1269 Arts and sciences poems

What if the primary colors on your spectrum were mud, muddled, and muddliest? Benjamin Franklin invented the Internet so that I could talk to folk but not face to face and I know what purple-tailed hawk of thought just perched on your extended wrist but try to fit your average feet in my size 17s. Fact: the average reader processes 300 wpm and maybe they can read other people’s faces like a vegan interrogating a list of ingredients but what if every face was written in Braille and you had only catcher’s mitts below your wrists, or IKEA bookcases with reams of instructions ciphered in tiny print with disappearing ink, imagine being so literal that when told to let sleeping dogs lie, you asked how a Doberman could be dishonest, imagine every smiling hint a girl ever sent your way was in a prescription bottle with a Youproof cap or a personal pizza delivered 30 minutes late to the door of a boarded-up summer bungalow then top that double dose of pepperoni by having even the most casual conversation served with Denali-sized asides of organic skew. Fact: the US has 95,000 miles of shoreline, but on this dinner plate the border between the Country of Carrots and the Province of Peas can never meet, say your brain is a slinky bullet-headed train but your mouth is a horse-drawn Amish wagon and what rockets across the endless gray rails of your origamied cranium is ever projected onto your grinning scrim of skin, and maybe Ben Franklin didn’t invent the Internet, but the Internet has plenty pictures of him inventing electricity which is almost the same thing, say your friend Cynthia R. claims it will storm later and you hear Oran Juice Jones singing “I saw you (and him) walking in the rain” and you beam a lighthouse smile, only Cynthia says, “Seriously, I saw it on the news,” while all you smell is full-length fur coats matted by a downpour in MacArthur Park and now Cynthia R. wants to know what’s so funny but who can say Oran Juice Jones without a concentrated face so you try to collect the loose nickels and pennies of thought spilling from your front pocket but Cynthia fires up her smartphone to show you the seven-day forecast and now the foil-covered pots on the back of her electric range are beginning to boil and you say, “No, I believe you,” but she believes in tone of voice the way Crayola once believed in a peach crayon called “Flesh” or the way banks believe in daily deposits left by a river’s most assiduous visits. Fact: the city of Pittsburgh has over 400 bridges, let’s say you arch quick when softly pricked as if any foreign finger were a cattle prod and maybe Ben Franklin didn’t invent electricity but he certainly earned a shiny penny by cutting out the lights during thunderstorms, only your steady tone is mono as a Sinatra single on the platter of a hand-cranked Victrola, and Cynthia cocks her head like a small dog that is not boarding your single-storied boat and now you’re a wind-whipped antenna on an empty dinghy bobbing dockside as she steams out of range of your radio’s befuddled dial.

For my little ballads, those strange, sunset-red laments, spring paid me a gull’s egg. I bade my lover paint my portrait on its thick shell. He painted a new bulb in brown soil— on the other side, a powdery mound of sand.

From embarrassment, I made statements. My icons—tight caves and mouths—stuck together briefly like dry lips, like a lover’s insults. The fact is they were ugly to all of us. I said, How painstakingly personal! Here are the words for this, Relentless as insects! I was hysterical. Every tone became artful, the worst urges nuzzling like housepets for someone to feel them, each real subject demanding more real context for remarks. Then abstractions insinuating their sharp edges, asking to pry open privacies alone in the bathroom at bedtime then with strangers in elevators, at stop signs. Even then, I knew you’d shun them, because who would choose such intrusions? I learned to love this isolation as a woman who appears to listen. All night I’d talk about my life anticipating her dramatic relief, believing her affectionate gestures filled in what wasn’t spoken. At those times she seemed so genuine and friendly, a voice from inside my own body describing my shameless surrender as our first kiss, perfect as gravity.

