1269 Arts and sciences poems

Your voice crawls across the dashboard of Grandma’s Dodge Dynasty on the way home from Lilydale First Baptist. You sing a cocktail of static and bass. Sound like you dressed to the nines: cowboy hat, fur coat & alligator boots. Sound like you lotion every tooth. You a walking discography, South Side griot, keeper of crackle & dust in the grooves. You fell in love with a handmade box of wires at 16 and been behind the booth ever since. From wbez to V103, you be the Coolest Gent, King of the Dusties. Your voice wafts down from the ceiling at the Hair Lab. You supply the beat for Kym to tap her comb to. Her brown fingers paint my scalp with white grease to the tunes of Al & Barry & Luther. Your voice: an inside-out yawn, the sizzle of hot iron on fresh perm, the song inside the blackest seashell washed up on a sidewalk in Bronzeville. You soundtrack the church picnic, trunk party, Cynthia’s 50th birthday bash, the car ride to school, choir, Checkers. Your voice stretch across our eardrums like Daddy asleep on the couch. Sound like Grandma’s sweet potato pie, sound like the cigarettes she hide in her purse for rough days. You showed us what our mommas’ mommas must’ve moved to. When the West Side rioted the day MLK died, you were audio salve to the burning city, people. Your voice a soft sermon soothing the masses, speaking coolly to flames, spinning black records across the airwaves, spreading the gospel of soul in a time of fire. Joycetta says she bruised her thumbs snappin’ to Marvin’s “Got to Give It Up” and I believe her.

Where dost thou careless lie, Buried in ease and sloth? Knowledge that sleeps doth die; And this security, It is the common moth That eats on wits and arts, and oft destroys them both. Are all th' Aonian springs Dried up? lies Thespia waste? Doth Clarius' harp want strings, That not a nymph now sings? Or droop they as disgrac'd, To see their seats and bowers by chatt'ring pies defac'd? If hence thy silence be, As 'tis too just a cause, Let this thought quicken thee: Minds that are great and free Should not on fortune pause; 'Tis crown enough to virtue still, her own applause. What though the greedy fry Be taken with false baites Of worded balladry, And think it poesy? They die with their conceits, And only piteous scorn upon their folly waits. Then take in hand thy lyre, Strike in thy proper strain, With Japhet's line aspire Sol's chariot for new fire, To give the world again; Who aided him will thee, the issue of Jove's brain. And since our dainty age Cannot endure reproof, Make not thyself a page To that strumpet, the stage, But sing high and aloof, Safe from the wolf's black jaw and the dull ass's hoof.

Come leave the loathéd stage, And the more loathsome age, Where pride and impudence in faction knit Usurp the chair of wit, Indicting and arraigning, every day, Something they call a play. Let their fastidious, vain Commission of the brain Run on, and rage, sweat, censure, and condemn: They were not made for thee, less thou for them. Say that thou pour’st ’em wheat, And they would acorns eat; ‘Twere simple fury, still thyself to waste On such as have no taste; To offer them a surfeit of pure bread, Whose appetites are dead; No, give them grains their fill, Husks, draff to drink, and swill; If they love lees, and leave the lusty wine, Envy them not, their palate’s with the swine. No doubt a moldy tale, Like Pericles, and stale As the shrive’s crusts, and nasty as his fish, Scraps out of every dish Thrown forth, and raked into the common tub, May keep up the Play Club. Broome’s sweepings do as well There as his master’s meal; For who the relish of these guests will fit Needs set them but the alms-basket of wit. And much good do’t ye then, Brave plush and velvet men Can feed on orts, and safe in your scene clothes, Dare quit upon your oaths The stagers, and the stage-wrights too (your peers) Of stuffing your large ears With rage of comic socks, Wrought upon twenty blocks; Which, if they’re torn, and foul, and patched enough, The gamesters share your guilt, and you their stuff. Leave things so prostitute, And take th’Alcaic lute; Or thine own Horace, or Anacreon’s lyre; Warm thee by Pindar’s fire; And though thy nerves be shrunk, and blood be cold, Ere years have made thee old, Strike that disdainful heat Throughout, to their defeat; As curious fools, and envious of thy stain, May, blushing, swear no palsy’s in thy brain. But when they hear thee sing The glories of thy King, His zeal to God, and his just awe of men, They may be blood-shaken, then Feel such a flesh-quake to possess their powers, That no tuned harp like ours, In sound of peace or wars, Shall truly hit the stars When they shall read the acts of Charles his reign, And see his chariot triumph ’bove his wain.

The steam box is used for bending   frames and planks in traditional boatbuilding. With a match I became a man who summoned diesel from the yellow caverns of a ten-gallon jug, called the flame now hissing out the hose at the small house of  water, that rusted drum from which travels an excruciating wetness — this is what makes the body otherwise, what makes it sing. To take that which has decided on a shape, and bend, without breaking, the lengthening fibers. To give the straight thing curve. To make of  the tree a song grown long in a linseed skin, the slick hot strake waiting to become parcel of  the round world again.

