1269 Arts and sciences poems

A question posed to Flannery O'Connor, as to whether writing programs stifled writers, drew the famous, tart rejoinder that in her opinion they didn't stifle nearly enough. Even if, as it is often said, there are too many of us—poets, that is—that the field is too crowded (as opposed to too many hedge-fund managers or too many pharmaceutical lobbyists or too many fundamentalists), time, rejection, discouragement, and the inevitable practicalities and detours (some of them fortuitous), as well as wasted energy, the slow seepage or sudden shift of interest, premature death, burdensome debt or better offers, usually cure the problem of overpopulation. In other words, there are plenty of natural predators

You’re right about the praise I dish your way jail’s the comeuppance of a liar poet My only want is your content and if I hold another want may I never be granted it Each full moon is born of a crescent yet what’s a full moon got Vitiligo and the morning sees me with eyes of dew a fever that breaks out on your integument On your skin exanthem is a pasture of anemones Because you’re one of them I love my enemies

My beloved little billiard balls, my polite mongrels, edible patriotic plums, you owe your beauty to your mother, who resembled a cyclindrical corned beef with all the trimmings, may God rest her forsaken soul, for it is all of us she forsook; and I shall never forget her sputtering embers, and then the little mound. Yes, my little rum runners, she had defective tear ducts and could weep only iced tea. She had petticoats beneath her eyelids. And in her last years she found ball bearings in her beehive puddings, she swore allegiance to Abyssinia. What should I have done? I played the piano and scrambled eggs. I had to navigate carefully around her brain’s avalanche lest even a decent finale be forfeited. And her beauty still evermore. You see, as she was dying, I led each of you to her side, one by one she scorched you with her radiance. And she is ever with us in our acetylene leisure. But you are beautiful, and I, a slave to a heap of cinders.