The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles and my stomach churns at the imagined taste while my mouth splits into dry lips without loyalty or reason thirsting for the wetness of his blood as it sinks into the whiteness of the desert where I am lost without imagery or magic trying to make power out of hatred and destruction trying to heal my dying son with kisses only the sun will bleach his bones quicker. A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and there are tapes to prove it. At his trial this policeman said in his own defense “I didn't notice the size nor nothing else only the color”. And there are tapes to prove that, too. Today that 37 year old white man with 13 years of police forcing was set free by eleven white men who said they were satisfied justice had been done and one Black Woman who said “They convinced me” meaning they had dragged her 4'10'' black Woman's frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children. I have not been able to touch the destruction within me. But unless I learn to use the difference between poetry and rhetoric my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire and one day I will take my teenaged plug and connect it to the nearest socket raping an 85 year old white woman who is somebody's mother and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time “Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”

I thought to write an elegy as  reply to your questions to pitch the word as far forward like a dolphin out of the sea over a threshold, to behold the land as practical and green as this table, a space to write and walk into like a kitchen hearing the conjuct vowels what does a reader suppose if not the promise of a text the ultimate form at the end of a chain of forms infinite summed to a singular value the elegy as a place to begin.

.            .             .          .            . Before the astronomer's table a circle with a demon inside demons with wings of a bat (Before the astronomer's table) overhead like an armada of ships .            .             .          .            . Time of the weed, time of bramble along the bank of a canal muddy with old newspaper close-held surface to write on to dance as with desire black letters where roads meet .            .             .          .            . Tonight in the city, only the chains make soft noises like bells only the dogs are awake the fences lean over to scrape their elbows on stone and broken glass

Eros scrabbles to rose and rage to gear or gare, as in Gare du Nord, where I trained in to Paris from not smoking pot in Master Mad, I’m sorry, Amsterdam, with its canals called grachts and clocks that bonged my homesick hours at different times. Which is smite for you violet types, a flower that says “love it” if you listen. Me, I do and don’t feel it matters that evil thrives in live, that we tinker and smash everything down to bits and then try to patch a path back home, it’s our lotto in life, to have no clue what a natural disaster is when that disaster is us. That’s what I love about the shrug, it says zilch sans le mouth and becomes more aerobic the more you admit the less you know, you know? It’s a jumble out there, kids, with slips and slides and elide’s eally ool, depending what’s lopped off, as in light of   hand or slight of and, but I better spot before you pots how sparse this parsing is. Besides, what can I say about language other than it’s an anal egg in need of one glorious u. Words or sword — pick your poisson. Every time I try to peak into speaking, the bag of gab to learn what our noodles are really up to, I get flummoxed that the tools I use are the stool I stand on to see a way in or out. I can’t even tell if  I’m more trapped or rapt, if meaning’s mean or play’s a dumb waiter riding numbly up and down. But have you noticed read becomes dear if you ignore the world as you find it and find it in you to swirl the word, in the way solve and loves are the same bones, different skeletons.

A book with poems about Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth, William Tell, W.B. Yeats, Ted Hughes, Sitting Bull, an otter, a fox, and a hare won the Pulitzer Prize in the first year of the war. In the second year, the year of insurgency, of bridges, corpses, blindfolds, and dogs, a poet who wrote about the only species that commits suicide received the prize. In the year of boycotts and stained fingertips, the third of the war, the prize went to a retired life insurance executive who lived on acreage near the village of Garland, Nebraska. Disappearance, from one life to another, was the subject of the prizewinner in the year of growing sectarian violence, the fourth of the war, also the year of verdict and hanging. In the fifth year, of surge and black water, the civil war continued, and the prize was given to a book about our civil war, which ended 143 years earlier. In the sixth year, the prize was granted to a poet who wrote a lovely poem about war, the war in Europe, where white men killed each other by the millions; his poem still mentioned an Arab, a young man who performs an act of purification, removing hair from his body, before flying a plane into an office building, an act that took place fifty-eight years after the war the poem is actually about. The prize was shared in the sixth year of the war, the other book evoking pleasures (of family, beaches, and dogs) and horrors (of young men purifying their bodies with speed and conviction). In the seventh year, the year of ceasefire and effigy, the prize was presented to a book about loss, memory, and the continuum of time; the book was named after a dog in the sky. The war went on, for eight years now, and many soldiers (300,000) were returned home, and many others (not soldiers, too many to count) were returned to the earth; this was the year of exit strategies, and a book described as filled with “little thought-bombs” won the Pulitzer Prize. In the year of renaming, the ninth, a new dawn replaced freedom, and the prizewinner had served as United States Poet Laureate in the war’s sixth, seventh, and eighth years. The last year, the year of withdrawal, the prize was given to a book named after life on another planet, which is a yearning for another way to live, which is also another way to die. Long after life on Earth the depleted uranium in the Tigris will reach its half-life, four and a half billion years after the tenth year of the war, which is the end of time.

