1269 Arts and sciences poems

Too hot to rest, I toss my arms off the bed. My night- gown wet with sweat. I feel you — a sack of scavenged skulls on my chest — sipping the salt from my breasts. Imp. Incubus. Im- pulse. You and me like a mare that must be broken in by breaking in- to. Tamed is how fire is by giving itself something to destroy: it destroys it- self. But who can deter- mine what’s inside another? What is risked when we enter    ... Caliper. Forceps. Scalpel. Oculus. Perhaps you’re the wilderness that waits with- in me. Perhaps an other mystery, I open beneath you. Yoked. Harnessed. Paralyzed. At once a- wake and a- sleep. I nay. I knock over the kerosene lamp. Light of the rational mind snuffed. Shadow of shadows. Because I can’t see, I sense. Your thumb thrumming my mouth. A command. Arch- angel. Vision of invasion. Insemination. My horse heart beating with yours.

These frail, white widows who get their hair done weekly in tight curls, like little flowers, bend their heads until the applause says it’s time to be brave again.

Late August was a pressure drop, rain, a sob in the body, a handful of air with a dream in it, summer was desperate to paradise itself with blackberry drupelets and swarms, everything polychromed, glazed, sprinkler caps gushing, the stars like sweat on a boxer's skin. A voice from the day says Tax cuts for the rich or scratch what itches or it's a sax from Bitches Brew, and I'm a fool for these horns and hues, this maudlin light. It's a currency of feeling in unremembered March. There's a war on and snow in the city where we've made our desire stop and start. In the dying school of Bruce I'm the student who still believes in the bad taste of the beautiful and the sadness of songs made in the ratio of bruise for bruise.

Ah Ben! Say how, or when Shall we thy guests Meet at those lyric feasts Made at the Sun, The Dog, the Triple Tun? Where we such clusters had As made us nobly wild, not mad; And yet each verse of thine Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine. My Ben Or come again, Or send to us Thy wit's great overplus; But teach us yet Wisely to husband it; Lest we that talent spend, And having once brought to an end That precious stock, the store Of such a wit the world should have no more.

The belt kicks on with a whir & the whir licks the end grain of the offcut with a hint of  hesitation. A small wind of ochre dust sweeps off the belt before the belt comes back to where it was. The whole room swells with the scent of cinnamon & desire. How imprecise the smell of desire. The wood takes on a sheen, a gloss the grain can live behind without worry of  being forgotten. A single knot blinks out of the small block and becomes the eye of a hummingbird, its beak bending around the edge of the wood, its small song captured in the annular rings. To think, this block was tossed in with the scraps. That the bird could have been lost. Or burned.

Playwright, convict of public wrongs to men, Takes private beatings and begins again. Two kinds of valor he doth show at once: Active in ’s brain, and passive in his bones.

You’re like a little fruit you’re like a moon I want to hold I said lemon slope about your hip because it’s one of my words about you I whispered in bed this smoothing the fruit & then alone with my book but writing in it the pages wagging against my knuckles in the light like a sail.

There you are, at the gate of the memory palace underneath the rusted teeth of the portcullis, your hand raised in a puzzling gesture— is it farewell, come here, get back, no blame, or are you just trying to hitch a ride? But I’ve seen that gesture when you sleep, as if you were saying to someone, on the one hand . . . on the other hand. Here is a memory to store in the palace— You and I at the circus. The arena is dark except for one blue spotlight. In it, a clown stands before a table. On the table an array, crystal wine glasses filled with different levels of water. He’s dressed in white with a conical hat, tear marks on one cheek. With a wet finger, he plays music that was once forbidden because it made musicians lose their minds. There is a blank look in his eyes and he performs perfectly, as if he were a mechanical clown. Now look up, the lady on the trapeze is dropping large blue crepe-paper flowers. Maybe the palace is the size of a dollhouse and my eye at the window is the eye of a giant. Maybe the palace is in my chest and my heart is beating too loud inside. I remember when I woke but was still asleep and saw my chest rising and falling on its own and then I accidentally rolled out of my body and there were two of me lying side by side. In an alcove shaped like a scallop shell I’ve placed a list of the way lovers have said goodbye. Developer fluid heated up, passed off as consommé, is a standout. As is GOODBYE written in shaving cream on the dusty windows of a row of abandoned cars in Baja. Just as I begin to suspect what is wrong with this picture I notice how lightly you step over the grillwork of the oubliette, that terrible lace under which men are forgotten. You raise your hand again and now I understand that gesture— it’s how you erase the distant mountains, the palace, the sky, everything.

Han-Shan sits on a flat stone In his garden and plays the flute, Mimicking the birds singing among The gourd vines or from the top Of the blue pine tree. Or he constructs a new trellis For the rambling rose over his front Gate or works at the great loom in his porch, Weaving his own coverlets. Sometimes, he paints drinking gourds To hang at his cold spring. His poems, delicate but strong, Paper the ceiling above his bed, So he can lie and read His own masterpieces. No man, he avers, can catch Such fish in one basket.

Music of Japan. Parsimoniously from the water clock the drops unfold in lazy honey or ethereal gold that over time reiterates a weave eternal, fragile, enigmatic, bright. I fear that every one will be the last. They are a yesterday come from the past. But from what shrine, from what mountain’s slight garden, what vigils by an unknown sea, and from what modest melancholy, from what lost and rediscovered afternoon do they arrive at their far future: me? Who knows? No matter. When I hear it play I am. I want to be. I bleed away.