1269 Arts and sciences poems

“Nothing but sunlight and gleaming, linoleum flecked with flame, a thick coat of wax that flashed down a corridor and led to a room, a place where I curled up a few innocuous inches off the floor. Straps—word out of strophe, the restraints of line and stanza— straps hung in loops on closet hooks. On the nightstand a basket with peanut butter crackers, a vivid and unnatural orange, a crinkly wrap. A knee-high fridge stocked with icy juices, foil boxes, straws glued on. A female voice next door claimed she was still a human being, though I could not hear the reasons. When it was my turn, I answered right away, saying I knew where I was and why. No, I would not harm myself, surprised to be asked as I had never had the thought. Yes I knew where I was going next. Out the window and through shadow and streetlight, I saw how this building connected to the next. I was to follow a stripe painted on the wall. Someone would walk with me as well. I felt fine I said, and it was sort of true. Actually I felt nailed by one wrist to a desire to flee and by the other to a sincere longing for sleep. I was not in pain. Thank you. I felt like the very last note in a concert, the one that hovers as if it wants to linger, but is already over.”

We remember so little, We are certain of nothing. We long to perish into the absolute. Where is a mountain To spread its snowfields for us like a shawl? You might begin, The men who come to see me are not exactly lovers. Or,Seen at a distance the gazelle is blue. That’s just your way of cheering me up. You might begin, The quality of the telegram is vulnerable. Or even,The spirit of the telegram is virginal. By now I am ravenous. You might begin, Nothing’s more passionate than a train, Entering an enormous depot, Empty except for two lovers, irreconcilable, Parting.

for Yukio Mishima I didn’t write Etsuko, I sliced her open. She was carmine inside like a sea bass and empty. No viscera, nothing but color. I love you like that, boy. I pull the kimono down around your shoulders and kiss you. Then you let it fall open. Each time, I cut you a little and when you leave, I take the piece, broil it, dip it in ginger sauce and eat it. It burns my mouth so. You laugh, holding me belly-down with your body. So much hurting to get to this moment, when I’m beneath you, wanting it to go on and to end. At midnight, you say see you tonight and I answer there won’t be any tonight, but you just smile, swing your sweater over your head and tie the sleeves around your neck. I hear you whistling long after you disappear down the subway steps, as I walk back home, my whole body tingling. I undress and put the bronze sword on my desk beside the crumpled sheet of rice paper. I smooth it open and read its single sentence: I meant to do it. No. It should be common and feminine like I can’t go on sharing him, or something to imply that. Or the truth: that I saw in myself the five signs of the decay of the angel and you were holding on, watching and free, that I decided to go out with the pungent odor of this cold and consuming passion in my nose: death. Now, I’ve said it. That vulgar word that drags us down to the worms, sightless, predestined. Goddamn you, boy. Nothing I said mattered to you; that bullshit about Etsuko or about killing myself. I tear the note, then burn it. The alarm clock goes off. 5:45 A.M. I take the sword and walk into the garden. I look up. The sun, the moon, two round teeth rock together and the light of one chews up the other. I stab myself in the belly, wait, then stab myself again. Again. It’s snowing. I’ll turn to ice, but I’ll burn anyone who touches me. I start pulling my guts out, those red silk cords, spiraling skyward, and I’m climbing them past the moon and the sun, past darkness into white. I mean to live.

I We aren't serious when we're seventeen. —One fine evening, to hell with beer and lemonade, Noisy cafés with their shining lamps! We walk under the green linden trees of the park The lindens smell good in the good June evenings! At times the air is so scented that we close our eyes. The wind laden with sounds—the town isn't far— Has the smell of grapevines and beer . . . II —There you can see a very small patch Of dark blue, framed by a little branch, Pinned up by a naughty star, that melts In gentle quivers, small and very white . . . Night in June! Seventeen years old! —We are overcome by it all The sap is champagne and goes to our head . . . We talked a lot and feel a kiss on our lips Trembling there like a small insect . . . III Our wild heart moves through novels like Robinson Crusoe, —When, in the light of a pale street lamp, A girl goes by attractive and charming Under the shadow of her father's terrible collar . . . And as she finds you incredibly naïve, While clicking her little boots, She turns abruptly and in a lively way . . . —Then cavatinas die on your lips . . . IV You are in love. Occupied until the month of August. You are in love. —Your sonnets make Her laugh. All your friends go off, you are ridiculous. —Then one evening the girl you worship deigned to write to you . . . ! —That evening, . . . —you return to the bright cafés, You ask for beer or lemonade . . . —We're not serious when we are seventeen And when we have green linden trees in the park.

