1269 Arts and sciences poems

"O, maister deere, and fadir reverent! Mi maister Chaucer, flour of eloquence, Mirour of fructuous entendement, O, universel fadir in science! Allas! that thou thyn excellent prudence In thi bed mortel mightist naght byqwethe; What eiled Deth? Allas! whi wolde he sle the? "O Deth! thou didest naght harme singuleer In slaghtere of him; but al this land it smertith; But nathelees, yit hast thou no power His name sle; his hy vertu astertith Unslayn fro the, which ay us lyfly hertyth, With bookes of his ornat endytyng, That is to al this land enlumynyng. "Hast thou nat eeke my maister Gower slayn, Whos vertu I am insufficient For to descreyve? I woot wel in certayn, For to sleen al this world thou haast yment; But syn our lorde Crist was obedient To the, in feith I can no ferther seye; His creatures mosten the obeye." Simple is my goost, and scars my letterure, Unto your excellence for to write Myn inward love, and yit in aventure Wyle I me putte, thogh I can but lyte. Mi dere maistir—God his soule quyte!— And fadir, Chaucer, fayn wolde han me taght; But I was dul, and lerned lite or naght. Allas! my worthi maister honorable, This landes verray tresor and richesse, Deth, by thi deth, hath harme irreparable Unto us doon; hir vengeable duresse Despoiled hath this land of the swetnesse Of rethorik; for un-to Tullius Was never man so lyk a-monges us. Also, who was hier in philosophie To Aristotle, in our tonge, but thow? The steppes of Virgile in poesie Thow filwedist eeke. Men wot wel y-now That combre-world that the, my maistir, slow. Wold I slayn were! Deth was to hastyf To renne on the, and reve the thi lyf. She myghte han taried hir vengeance awhile, Til that sum man had egal to the be. Nay, lat be that! sche knew wel that this yle May never man forth brynge lyk to the, And hir office needes do mot she; God bad hir so, I truste as for thi beste; O maister, maister, God thi soule reste!

After reading Ash Wednesday she looked once at the baked beans and fled. Luncheonless, poor girl, she observed a kind of poetic Lent— and I had thought I liked poetry better than she did. I do. But to me its most endearing quality is its unsuitableness; and, conversely, the chief wonder in heaven (whither I also am sometimes transported) is the kind of baggage I bring with me. Surely there is no more exquisite jointure in the anatomy of life than that at which poetry dovetails with the inevitable meal and Mrs. B. sits murmuring of avocados.

Released silhouettes flow incessantly like water, flow between mountains swiftly like a kaleidoscope. The solitude of  the North Pole bustles with human silhouettes. Endless transmission of  ABC. On the shredded shore a silk hat burns like a mirror trick, like a human echo burns a silk hat endlessly. Then the flames were received like ABC. On the night of a beautiful lunar eclipse the silhouettes smiled. Translated from the Japanese

A lot of it lives in the trachea, you know. But not so much that you won’t need more muscle: the diaphragm, a fist clenching at the bottom. Inhale. So many of us are breathless, you know, like me kneeling to collect the pottery shards of a house plant my elbow has nudged into oblivion. What if I sigh, and the black earth beneath me scatters like insects running from my breath? Am I a god then? Am I insane because I worry about the disassembling of earth regularly? I walk more softly now into gardens or up the steps of old houses with impatiens stuffed in their window boxes. When it’s you standing there with a letter or voice or face full of solemn news, will you hold your breath before you knock?

Platanal, 1974, by Myrna Báez Considering Myrna Báez’s painting Platanal, E. Carmen Ramos explains, “When Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony, artists like Francisco Oller depicted the plantain as both a key accoutrement to the jibaro (rural peasant) and a metaphor for the island’s independent cultural identity.” Plantain trees gather at the edge of the orchard, clamor for light in the foreground. They seem to grow as one, as if they’d fill the field and the mountains behind them, leaves large and frayed. We stood there, once, or someplace like it, so here we are again, it seems, years later, branches leaning over the road, you in your long skirt, looking out as if to recall something you meant to do.My country, I hear you say still. But if that’s dusk in the hills, you know what’s coming to the field. You’ll stand among them till there’s nothing left to see. I’ll wait beside you, though I don’t know what we’re waiting for.

