1269 Arts and sciences poems

In the apparent vacancy beyond each line, you might sense the poem waiting to think itself. Imagine the surface of a twilight pond in wind, shifting and changing the sky, then going still as a concentrating mind, the far trees deepening in its reflection. Like the poem the pond’s alive— its beauty (the sudden scintillation of a hundred thousand wavelets) and music (the percussion of a beaver’s tail) arising from what is. And when the pond accumulates the darkness, which it loves, it challenges your eyes to find the light that without darkness you could not see. Wild campsites you never noticed now appear along the far shore. It’s not only itself the poem waits for moving line by line into its own dark. It waits for you.

The jolt that comes to bones inside a tumbled streetcar is what the painter considers as she strokes her- self into story. There is less to the jolt that comes as he shuts his eyes before the monitor, save what he imagines—a lightning bolt, a god tapping the shoulder. He imagines the sky swelling with ceiling fans or the guano of extinct birds, a jolt riding from his shoulder blades to his eyelids, dropping with roller coaster clacks to his fingers. Here, he dreams of Frida Kahlo. Here, he says,let me spread my flesh out like a table linen, let my bones be silver that touches, making, again, that clack. My skull will be a glass, set properly, I have class enough.

for Jim Schley The umbrella, in this case; Earlier, the stool, the Wooden pillars that hold up the roof. This guy, you realize, Will dance with anything— —He likes the idea. Then he picks up some lady’s discarded sandals, Holds them next to his head like sea shells, Donkey ears. Nothing, his body states, Is safe from the dance of ideas!

A poet! —He hath put his heart to school, Nor dares to move unpropped upon the staff Which art hath lodged within his hand—must laugh By precept only, and shed tears by rule. Thy Art be Nature; the live current quaff, And let the groveller sip his stagnant pool, In fear that else, when Critics grave and cool Have killed him, Scorn should write his epitaph. How does the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold; And so the grandeur of the Forest-tree Comes not by casting in a formal mould, But from its own divine vitality.

I summon up Panofskv from his bed Among the famous dead To build a tomb which, since I am not read, Suffers the stone’s mortality instead; Which, by the common iconographies Of simple visual ease, Usurps the place of the complexities Of sound survivors once preferred to noise: Monkeys fixed on one bough, an almost holy Nightmarish sloth, a tree Of parrots in a pride of family, Immortal skunks, unaromatically; Some deaf bats in a cave, a porcupine Quill-less, a superfine Flightless eagle, and, after them, a line Of geese, unnavigating by design; Dogs in the frozen haloes of their barks, A hundred porous arks Aground and lost, where elephants like quarks Ape mother mules or imitation sharks— And each of them half-venerated by A mob, impartially Scaled, finned, or feathered, all before a dry Unable mouth, symmetrically awry. But how shall I, in my brief space, describe A tomb so vast, a tribe So desperately existent for a scribe Knowingly of the fashions’ diatribe, I who have sought time’s memory afoot, Grateful for every root Of trees that fill the garden with their fruit, Their fragrance and their shade? Even as I do it, I see myself unnoticed on the stair That, underneath a clear Welcome of bells, had promised me a fair Attentive hearing’s joy, sometime, somewhere.

If it takes me all day, I will get the word freshened out of this poem. I put it in the first line, then moved it to the second, and now it won’t come out. It’s stuck. I’m so frustrated, so I went out to my little porch all covered in snow and watched the icicles drip, as I smoked a cigarette. Finally I reached up and broke a big, clear spike off the roof with my bare hand. And used it to write a word in the snow. I wrote the word snow. I can’t stand myself.

Grandfather advised me: Learn a trade I learned to sit at desk and condense No layoff from this condensery

Out of the deep and the dark, A sparkling mystery, a shape, Something perfect, Comes like the stir of the day: One whose breath is an odor, Whose eyes show the road to stars, The breeze in his face, The glory of heaven on his back. He steps like a vision hung in air, Diffusing the passion of eternity; His abode is the sunlight of morn, The music of eve his speech: In his sight, One shall turn from the dust of the grave, And move upward to the woodland.

The capital city. Arrowroot. Water-bur. Colts. Hail. Bamboo grass. The round-leaved violet. Club moss. Water oats. Flat river-boats. The mandarin duck. —The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon The sky. And the sky above that. The exchange of ice between mouths. Other people's poems My friend says we never write about anything we can get to the bottom of. For him, this is a place arbored with locust trees. For me, it's a language for which I haven't quite found the language yet. The dewy smell of a new-cut pear. Bacon chowder flecked with thyme. Roasted duck skin ashine with plum jam. Scorpion peppers. Clothes on a line. A smell of rain battering the rosemary bush. The Book Cliffs. Most forms of banditry. Weathered barns.Dr. Peebles.The Woman's Tonic, it says on the side, in old white paint. The clink of someone putting away dishes in another room. The mechanical bull at the cowboy bar in West Salt Lake. The girls ride it wearing just bikinis and cowboy hats. I lean over to my friend and say,I would worry about catching something. And he leans back to say,That's really the thing you'd worry about? We knock the bottom of our bottles together. How they talk in old movies, like,Now listen here. Just because you can swing a bat doesn't mean you can play ball. Or, I 'll be your hot cross if you'll be my bun. Well, anyway, you know what I mean. Somewhere between the sayable and the unsayable, poetry runs. Antidote to the river of forgetting. Like a rosary hung from a certain rearview mirror. Like the infinite rasp of gravel under the wheel of a departing car. Gerard Manley Hopkins's last words were I'm so happy, I'm so happy. Oscar Wilde took one look at the crackling wallpaper in his Paris flat, then at his friends gathered around and said,One or the other of us has got to go. Wittgenstein said simply,Tell all my friends, I've had a wonderful life.

Beauty, I’ve seen you pressed hard against the windowpane. But the ugliness was unsolved in the heart & mouth. I’ve seen the quick-draw artist crouch among the chrysanthemums. Do I need to say more? Everything isn’t ha-ha in this valley. The striptease on stage at the Blue Movie is your sweet little Sara Lee. An argument of eyes cut through the metaphor, & I hear someone crying among crystal trees & confetti. The sack of bones in the magnolia, What’s more true than that? Before you can see her long pretty legs, look into her unlit eyes. A song of B-flat breath staggers on death row. Real men, voices that limp behind the one-way glass wall. I’ve seen the legless beggar chopped down to his four wheels.