With her one horrid eye persistently unfastened, a vigilant bird watched my grandfather during the Great Depression use each evening of one whole year to wander his corn fields knowing this world is just one pig after another in one pen after another. Therefore, the bird heard him suppose, shouldn’t he with his best gun, machete, Buick, or rope terminate his acquaintance with the tiresome setup of breakfast-lunch-dinner-dawn-dusk-fall-winter-spring-summer- blah-blah-blah? But his girls were good-looking and made such fine pies, so the bird watched him live wretchedly until he died more naturally of cancer too soon to see his people become the dopefiends, doctor-haters, masturbators, insomniacs, sleep fanatics, shut-ins, and teetotalers the bird knew they would become, for the purpose of girls is to just ruin everything with wanton reproduction so that now now now it’s really relentless—how heavy his people got in their limbs and how torrential, thus, the frenzied wind, though beyond the eye of the bird is the small, ashen brain of the bird, and below that, a heart, I swear, through which come the iffy notes of this cruel song.

Nothing is nothing, although he would call me that,she was nothing. Those were his words, but his hand was lifting cigarettes in chains and bridges of ash-light. He said he didn't want his body to last. It wasn't a year I could argue against that kind of talk, so I cut the fowl killed on the farm a mile out—brown and silvery, wild— and put it over butter lettuce, lettuce then lime. I heated brandy in the saucepan, poured a strip of molasses slowly through the cold, slow as I'd seen a shaman pour pine tincture over the floor of my beaten house. She seemed to see my whole life by ordinance of some god who wanted me alive again. Burnt sage, blue smoke. Then sea salt shaken into the corners of violent sadness. She wrote my address across her chest to let everything listening know where my life was made. We waited, either forgetting what we were or becoming more brightly human in that pine, in her trance, in the lavender I set on the chipped sills, not a trance at all but my deliberate hand cutting from the yard part of what she required. Now wait longer, she said, and I did as I would when the molasses warmed over the pot enough to come into the brandy, to come into the night begun by small confessions— that this was just a rental, and mine just a floor, that the woman he loved was with another man, his mother mad, his apartment haunted in the crawl space. Then I told of the assault at daybreak between the houses. Heat, asphalt, all of it and my face toward the brick school where the apostolate studied first-century script and song. There must have been chanting, as it was on the hour. What we said was liturgy meant only for us and for that night. Not for anyone else to repeat, live by, believe. Never that. Our only theories were inside of our hands, flesh and land, body and prairie. I reached to smoke down his next-to-last, which he lit and made ready. The poultry like a war ration we ate all the way through. What we wished, we said. What we said, we found that night by these, and no other, means.

from Pia Arke's exhibition Arctic Hysteria at Greenland's National Museum & Archives, Nuuk, 2010 i. I am in my body. I am here, in front of you. I am the temperature in this room. I am undressed in my nudity; I am the light and shade you feel. I am more like other people than like you. I have before and after. I am my self, entirely and only. My outside and inside are continuous. I am muscle, organ, fluid, bone. I am monumental. You are the only one who sees me. ii. I am not naked as I am; I am naked as you see me. I am transparent, almost visible. I have a time and a place. I am tribal and exotic. I must always carry objects. You are heroic. I am a complete museum, the story of my own making. I am a mirror to you; you are reflected in the looking at me. At best, I mimic you. You write me. When you leave, I will no longer exist. iii. I am a single conscious point. I am indifferent. I am unself, like a photogram. I am prehistoric, before definition. Your body falls over me. I have depth and luminescence. I am neither here nor there; I have infinite extension. I live inside the lived world, the light and dark inside my head like dream substance. I am camera obscura, the room itself. I both adore and resist.

Like a bowerbird trailing a beakful of weeds Like prize ribbons for the very best The lover, producer Of another’s pleasure He whom her swollen lips await Might wing through any day of the decade A form of health insurance For which it is never too late Titanic, silver brush Hindenburg, of exploding cigars a climax The watery below, the fiery above Ashes of print between—pigment between If the crippled woman were to descend From her bed, her fortress beyond midnight Downstairs (nude/staircase) to the kitchen Naked to sit at the table (writing/thinking) She might hear the washer spin like a full orchestra Complete a cycle like a train crash Before the fiend would stare through the window Step smoothly into the kitchen, stop some clocks. Envy shapes a fig tree in one’s breast, That is, bluntly to say, a cancer, That is to say In a mind, a fertile windy field. A murdered child. Well then, fear, primarily of falling. Ebony surf toils on the beach, a glaze At the same moment I am (from a cliff) falling The kitchen fiend removes his Dior tie Places his hand over the woman’s And softly says: I am the lover. Now if the crippled woman began to dance To pirouette, to rumba Growling for her child Her burning page, the devil would be shamed (Materialism is not for everyone / Religion is The extension of politics by other means

Toe after toe, a snowing flesh, a gold of lemon, root and rind, she sifts in sunlight down the stairs with nothing on. Nor on her mind. We spy beneath the banister a constant thresh of thigh on thigh; her lips imprint the swinging air that parts to let her parts go by. One-woman waterfall, she wears her slow descent like a long cape and pausing on the final stair, collects her motions into shape.

On my birthday A crow guffaws, dirty man throwing the punch of his one joke. And now, nearer, a murder answers, chortling from the pale hill’s brow. From under my lashes’ wings they stretch clawed feet. There the unflappable years perch and stare. When I squint, when I grin, my new old face nearly hops off my old new face. Considering what’s flown, what might yet fly, I lean my chin on the palm where my half-cashed fortune lies.