1269 Arts and sciences poems

We knew it would happen, one of the laws. And that it would be this sudden. Words become a chewing action of the jaws and mouth, unheard by the only other citizen there was on earth.

I haven’t remembered anything, only the names and that their dates have been replaced by fees toted up out of mischief: a whopping yellow sun, finesse swallowed hard, a scrapbook in pantyhose dawdling beside some Shreveport-like expanse. But now you see it, she’s supposed to call. Surely neither will converse, they merely tell, succumbing to a disorderly shelf life like Tampax in June. Salute the budding terminus where the East Side was. Can there be a way to redefine the tense behind its jaunts, the pubescent imagery a hand calls forth as, rippling, it is thrust into the brine? The phantom tugboat slips along in depths past Garbo’s awnings and the united glaze which wilts, harnessing dim signatories in the windows’ sarong. Do things go further in need as I could? Or are they immune? How else have I been taught to guess and then been told to know, because matter equals good? A silken light masks the entrance to the market proofs of time.

What I remember is a carhop on Pico hurrying Toward a blue Chevy, A crucifix dangling from its rearview mirror That jiggled as the driver brushed A revolver against it, in passing, before tucking it Behind his back & beginning to joke with her. What I remember Is the smooth arc the gun made & the way Jesus shimmied to the rhythm. • Someday I’ll go back to the place depicted By the painting, boarded over by the layers of paint And abandoned, And beneath the pastel yellows I’ll find The Bayside Motel & the little room With the thin, rumpled coverlet, And sit down, drinking nothing but the night air By the window, & wait for her to finish Dressing, one earring, then another, And wait until the objects in the room take back Their shapes in the dawn, And wait until Each rumpled crease in the sheets & pillowcase Is as clear as a gift again, & wait — At a certain moment, that room, then all the rooms Of the empty Bayside, Will turn completely into light. • I place a cup on the sill & listen for the faint Tock of china on wood, & ... That moment of light is already this one — Sweet, fickle, oblivious, & gone: My hand hurrying across the page to get there On time, that place Of  undoing — • Where the shriek of  the carhop’s laugh, And the complete faith of the martyr, as he spins & shimmies in the light, And the inextricable candor of doubt by which Diebenkorn, One afternoon, made his presence known In the yellow pastels, then wiped his knuckles with a rag — Are one — are the salt, the nowhere & the cold — The entwined limbs of  lovers & the cold wave’s sprawl.

