1269 Arts and sciences poems

Scrape the sun from the wall of  the sky. Cast the great nets of  autumn over the houses. Even the throat of  the lily is a dangerous inlet. Let the world stand wearily on the stoop of  the jail of  the world and the light of  the mind, that small lamp, pearl of  shine, let the night come to it, as iron filings to a magnet, mother.

1. OVERTURE ”Obviously there is much to be said for the conscious cultivation and extension of taste, but there is also something to be said for the functional reaction to artistic design (and honeysuckles) as normal elements of human existence.” —Albert Murray

There’s no description in the braided stone, the pear, the stone in the pear, the birchbark, bread hills on the snowfall tablecloth. The dog of work gnaws the day’s short bone, snarls a mountainside into lavender and green. In the mind where objects vanish, almost is all. Element of pitcher, sky, rockface, blank canvas plastic and vast in one off-center patch. To copy what’s invisible, to improvise a soul of things and remake solid life into fresh anxious unlifelike form.

Hold high the woof, dear friends, that we may see The cunning mixture of its colours rare. Nothing in nature purposely is fair,— Her beauties in their freedom disagree; But here all vivid dyes that garish be, To that tint mellowed which the sense will bear, Glow, and not wound the eye that, resting there, Lingers to feed its gentle ecstacy. Crimson and purple and all hues of wine, Saffron and russet, brown and sober green Are rich the shadowy depths of blue between; While silver threads with golden intertwine, To catch the glimmer of a fickle sheen,— All the long labour of some captive queen.

For me, biography is a lantern, burning in the midst of parenthetical opaqueness. In a sense, it is a ruse, a phantasmic meandering, brighter or dimmer, according to the ecletic happenstance of terror. Me, I’ve been sired in anomaly, in an imagery of brewing grenadine riddles, a parallel poesis spawned from curious seismographic molten. I say curious, because the original stalking arc has disappeared into the wilderness of an a priori blizzard, which gives birth to a level, like a portal of fire conjoined with the lightning field of mystery. I call it the poetic guardian dove, the hieratic alien wing. It is the non-local field, the non-particle acid, flowing into my cognitive iodine rays, into the vicious fires of my tarantella marshes. So I dance with vibration, with the solar arc spinning backward around the miraculous force of a double green horizon. Simultaneously, I escape the territorial, while remaining within the burning loops of my own momentary seizures, guarded by ferns, legs plowing land, the face and the mind guided by stars. So, I am a martyr of drills, of spates of specific lingual flooding, casting at times, a mist or a mirage, like a caravan of yaks, transporting tungsten and water. Conversely, to give a graph of dates, to single out a bevy of personal social lesions, would invert me, would turn me around a diurnal bundle of glass, staggered, with a less than fiery temperature, partially nulling my sensitivity to falling phonemic peppers, to the inclination towards victory which burns in the dawn above heaven. For me, this is the green locale, the pleroma of eternal solar essence, glinting, full of fabulous maelstrom diamonds, an empowered hegira of drift, of claustrophobic rainbow spectrums which empty themselves, and return to themselves, like having an image go out and return to itself, so that its power transmutes by the very energy of its looping; and I think of myself, the poet sending signals into mystery, and having them return to me with oneiric wings and spirals, so much so, that I forget my prosaic locale with its stultifying anchors, with its familial dotage and image reports, with its dates inscribed in trapezoidal feces. I am only concerned with simultaneity and height, with rays of monomial kindling, guiding the neo-cortex through ravens, into the ecstasy of x-rays and blackness.

About me young careless feet Linger along the garish street; Above, a hundred shouting signs Shed down their bright fantastic glow Upon the merry crowd and lines Of moving carriages below. Oh wonderful is Broadway — only My heart, my heart is lonely. Desire naked, linked with Passion, Goes trutting by in brazen fashion; From playhouse, cabaret and inn The rainbow lights of Broadway blaze All gay without, all glad within; As in a dream I stand and gaze At Broadway, shining Broadway — only My heart, my heart is lonely.

With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots, Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots; Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue, Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The last line should strike like a lover’s complaint. You should never see it coming. And you should never hear the end of it.

I held a jackhammer once. It matched me in height and weight and I planned destruction, ripped everything solid from the ground. The concrete was my prey, but it was the tool I fought to master, its metal body trembling beneath my hands. Or, perhaps, its electric heart was what shook me through my last held bones. The concrete, gone, the rented machinery, returned— and I wondered if Sisyphus had imagined a garden where the rock came from.