1269 Arts and sciences poems

i Marionette means little Mary. Think of Mary Shelley, a jointed doll lifted from her mother’s unstitched interior, that fist-shaped hole, the future mother of three dead children and Frankenstein’s monstrous electric baby, hater of creators. Think of all the porn-dollies moving their mouths up and down on wood and the way the men jerk, responding as they’re made to, and the clear wires. The men who make up cyborgs, beautiful and silver-skulled with wet mouths that might deliver quick blue shocks. Think of Eve’s small teeth kinking apple flesh and who put it there and who suggested and who lifted her wrist. Think of shadow puppets with enormous penises. Think of little boys shot for holding up toy guns. Think of animals compared to puppets by Aristotle — how levers are released and strike the twisted sinews against one another. Think of people compared to animals. Think of men on a bus forcing instruments so far inside a girl they puppet the girl to death and puppet means pulled by tendons. Think of if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands. Think of the grace of a marionette as it glances the earth, as its limbs shake and float. Think of how its mind is elsewhere. ii Fox and Cat hang Pinocchio from the tree, a noose of string around his throat. Hoist by what he’s made of, the merciless weather swings him to clatter like a wedding bell that rings out atrocious spasms to a shuddered stop. His maker is not here for this unmaking. They should make him watch.

About the radiant heart of the matter, valencies drift

This isn’t a great poem. I’m not writing this to write a great poem. I am writing this because I am one person. I am only one. I have a face and a front of my face. I have two shoulders and two hips. I’m living. I live. So what can I do with my face if it can’t see that person’s face? What do I tell my eyes to see? How do I let them know that when they see that face it is that person’s wish that they not know it? How do I tell them we have to go back into the world where no one knows us and we don’t know anyone? How do I tell them to stay there? There is nothing for them to see. How do I tell my hands they will never touch that person’s hands? How do I tell my ears that when that person says my name it is only a word? How do I tell my lips to make that person’s name another word so I can say it? How do I tell my neck that person cannot see it? How do I tell my hair that person cannot pull it? It is my hair. It is my head. How do I tell my teeth they will never strike that person’s teeth? How do I tell my thighs it does not matter what they do? They are the tops of my legs. They will fall apart. How do I tell my back it must never wait for that person? That person will not hold me. That person does not know where I am, does not think of me. Does not know I have exhausted every argument against him. That person does not know I no longer love freedom. That person does not know what it means when I ask for forgiveness. That person does not know I beg the world to let me change. That person cannot see my face. Knows a woman with my name and she is a woman. Does not know the word I hide behind my words. Does not know this face. Does not know this is my face. Says my name and looks at this person. How do I tell my feet to stand here? How do I tell my eyes to see? How do I tell the voice under my voice to keep on speaking? How do I tell my mouth to speak?

If you can make a poem a farmer finds useful, you should be happy. A blacksmith you can never figure out. The worst to please is a carpenter.

Each grinding flattened American vowel smashed to centerlessness, his glee that whatever long ago mutilated his mouth, he has mastered to mutilate you: the Joker's voice, so unlike the bruised, withheld, wounded voice of Ennis Del Mar. Once I have the voice that's the line and at the end of the line is a hook and attached to that is the soul.

I The bartender Has eyes the color of ripe apricots Easy to please as a cash register he Enjoys art and good jokes. Squish Goes the painting Squirt Goes the poem He We Laugh. II It is not easy to remember that other people died besides Dylan Thomas and Charlie Parker Died looking for beauty in the world of the bartender This person, that person, this person, that person died looking for beauty Even the bartender died III Dante blew his nose And his nose came off in his hand Rimbaud broke his throat Trying to cough Dada is not funny It is a serious assault On art Because art Can be enjoyed by the bartender. IV The bartender is not the United States Or the intellectual Or the bartender He is every bastard that does not cry When he reads this poem.