I We thrill too strangely at the master's touch; We shrink too sadly from the larger self Which for its own completeness agitates And undetermines us; we do not feel— We dare not feel it yet—the splendid shame Of uncreated failure; we forget, The while we groan, that God's accomplishment Is always and unfailingly at hand. II Tumultuously void of a clean scheme Whereon to build, whereof to formulate, The legion life that riots in mankind Goes ever plunging upward, up and down, Most like some crazy regiment at arms, Undisciplined of aught but Ignorance, And ever led resourcelessly along To brainless carnage by drunk trumpeters. III To me the groaning of world-worshippers Rings like a lonely music played in hell By one with art enough to cleave the walls Of heaven with his cadence, but without The wisdom or the will to comprehend The strangeness of his own perversity, And all without the courage to deny The profit and the pride of his defeat. IV While we are drilled in error, we are lost Alike to truth and usefulness. We think We are great warriors now, and we can brag Like Titans; but the world is growing young, And we, the fools of time, are growing with it:— We do not fight to-day, we only die; We are too proud of death, and too ashamed Of God, to know enough to be alive. V There is one battle-field whereon we fall Triumphant and unconquered; but, alas! We are too fleshly fearful of ourselves To fight there till our days are whirled and blurred By sorrow, and the ministering wheels Of anguish take us eastward, where the clouds Of human gloom are lost against the gleam That shines on Thought's impenetrable mail. VI When we shall hear no more the cradle-songs Of ages—when the timeless hymns of Love Defeat them and outsound them—we shall know The rapture of that large release which all Right science comprehends; and we shall read, With unoppressed and unoffended eyes, That record of All-Soul whereon God writes In everlasting runes the truth of Him. VII The guerdon of new childhood is repose:— Once he has read the primer of right thought, A man may claim between two smithy strokes Beatitude enough to realize God's parallel completeness in the vague And incommensurable excellence That equitably uncreates itself And makes a whirlwind of the Universe. VIII There is no loneliness:—no matter where We go, nor whence we come, nor what good friends Forsake us in the seeming, we are all At one with a complete companionship; And though forlornly joyless be the ways We travel, the compensate spirit-gleams Of Wisdom shaft the darkness here and there, Like scattered lamps in unfrequented streets. IX When one that you and I had all but sworn To be the purest thing God ever made Bewilders us until at last it seems An angel has come back restigmatized,— Faith wavers, and we wonder what there is On earth to make us faithful any more, But never are quite wise enough to know The wisdom that is in that wonderment. X Where does a dead man go?—The dead man dies; But the free life that would no longer feed On fagots of outburned and shattered flesh Wakes to a thrilled invisible advance, Unchained (or fettered else) of memory; And when the dead man goes it seems to me 'T were better for us all to do away With weeping, and be glad that he is gone. XI So through the dusk of dead, blank-legended, And unremunerative years we search To get where life begins, and still we groan Because we do not find the living spark Where no spark ever was; and thus we die, Still searching, like poor old astronomers Who totter off to bed and go to sleep, To dream of untriangulated stars. XII With conscious eyes not yet sincere enough To pierce the glimmered cloud that fluctuates Between me and the glorifying light That screens itself with knowledge, I discern The searching rays of wisdom that reach through The mist of shame's infirm credulity, And infinitely wonder if hard words Like mine have any message for the dead. XIII I grant you friendship is a royal thing, But none shall ever know that royalty For what it is till he has realized His best friend in himself. 'T is then, perforce, That man's unfettered faith indemnifies Of its own conscious freedom the old shame, And love's revealed infinitude supplants Of its own wealth and wisdom the old scorn. XIV Though the sick beast infect us, we are fraught Forever with indissoluble Truth, Wherein redress reveals itself divine, Transitional, transcendent. Grief and loss, Disease and desolation, are the dreams Of wasted excellence; and every dream Has in it something of an ageless fact That flouts deformity and laughs at years. XV We lack the courage to be where we are:— We love too much to travel on old roads, To triumph on old fields; we love too much To consecrate the magic of dead things, And yieldingly to linger by long walls Of ruin, where the ruinous moonlight That sheds a lying glory on old stones Befriends us with a wizard's enmity. XVI Something as one with eyes that look below The battle-smoke to glimpse the foeman's charge, We through the dust of downward years may scan The onslaught that awaits this idiot world Where blood pays blood for nothing, and where life Pays life to madness, till at last the ports Of gilded helplessness be battered through By the still crash of salvatory steel. XVII To you that sit with Sorrow like chained slaves, And wonder if the night will ever come, I would say this: The night will never come, And sorrow is not always. But my words Are not enough; your eyes are not enough; The soul itself must insulate the Real, Or ever you do cherish in this life— In this life or in any life—repose. XVIII Like a white wall whereon forever breaks Unsatisfied the tumult of green seas, Man's unconjectured godliness rebukes With its imperial silence the lost waves Of insufficient grief. This mortal surge That beats against us now is nothing else Than plangent ignorance. Truth neither shakes Nor wavers; but the world shakes, and we shriek. XIX Nor jewelled phrase nor mere mellifluous rhyme Reverberates aright, or ever shall, One cadence of that infinite plain-song Which is itself all music. Stronger notes Than any that have ever touched the world Must ring to tell it—ring like hammer-blows, Right-echoed of a chime primordial, On anvils, in the gleaming of God's forge. XX The prophet of dead words defeats himself: Whoever would acknowledge and include The foregleam and the glory of the real, Must work with something else than pen and ink And painful preparation: he must work With unseen implements that have no names, And he must win withal, to do that work, Good fortitude, clean wisdom, and strong skill. XXI To curse the chilled insistence of the dawn Because the free gleam lingers; to defraud The constant opportunity that lives Unchallenged in all sorrow; to forget For this large prodigality of gold That larger generosity of thought,— These are the fleshly clogs of human greed, The fundamental blunders of mankind. XXII Forebodings are the fiends of Recreance; The master of the moment, the clean seer Of ages, too securely scans what is, Ever to be appalled at what is not; He sees beyond the groaning borough lines Of Hell, God's highways gleaming, and he knows That Love's complete communion is the end Of anguish to the liberated man. XXIII Here by the windy docks I stand alone, But yet companioned. There the vessel goes, And there my friend goes with it; but the wake That melts and ebbs between that friend and me Love's earnest is of Life's all-purposeful And all-triumphant sailing, when the ships Of Wisdom loose their fretful chains and swing Forever from the crumbled wharves of Time.