i.110 "Much too long" you say, Velox, censorious, Of my epigrams—that's quite uproarious. You write none. Your brevity is glorious. • Scribere me quereris, Velox, epigrammata longa. ipse nihil scribis: tu breviora facis? vi.60 For my small books Rome's gone utterly mad; I'm quite ubiquitous—call it a fad. Look, there—see that fellow, leafing, curious. First he blushes deeply, then he's furious; A moment later his eyes glaze over; He yawns, flips a page, then reels in horror. This mercurial response I thrill to see; Why, then my epigrams even please me! • Laudat, amat, cantat nostros mea Roma libellos, meque sinus omnes, me manus omnis habet. ecce rubet quidam, pallet, stupet, oscitat, odit. hoc volo: nunc nobis carmina nostra placent. vii.90 Matho's one-word review of my small book: "Uneven." I'm supposed to get all shook! The scribblings of Calvinus and Umber Are very "even". . . yet how they lumber. I swear to you, Creticus, I thank God My gift is for being quite frankly "odd." • Iactat inaequalem Matho me fecisse libellum: si verum est, laudat carmina nostra Matho. aequales scribit libros Calvinus et Umber: aequalis liber est, Cretice, qui malus est. ix.50 You pontificate my talent is small, Gaurus, because my epigrams are all Just puny trifles. Yet they seem to please, I'll confess. They're a veritable breeze Compared to your epic tome, which rattles, In twelve mortal books, o'er Priam's battles. That makes you big man on campus? Oh no! As statuettes of master carvers glow With life, so do my tiny dramas boast Vital creatures. Your giants? Clay, at most. • Ingenium mihi, Gaure, probas sic esse pusillum, carmina quod faciam quae brevitate placent. confiteor. sed tu bis senis grandia libris qui scribis Priami proelia, magnus homo es? nos facimus Bruti puerum, nos Langona vivum: tu magnus luteum, Gaure, Giganta facis. iv.49 Quite clueless, Flaccus, all these sorry folks Who brand short poems mere badinage and jokes. Want to know who's more idle? The big boys, Our Epic Poets, who rehearse the joys Of serving human flesh up à la carte— Tereus' bloody banquet or the huge tart Chez Thyestes ("It's a little gristly!"). Or they serve us crap, like how remissly Daedalus made—with wax, imagine!—wings For his poor doomed son. Then Big Epic sings Of arms and the—not "man"—one-eyed giant? Polyphemus: his brain was far from pliant, So Homer made him watch sheep in Sicily. Pardon me for carping so pissily, Flaccus, at insults to my epigrams, So far from the bloated whimsy that crams Our big-assed epics. All men blare in praise of these "classics," you say, and bask in their rays. I will not disagree, but mark my word: Some day, far off, a wise man will be heard To say, "Classics we all want to have read, Never to read." My books get read instead! • Nescit, crede mihi, quid sint epigrammata, Flacce, qui tantum lusus illa iocosque vocat. ille magis ludit qui scribit prandia saevi Tereos aut cenam, crude Thyesta, tuam, aut puero liquidas aptantem Daedalon alas, pascentem Siculas aut Polyphemon ovis. a nostris procul est omnis vesica libellis, Musa nec insano syrmate nostra tumet. "illa tamen laudant omnes, mirantur, adorant." confiteor: laudant illa, sed ista legunt. ix.81 Read or recited, my verse is much praised, Aulus, yet one poet opines: "Ill-phrased." I couldn't care less! When I set a table, My guests, not the cooks, should say I'm able. • Lector et auditor nostros probat, Aule, libellos, sed quidam exactos esse poeta negat. non nimium curo: nam cenae fercula nostrae malim convivis quam placuisse cocis. x.59 A whole damned page crammed with verse—so you yawn! If a poem's too long you move swiftly on; "Shorter the better!" is your golden rule. But markets are scoured to make the tongue drool; A groaning board's set—rich sauces for days— And yet, dear reader, you want canapés? But I don't hunger for diners so prude: Hail meat and potatoes—screw finger food! • Consumpta est uno si lemmate pagina, transis, et breviora tibi, non meliora placent. dives et ex omni posita est instructa macello cena tibi, sed te mattea sola iuvat. non opus est nobis nimium lectore guloso; hunc volo, non fiat qui sine pane satur. xi.16 You there, reader, the over-solemn one, Take a hike wherever—my verse is spun Only for blithe, witty cognoscenti "Up" for priapic jeux de spree aplenty Or aroused by bells on harlot's fingers. He who in these randy pages lingers— Though more stern than Curius or Fabricius Soon gets tingly, and anon lubricious; Then, lo, beneath a toga something pokes. My little book's salacious whims and jokes Will lead even the chastest dames astray; Taken with wine, my lines can make 'em bray! Lucretia, more proper than whom none such, Peeked between my covers, blushed very much, And threw me down (but Brutus stood glowering). Brutus, "Ciao!"—and back she'll be devouring. • Qui gravis es nimium, potes hinc iam, lector, abire quo libet: urbanae scripsimus ista togae; iam mea Lampsacio lascivit pagina versu et Tartesiaca concrepat aera manu. o quotiens rigida pulsabis pallia vena, sis gravior Curio Fabricioque licet! tu quoque nequitias nostri lususque libelli uda, puella, leges, sis Patavina licet. erubuit posuitque meum Lucretia librum, sed coram Bruto; Brute, recede: leget. iv.89 Hey, you're stuffed, little book, give it a rest. You've reached the end-papers and still have zest! What on earth makes you yet want to let go, When "misfire" our verse reeked from the get-go? Zip it, my pages, let's call a "time out"; We've hit the back cover—and still you'd spout? Look, the reader's pissed and quite unimpressed; Even our publisher calls you a pest: "Hey, you're stuffed, little book, give it a rest!" • Ohe, iam satis, ohe, libelle, iam pervenimus usque ad umbilicos. tu procedere adhuc et ire quaeris, nec summa potes in schida teneri, sic tamquam tibi res peracta non sit, quae prima quoque pagina peracta est. iam lector queriturque deficitque, iam librarius hoc et ipse dicit "ohe, iam satis est, ohe, libelle."

To love is to tell the story of the world.     There was an ocean with a boat     mountains     a meadow     too painful to stare at directly. Haven’t I been here before? Yes.     No:     not quite here. “It is not as if,” the philosopher writes, “an I exists independently over here and then simply loses a you over there.” In the mist, a man rigs the Suzelle, little red boat. Loved labored for months, learning to tie the right knot. The exact and only knot that will keep the vessel tethered. She rehearsed for the worst possible thing. “The attachment to you,” it is written, “is part of what composes who I am.” I know/knew those hands, hers. I watched her dust the sourdough with flour at midnight a moon between her fingers.     Gone went Loved. But the half-world of her in me was me.     It was lit by the moon.