Our age bereft of nobility How can our faces show it? I look for love. My lips stand out dry and cracked with want of it. Oh it is well. My poem shall show the need for it. Again we go driven by forces we have no control over. Only in the poem comes an image that we rule the line by the pen in the painter’s hand one foot away from me. Drawing the face and its torture. That is why no one dares tackle it. Held as they are in the hands of forces they cannot understand. That despair is on my face and shall show in the fine lines of any man. I had love once in the palm of my hand. See the lines there. How we played its game, are playing now in the bounds of white and heartless fields. Fall down on my head, love, drench my flesh in the streams of fine sprays. Like French perfume so that I light up as mountain glorys and I am showered by the scent of the finished line. No circles but that two parallels do cross And carry our souls and bodies together as the planets, Showing light on the surface of our skin, knowing that so much of it flows through the veins underneath. Our cheeks puffed with it. The pockets full. 2. Pushed on by the incompletion of what goes before me I hesitate before this paper scratching for the right words. Paul Klee scratched for seven years on smoked glass, to develop his line, LaVigne says, look at his face! he who has spent all night drawing mine. The sun also rises on the rooftops, beginning w/ violet. I begin in blue knowing why we are cool. 3. My middle name is Joseph and I walk beside an ass on the way to what Bethlehem, where a new babe is born. Not the second hand of Yeats but first prints on a cloudy windowpane. America, you boil over 4. The cauldron scalds. Flesh is scarred. Eyes shot. The street aswarm with vipers and heavy armed bandits. There are bandages on the wounds but blood flows unabated. The bath- rooms are full. Oh stop up the drains. We are run over. 5. Let me ramble here. yet stay within my own yardlines. I go out of bounds without defense, oh attack. 6. At last the game is over and the line lengthens. Let us stay with what we know. That love is my strength, that I am overpowered by it: desire that too is on the face: gone stale. When green was the bed my love and I laid down upon. Such it is, heart’s complaint, You hear upon a day in June. And I see no end in view when summer goes, as it will, upon the roads, like singing companions across the land. Go with it man, if you must, but leave us markers on your way. South of Mission, Seattle, over the Sierra Mountains, the Middle West and Michigan, moving east again, easy coming into Chicago and the cattle country, calling to each other over canyons, careful not to be caught at night, they are still out, the destroyers, and down into the South, familiar land, lush places, blue mountains of Carolina, into Black Mountain and you can sleep out, or straight across into States I cannot think of their names. This nation is so large, like our hands, our love it lives with no lover, looking only for the beloved, back home into the heart, New York, New England, Vermont green mountains, and Massachusetts my city, Boston and the sea. Again to smell what this calm ocean cannot tell us. The seasons. Only the heart remembers and records in words of works we lay down for those men who can come to them. 7. At last. I come to the last defense. My poems contain no wilde beestes, no lady of the lake music of the spheres, or organ chants, yet by these lines I betray what little given me. One needs no defense. Only the score of a man’s struggle to stay  with what is his own, what lies within him to do. Without which is nothing, for him or those who hear him And I come to this, knowing the waste, leaving the rest up to love and its twisted faces my hands claw out at only to draw back from the blood already running there. Oh come back, whatever heart you have left. It is my life you save. The poem is done. 6.18.58

The scene changes Five hours later and I come into a room where a clock ticks. I find a pillow to muffle the sounds I make. I am engaged in taking away from God his sound. The pigeons somewhere above me, the cough a man makes down the hall, the flap of wings below me, the squeak of sparrows in the alley. The scratches I itch on my scalp, the landing of birds under the bay window out my window. All dull details I can only describe to you, but which are here and I hear and shall never give up again, shall carry with me over the streets of this seacoast city, forever; oh clack your metal wings, god, you are mine now in the morning. I have you by the ears in the exhaust pipes of a thousand cars gunning their motors turning over all over town. 6.15.58

To make beauty out of pain, it damns the eyes— No, dams the eyes. See how they overflow? No damns them, damns them, and so they cry. What shape can I swallow to make me whole? Baby’s bird-shaped block, blue-painted wood That fits in the bird-hole of the painted wood box? The skeleton leaf? The skeleton key? Loud Knock when the shape won’t unlock any locks. I hear it through the static in the baby’s room When the monitor clicks on and off, sound Of sea-ice cracking against the jagged sea-rocks, Laughing gull in the gale. What is it dives down Past sight, down there dark with the other blocks? It can’t be seen, only heard. A kind of curse, This kind curse. Forgive me. Blessing that hurts.

Put nothing down to distress the reader. No barking dog. No rustle in the place whispers belong or photos of petals near collapse. Erase oranges of confusing taste, a face wrinkled or in pain, a map with waterless rivers or water without a bend, still in darkness. Here, where mystery beyond hope comes too near, make a bright flight of leaves descend, none to smear all our spotless rivers. A map folds and unfolds, does not bunch or wrinkle. Rainbows to last. The First Endlessness of Eden. This was the spot I was to start on, a leg steps out of the lake, a step falters instead into dashes that spread without prints onto the screaming bank.