and then there are the one-hit zombies cursed to an eternity of Monday nights who runs our music does not make it controls manufacture and marketing of rhythm schemes on and fixes the charts. it’s polyphonic from the dark of the chitlin to solid gold dawn doublecrossed over a love come down after the plunge sloshing around in limbo that too sweet gospel splash

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Is worth any number of old ladies. A grandmother hung from a cliff like a tense moment in an action movie and the Ode, speaking itself with its hand on one heart, steadfastly refused to save her, in fact it did that thing where it ground each finger out with a motorcycle boot and then ate its cigarette for emphasis, whooping; some old-ass bitch was in pussy church when the Öde, now spelling itself with an umlaut, swung its urn at the back of her head, really clocking her; till the violets in her church hat grew from the floor and won a third-place prize for consciousness; the Ode is pushing nanas off bridges, detonating them with dynamite, tying them to railroad tracks with squeaky young rope, pouring big glugs into them out of the skull-and-crossbones bottle, the Ode is checking its pocketwatch, which points always to death-to-old-ladies o’clock, it is shrieking ugh you’re like one hundred and your breath smells exactly like horse medicine ho , the Ode is blasting holes in them, is laying them out in the potpourri aisle, is stabbing them with those icicles they always said were dangerous, the Ode means ill to all of them, the Ode is worth any number    ... and the worst is I believe it. The worst is I will become one, without having written anything like the Ode on a Grecian Urn, and sit in long rows along with my kind, till there the Ode comes striding toward me, my necessary death at the ready, my pulse like black grapes at its fingertips, saying, “Fear not, it will be fast, the forgetting of great poems will fly through you in bullets”; beauty is truth, and truth    ... but already I am losing it, all I know is that the world is falling away, and you won’t believe what it is wearing, the ridiculous pantsuit of me, a old lady, crumpled hopelessly at the crotch, a flower valiant in its little butthole — all the vital syllables are being erased — its space-age fabric now seen for what it is: an embarrassment, my name is turning into Edna, Myrtle, Dorcas, my descendants find my peppermints disgusting, the urn is approaching to scatter me over a landscape that is heaven on earth, and in the feet of the poem I am running — in mad pursuit, and struggle to escape — chased as if I am worth one million, Pearl, Opal, Ruby, Coral, until I am caught by the feeble arm, and because it is true I am telling the Ode: you stood in me like a spine, put poppies behind my eyes, just the fact of you, that he took one raw spring to set you down instead of going out to tip heifers, tweak noses, or sexually harass huge curvy vases, you were for me too, though they would trade me in all my Beulahs, have lined me up to enter that land in my turn, you let me memorize your most satiny parts and repeat them in hospital waiting rooms, first to myself, and then almost out loud, mine, mine, the world’s, all mine, something to say in the face of tall sickness as I quietly try to unwrap hard candies, as I tug down tissues from my sleeve, because it is true I am telling you, Ode, that I had a throat and you boiled in it, and the Ode is murmuring almost gently, “But do you like my ending? Some people don’t like my ending,” I don’t, I never did, I thought it was so overwrought, though now that I’m here myself why not if it has to be this way then better put a bright red cough on all that white

A-bomb is how it begins with a big bang on page one, a calculator of sorts whose centrifuge begets bedouin, bamboozle, breakdance, and berserk, one of my mother's favorite words, hard knock clerk of clich é s that she is, at the moment going ape