Footnotes to the tower. For “He spends the summer There, in a state of violent agitation,” Read: “It’s there, in his agitation’s most violent State that Hölderlin suspends the summer” — Like a yellow pear above the untroubled water. For the lost, disheveled decades of derangement, Translate I was struck by Apollo as you Must change your life. For sonnets that sing their own Spontaneous, Orphic necessity to praise, Think naked as a lightning rod he waited. For necessity insert Anangke. But for Anangke, “Lord, just one more summer, please.” For summer, the lyre. Hölderlin in his tower. Until autumn, when the leaves start falling. Whoever Has nowhere to go will never get home now.

This is what poetry is (says the Road), a laying down of uniform pattern across a land you can't control but which you think it best to flatten. It's far from vivid. Look at the whole flamboyant forest! Look at the paths that can't be uttered by a mouth and at the scattered arcs of light more integral to this wide planet than words will ever be. Your lines? Like railroad tracks that cut the bracken, bring something through, then disappear. No one knows what speck was taken or where it moved, and no one cares.

with clear-cased woofers for heads, no eyes. They see us as a bat sees a mosquito—a fleshy echo, a morsel of sound. You've heard their intergalactic tour busses purring at our stratosphere's curb. They await counterintelligence transmissions from our laptops and our blue teeth, await word of humanity's critical mass, our ripening. How many times have we dreamed it this way: the Age of the Machines, postindustrial terrors whose tempered paws—five welded fingers —wrench back our roofs, siderophilic tongues seeking blood, licking the crumbs of us from our beds. O, great nation, it won't be pretty. What land will we now barter for our lives ? A treaty inked in advance of the metal ones' footfall. Give them Gary. Give them Detroit, Pittsburgh, Braddock—those forgotten nurseries of girders and axels. Tell the machines we honor their dead, distant cousins. Tell them we tendered those cities to repose out of respect for welded steel's bygone era. Tell them Ford and Carnegie were giant men, that war glazed their palms with gold. Tell them we soft beings mourn manufacture's death as our own.

The role of elegy is To put a death mask on tragedy, A drape on the mirror. To bow to the cultural Debate over the aesthetization of sorrow, Of loss, of the unbearable Afterimage of the once material. To look for an imagined Consolidation of grief So we can all be finished Once and for all and genuinely shut up The cabinet of genuine particulars. Instead there’s the endless refrain One hears replayed repeatedly Through the just ajar door: Some terrible mistake has been made. What is elegy but the attempt To rebreathe life Into what the gone one once was Before he grew to enormity. Come on stage and be yourself, The elegist says to the dead. Show them Now—after the fact— What you were meant to be: The performer of a live song. A shoe. Now bow. What is left but this: The compulsion to tell. The transient distraction of ink on cloth One scrubbed and scrubbed But couldn’t make less. Not then, not soon. Each day, a new caption on the cartoon Ending that simply cannot be. One hears repeatedly, the role of elegy is.

Blacksmithing demonstration, mountain arts and crafts fair, Monteagle, TN “But can you forge a nail?” the blond boy asks, And the blacksmith shoves a length of  iron rod Deep in the coal fire cherished by the bellows Until it glows volcanic. He was a god Before anachronism, before the tasks That had been craft were jobbed out to machine. By dint of   hammer-song he makes his keen, Raw point, and crowns utility with rose: Quincunx of facets petaling its head. The breeze-made-visible sidewinds. The boy’s Blonde mother shifts and coughs.Once Work was wed To Loveliness— sweat-faced, swarthy from soot, he Reminds us with the old saw he employs (And doesn’t miss a beat): “Smoke follows beauty.”