See! Their verses are laid as mosaic gold to gold gold to lapis lazuli white marble to porphyry stone shouldering stone, the dice polished alike, there is no cement seen and no gap between stones as the frieze strides to the impending apse: the rays of many glories forced to its focus forming a glory neither of stone nor metal, neither of words nor verses, but of the light shining upon no substance; a glory not made for which all else was made.

(A Pantoum) Of making many books there is no end, Though myriads have to deep oblivion gone; Each day new manuscripts are being penned, And still the ceaseless tide of ink flows on. Though myriads have to deep oblivion gone, New volumes daily issue from the press; And still the ceaseless tide of ink flows on— The prospect is disheartening, I confess. New volumes daily issue from the press; My pile of unread books I view aghast. The prospect is disheartening, I confess; Why will these modern authors write so fast? My pile of unread books I view aghast— Of course I must keep fairly up to date— Why will these modern authors write so fast? They seem to get ahead of me of late. Of course I must keep fairly up to date; The books of special merit I must read; They seem to get ahead of me of late, Although I skim them very fast indeed. The books of special merit I must read; And then the magazines come round again; Although I skim them very fast indeed, I can’t get through with more than eight or ten. And then the magazines come round again! How can we stem this tide of printer’s ink? I can’t get through with more than eight or ten— It is appalling when I stop to think. How can we stem this tide of printer’s ink? Of making many books there is no end. It is appalling when I stop to think Each day new manuscripts are being penned!

The poem of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice. It has not always had To find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script. Then the theatre was changed To something else. Its past was a souvenir. It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. It has To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and With meditation, speak words that in the ear, In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound Of which, an invisible audience listens, Not to the play, but to itself, expressed In an emotion as of two people, as of two Emotions becoming one. The actor is A metaphysician in the dark, twanging An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend, Beyond which it has no will to rise. It must Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

There is a little lightning in his eyes. Iron at the mouth. His brows ride neither too far up nor down. He is splendid. With a place to stand. Some glowing in the common blood. Some specialness within.

When the man behind the counter said, “You pay by the orifice,” what could we do but purchase them all? Ah, Sandy, you were clearly the deluxe doll, modish and pert in your plastic nurse whites, official hostess to our halcyon days, where you bobbed in the doorway of our dishabille apartment, a block downwind from the stockyards. Holding court on the corroded balcony, K. and I passed hash brownies, collecting change for the building’s monthly pool to predict which balcony would fall off next. That’s when K. was fucking M. and M. was fucking J., and even B. and I threw down once on the glass-speckled lawn, adrift in the headlights of his El Camino. Those were immortal times, Sandy! Coke wasn’t addictive yet, condoms prevented herpes and men were only a form of practice for the Russian novel we foolishly hoped our lives would become. Now it’s a Friday night, sixteen years from there. Don’t the best characters know better than to live too long? My estranged husband house-sits for a spoiled cockatoo while saving to buy his own place. My lover’s gone back to his gin and the farm-team fiancée he keeps in New York. What else to do but read Frank O’Hara to my tired three-year-old? When I put him to bed, he mutters “more sorry” as he turns into sleep. Tonight, I find you in a box I once marked “The Past.” Well, therapy’s good for some things, Sandy, but who’d want to forgive a girl like that? Frank says Destroy yourself if you don’t know! Deflated, you’re simply the smile that surrounds a hole. I don’t know anything.

In the story of my life there is a field filled with chicory, daisies, and mayflowers. It’s the field behind my childhood house. In summer, I used to spend hours lying in it looking at clouds before my mother brought us to the town pool where I spent some more hours swimming. In the other seasons I went to school. In the school there was a library. In the story of my life there is a book. The book was bound in rough green cloth. Its glossy pages smelled oddly like puke. The book told the story of two children, Johnnie and Jill, I think. They got lost in a deep forest, drawn in thick dark ink. They were brother-and-sister orphans. They met fantastical creatures. One was the goddess of spring, or was that in Botticelli’s picture that I saw in the same library in a book of art history for kids, old European art of course. The other kinds they did not want us to know about. The picture was magic and so was Johnnie and Jill though not a children’s classic. I don’t really remember the title. In the book the goddess of spring rescues the children in trouble and then — I can’t remember a thing. I’m sure there was a villain in the book, probably a woman, who practiced dark arts on a dark hill, so evil she wasn’t human. In the story of my life there is a hill that tamely rises above the field. We sledded there in winter. In spring our bikes wheeled down the hill dangerously. I walked on the hill this summer tamely, carefully, slowly, alongside my mother. It isn’t hard to say what had brought us there. We were old and middle-aged in the knife-like summer air. Slowly and tamely we walked and I remembered the book. It was called —Julie and John? I wanted another look. So what was the title? And was it an allegory? A Catholic one? (It was a Catholic school.) That would ruin the story. A story is only good if it’s made up but convinces you it’s true. Even better if one of the characters is someone who could be you. How else do you know who you are? I once asked an old strange friend: You only know you’re the person who’s with the people you love, in the end.