I As once, if not with light regard I read aright that gifted bard (Him whose school above the rest His loveliest Elfin Queen has blest), One, only one unrivaled fair Might hope the magic girdle wear, At solemn tourney hung on high, The wish of each love-darting eye; Lo! to each other nymph in turn applied, As if, in air unseen, some hov'ring hand, Some chaste and angel-friend to virgin-fame, With whispered spell had burst the starting band, It left unblessed her loathed dishonoured side; Happier, hopeless fair, if never Her baffled hand with vain endeavour Had touched that fatal zone to her denied! Young Fancy thus, to me divinest name, To whom, prepared and bathed in Heav'n, The cest of amplest power is giv'n, To few the godlike gift assigns, To gird their blessed, prophetic loins, And gaze her visions wild, and feel unmixed her flame! II The band, as fairy legends say, Was wove on that creating day, When He, who called with thought to birth Yon tented sky, this laughing earth, And dressed with springs, and forests tall, And poured the main engirting all, Long by the loved enthusiast wooed, Himself in some diviner mood, Retiring, sate with her alone, And placed her on his sapphire throne; The whiles, the vaulted shrine around, Seraphic wires were heard to sound; Now sublimest triumph swelling, Now on love and mercy dwelling; And she, from out the veiling cloud, Breathed her magic notes aloud: And thou, thou rich-haired youth of morn, And all thy subject life was born! The dang'rous Passions kept aloof, Far from the sainted growing woof; But near it sate ecstatic Wonder, List'ning the deep applauding thunder; And Truth, in sunny vest arrayed, By whose the tarsel's eyes were made; All the shad'wy tribes of Mind, In braided dance their murmurs joined; And all the bright uncounted powers Who feed on Heav'n's ambrosial flowers. Where is the bard, whose soul can now Its high presuming hopes avow? Where he who thinks, with rapture blind, This hallowed work for him designed? III High on some cliff, to Heav'n up-piled, Of rude access, of prospect wild, Where, tangled round the jealous steep, Strange shades o'erbrow the valleys deep, And holy Genii guard the rock, Its glooms embrown, its springs unlock, While on its rich ambitious head, An Eden, like his own, lies spread: I view that oak the fancied glades among, By which as Milton lay, his evening ear, From many a cloud that dropped ethereal dew, Nigh sphered in Heav'n its native strains could hear: On which that ancient trump he reached was hung; Thither oft, his glory greeting, From Waller's myrtle shades retreating, With many a vow from Hope's aspiring tongue, My trembling feet his guiding steps pursue; In vain— such bliss to one alone Of all the sons of soul was known, And Heav'n and Fancy, kindred powers, Have now o'erturn'd th'inspiring bowers, Or curtained close such scene from every future view.

Who gave thee, O Beauty, The keys of this breast,— Too credulous lover Of blest and unblest? Say, when in lapsed ages Thee knew I of old; Or what was the service For which I was sold? When first my eyes saw thee, I found me thy thrall, By magical drawings, Sweet tyrant of all! I drank at thy fountain False waters of thirst; Thou intimate stranger, Thou latest and first! Thy dangerous glances Make women of men; New-born, we are melting Into nature again. Lavish, lavish promiser, Nigh persuading gods to err! Guest of million painted forms, Which in turn thy glory warms! The frailest leaf, the mossy bark, The acorn’s cup, the raindrop’s arc, The swinging spider’s silver line, The ruby of the drop of wine, The shining pebble of the pond, Thou inscribest with a bond In thy momentary play, Would bankrupt nature to repay. Ah, what avails it To hide or to shun Whom the Infinite One Hath granted his throne? The heaven high over Is the deep’s lover; The sun and sea, Informed by thee, Before me run And draw me on, Yet fly me still, As Fate refuses To me the heart Fate for me chooses. Is it that my opulent soul Was mingled from the generous whole; Sea-valleys and the deep of skies Furnished several supplies; And the sands whereof I’m made Draw me to them, self-betrayed? I turn the proud portfolio Which holds the grand designs Of Salvator, of Guercino, And Piranesi’s lines. I hear the lofty paeans Of the masters of the shell, Who heard the starry music And recount the numbers well; Olympian bards who sung Divine Ideas below, Which always find us young And always keep us so. Oft in streets or humblest places, I detect far-wandered graces, Which, from Eden wide astray, In lowly homes have lost their way. Thee gliding through the sea of form, Like the lightning through the storm, Somewhat not to be possessed, Somewhat not to be caressed, No feet so fleet could ever find, No perfect form could ever bind. Thou eternal fugitive, Hovering over all that live, Quick and skilful to inspire Sweet, extravagant desire, Starry space and lily-bell Filling with thy roseate smell, Wilt not give the lips to taste Of the nectar which thou hast. All that’s good and great with thee Works in close conspiracy; Thou hast bribed the dark and lonely To report thy features only, And the cold and purple morning Itself with thoughts of thee adorning; The leafy dell, the city mart, Equal trophies of thine art; E’en the flowing azure air Thou hast touched for my despair; And, if I languish into dreams, Again I meet the ardent beams. Queen of things! I dare not die In Being’s deeps past ear and eye; Lest there I find the same deceiver. And be the sport of Fate forever. Dread Power, but dear! if God thou be, Unmake me quite, or give thyself to me!