The count of cappuccino, the marquise of meringue, all the little cantuccini... and what was the song they sang? Oh, the best of us is nothing but a sweetening of the air, a tryst between the teeth and tongue: we meet and no one’s there though the café’s always crowded as society arrives and light glints to and fro between the eyes and rings and knives. We’ll slip away together, perfect ghosts of appetite, the balancing of ash on fire and whim—the mating flight of amaretti papers, my petite montgolfiere , our lit cage rising weightless up the lift shaft of the air. So the count of cappuccino, the marquise of not much more, consumed each other’s hunger. Then the crash. And then the war.

Today my heart is so goddamned fat with grief that I’ve begun hauling it in a wheelbarrow. No. It’s an anvil dragging from my neck as I swim through choppy waters swollen with the putrid corpses of hippos, which means lurking, somewhere below, is the hungry snout of a croc waiting to spin me into an oblivion worse than this run-on simile, which means only to say: I’m sad. And everyone knows what that means. And in my sadness I’ll walk to a café, and not see light in the trees, nor finger the bills in my pocket as I pass the boarded houses on the block. No, I will be slogging through the obscure country of my sadness in all its monotone flourish, and so imagine my surprise when my self-absorption gets usurped by the sound of opera streaming from an open window, and the sun peeks ever-so-slightly from behind his shawl, and this singing is getting closer, so that I can hear the delicately rolled r’s like a hummingbird fluttering the tongue which means a language more beautiful than my own, and I don’t recognize the song though I’m jogging toward it and can hear the woman’s breathing through the record’s imperfections and above me two bluebirds dive and dart and a rogue mulberry branch leaning over an abandoned lot drags itself across my face, staining it purple and looking, now, like a mad warrior of glee and relief I run down the street, and I forgot to mention the fifty or so kids running behind me, some in diapers, some barefoot, all of them winged and waving their pacifiers and training wheels and nearly trampling me when in a doorway I see a woman in slippers and a floral housedress blowing in the warm breeze who is maybe seventy painting the doorway and friends, it is not too much to say it was heaven sailing from her mouth and all the fish in the sea and giraffe saunter and sugar in my tea and the forgotten angles of love and every name of the unborn and dead from this abuelita only glancing at me before turning back to her earnest work of brushstroke and lullaby and because we all know the tongue’s clumsy thudding makes of miracles anecdotes let me stop here and tell you I said thank you.

I try to make myself afraid, the way you must have been afraid, stepping out onto this stage— but with a fear so pure, so perfectly informed that you strode out shouting. Here, where the neon yellow arrows painted on the floor shoot forward underfoot in blackness—beneath the hanging sequence of tinted skies—out toward that mindless immortalizing light, now dark. Now I think I feel the heat you must have felt rising from the front rows. A gaping fire door, a furnace: your single body standing here with no shadow, swinging on itself. Had you been a fool, you might have thought that they loved you. They never love you, you said. They are hungry for the god in his gold eclipse, the pure you on fire. John and I move quickly, each with a handful of ash, scattering. The sound of no sound falling into the cracks in the boards, the footlights, the first row. A small personal snow: a prince of dust, a villain of dust. Each part you played drifting up again, recomposing. I open my hand, I let you go—back into the lines you learned, back into the body and the body's beauty— back into the standing ovation: bow after bow after bow.

The tour has only started when I’m ambushed by that flat-lined verdigris I’d know even as a stumbling sleepwalker:landschap with tin river, cleaver of sodden pastures — marvelous for painters, says the docent, was the enormity of the sky, rarely cloudless, and she’s already turning to an Italian hillscape when I say wait! this is my bloodstream, as my finger makes brief unintended contact with the canvas, and then my voice an ambulance I tell her there should be a diagram to indicate the grazing motion, how the grinding molars of the Holsteins make the river go — or else, self-portrait in the glassing-over eye of a stickleback caged in a jam jar, left too long in the sun — but now the river is across the room because the docent has ushered me toward an upholstered bench and is murmuring, sit, sit, I have here from the staff room a coffee, here you are — and I’m making the gesture for no, those fields I ate and was made of live in me, uncloseable parentheses

I passed him by at first. From the photograph Peered sepia eyes, blindered, unappeased From a lair of brows and beard: one not amazed At anything, as if to have looked enough Then turned aside worked best for him—as if Night vision was the discipline that eased The weight of what he saw. A man’s gaze posed Too long in the sun goes blank; comes to grief. That face could be a focus for this back room, For pack-rat papers strewn as if in rage, Fond notes unread: each wary eye a phial Unstopped to let huge Melville out, to calm The sea of pages; Melville in older age: The grown man’s sleepy defiance of denial.