She always writes poems. This summer she’s starting a novel. It’s in trouble already. The characters are easy—a girl and her friend who is a girl and the boy down the block with his first car, an older boy, sixteen, who sometimes these warm evenings leaves his house to go dancing in dressy clothes though it’s still light out. The girl has a brother who has lots of friends, is good in math, and just plain good which doesn’t help the story. The story should have rescues & escapes in it which means who’s the bad guy; he couldn’t be the brother or the grandpa or the father either, or even the boy down the block with his first car. People in novels have to need something, she thinks, that it takes about two hundred pages to get. She can’t imagine that. Nothing she needs can be got; if it could she’d go get it: the answer to nightmares; a mother who’d be proud of her; doing things a mother could be proud of; having hips & knowing how to squeal at the beach laughing when the boy down the block picked her up & carried her & threw her in the water. If she’d laughed squealing he might still take her swimming & his mother wouldn’t say she’s crazy, she would not have got her teeth into his shoulder till well yes she bit him, and the marks lasted & lasted, his mother said so, but that couldn’t be in a novel. She’ll never squeal laughing, she’d never not bite him, she hates cute girls, she hates boys who like them. Biting is embarrassing and wrong & she has no intention of doing it again but she would if he did if he dared, and there’s no story if there’s no hope of change.

Dedicated to Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz 1 I turn to my Rand McNally Atlas. Europe appears right after the Map of the World. All of Italy can be seen page 9. Half of Chile page 29. I take out my ruler. In global perspective Italy amounts to less than half an inch. Chile measures more than an inch and a quarter of an inch. Approximately Chile is as long as China is wide: Back to the Atlas: Chunk of China page 17. All of France page 5: As we say in New York: Who do France and Italy know at Rand McNally? 2 I see the four mountains in Chile higher than any mountain of North America. I see Ojos del Salado the highest. I see Chile unequivocal as crystal thread. I see the Atacama Desert dry in Chile more than the rest of the world is dry. I see Chile dissolving into water. I do not see what keeps the blue land of Chile out of blue water. I do not see the hand of Pablo Neruda on the blue land. 3 As the plane flies flat to the trees below Brazil below Bolivia below five thousand miles below my Brooklyn windows and beside the shifted Pacific waters welled away from the Atlantic at Cape Horn La Isla Negra that is not an island La Isla Negra that is not black is stone and stone of Chile feeding clouds to color scale and undertake terrestrial forms of everything unspeakable 4 In your country how do you say copper for my country? 5 Blood rising under the Andes and above the Andes blood spilling down the rock corrupted by the amorality of so much space that leaves such little trace of blood rising to the irritated skin the face of the confession far from home: I confess I did not resist interrogation. I confess that by the next day I was no longer sure of my identity. I confess I knew the hunger. I confess I saw the guns. I confess I was afraid. I confess I did not die. 6 What you Americans call a boycott of the junta? Who will that feed? 7 Not just the message but the sound. 8 Early morning now and I remember corriendo a la madrugada from a different English poem, I remember from the difficulties of the talk an argument athwart the wine the dinner and the dancing meant to welcome you you did not understand the commonplace expression of my heart: the truth is in the life la verdad de la vida