Corot's painting, stolen from the Louvre, May 1998 It might have always been meant that they walked completely away, this man on horse, woman with basket. With their backs to us and the painter, they are so private. But like those stories where children step right into a picture and, looking over their shoulders, see the consoling frame, these two would know the way home like the palms of their hands, the routine so ordinary it most encloses, no need for thought, only motion and the full sensation of sun on your flesh, along the usual road.

Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill, Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty, Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea, Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place, Spares but the cloudy border of his base To the foil'd searching of mortality; And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure, Didst tread on earth unguess'd at.—Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.