1269 Arts and sciences poems

The first time I write my full name Jacqueline Amanda Woodson without anybody's help on a clean white page in my composition notebook, I know if I wanted to I could write anything. Letters becoming words, words gathering meaning, becoming thoughts outside my head becoming sentences written by Jacqueline Amanda Woodson

For Grandfather, in Bangkok I can tell you, sweeping the several jigsaw lizards away from your casket, away from their expert invasions, kneeling by the order of our births alongside the mother-of-pearl mosaics, the family at your death keeps to form, having to act out that love of endings. I can say the little I know of how you lived is your patient gaze in old photographs, surrounded by three generations, most of the spindling offspring back from the States or Australia or wherever they’d been taken, children barely known but abided on holidays. Today I’m told we have to place pennies in the dead man’s mouth to remind us of the portions left behind. You pay the debt, someone says,you give your something solid back, push your currency up against the open, up against the father tongue. It’s the formal silence we love, the hush that’s planned, the good answer, monks, boyish and newly shorn, who know to whip your burial cloth exactly three times over the altar flame to purify countless threads. Who know when to kneel, when to back away from the casket. The casket itself carved patiently, inlaid with the images, portions left behind of silver shrunken disciples, each framed to each then framed again by squares of alabaster scrollwork whittled into black wood: the whole teak surface worried, Grandfather, with carpenter’s gold, splintered, then resplintered, puzzled with lapis. The eastern window’s been slivered open, to make the sun stab the craftmen’s metallic fretwork. The mourners too, suddenly embossed, become dozens shifting to kneel. When a few clouds eclipse the sun, wiping away the borders, the frame and scrimshaw, so that we stand briefly in the room’s darkened largeness, next to me someone whispers, how your vessel is rented, a work to be given back.

On rain washed paper dried, ink still blurs. But all words are stains. The paper’s rippled lunar, mountain and crater, and

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations 1 Cloven Cloven Divided.About the title. The book Crowds and Power(Masse und Macht[1960], translated from German) was written by Elias Canetti; it is a study of how crowd behavior (ranging from religious congregations to mob violence) relates to obedience to state rule. Canetti (1905-1994) was a Bulgarian born novelist, playwright, and non-fiction writer who wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. The second section of this poem, in italics, is a long quotation/translation from this book , we are incorporate incorporate United in one body. Compare part of one petition from the Book of Common Prayer: “and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son” (from The Order for the Administration of The Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion). , our wounds simple but mysterious. We have some wherewithal to bide our time on earth. Endurance is fantastic Fantastic Imaginative or fanciful; remote from reality. ; ambulances battling at intersections, the city intolerably en fête en fête French for being festive, perhaps being dressed in festive attire . My reflexes are words themselves rather than standard flexures flexures Acts of bending, such as bowing or kneeling of civil power. In all of this Cassiopeia's Cassiopeia’s Cassiopeia is both a star constellation in the northern sky, and in Greek mythology an Ethiopian queen and the mother of Andromeda; a beautiful woman, but whose vanity and arrogance led to her downfall. John Milton refers to Cassiopeia in Il Penseroso: “Or that starr’d Ethiop queen that strove / To set her beauty’s praise above / The sea nymphs, and their powers offended” (lines 19-21). a blessing as is steady Orion Orion Orion is both the easily recognized star constellation and in Greek mythology a hunter. beloved of poets beloved of poets A list of poems naming Orion includes: Milton’s Paradise Lost , Tennyson’s Locksley Hall , Teasdale’s “ Winter Stars ” , Pickthall’s “ Stars ” , Eliot’s “ Sweeney among the Nightingales ” , and Frost’s “ The Star-splitter .” . Quotidian Quotidian Daily, everyday natures ours for the time being I do not know how we should be absolved Absolved To declare someone free from blame, guilt, or responsibility; also, in Christian theology, to remit or forgive someone for a sin. or what is fate. 2 Fame is not fastidious about the lips Fame is not fastidious about the lips In A Treatise of Civil Power(2007), Geoffrey Hill notes: “section 2 is a paragraph from Elias Canetti’s chapter on ‘Fame’, transposed, with slight changes of wording, into strophic form.” For more on this book by Canetti, see the note about the title above. which spread it. So long as there are mouthsto reiterate the one name it does notmatter whose they are.The fact that to the seeker after famethey are indistinguishable from each otherand are all counted as equal shows that thispassion has its origin in the experienceof crowd manipulation. Names collecttheir own crowds. They are greedy, live their ownseparate lives, hardly at all connectedwith the real natures of the men who bear them. 3 But hear this: that which is difficult preserves democracy; you pay respect to the intelligence of the citizen. Basics are not condescension. Some tyrants make great patrons. Let us observe this and pass on. Certain directives parody at your own risk. Tread lightly with personal dignity and public image. Safeguard the image of the common man the common man There is another version of this poem, printed in Geoffrey Hill’s book A Treatise of Civil Power(2007), with a fourth section added. .

“Breadth. Circle. Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there are No rhymes

“Are they real?” We have pages of kitchen utensils and books and candlesticks and nibs, but the charcoal pencil and new sketchpad are squat as aubergines in her hands in front of this display. With bad weather forecast and light silting up in cramped windows, we are the only visitors. The year settles in a corner of the room, has removed its white gloves, tip by tip, and set to one side its summer purse of bibelots and sheen. Half-term of her final year, we are sightseers intent on moors. In the morning, her windcheater and red wellies will bestow the dust of summer festivals upon sullen, wind-soaked sheep. We will park, and walk ourselves into the final, cutting rain between pages of her favorite book. She wants to go all the way to Top Withens, or the house they say must have been Top Withens, given its loneliness and set. But now is artifacts and souvenirs: a perfume with too much musk in it, a jar of damson jam which we probably won’t open until past its sell-by date. We are buying the word “damson.” And we are buying time. “Are they real?” she asks me, and I watch her reckon the distance between what should and should never be seen. We have fallen short. She draws, and what she draws is rain falling slant inside the bedroom; the bed as a box of leaves and stones and, within the display case, she hangs from the clothes rail, little moons. On the mannequin, water lilies stand in for morning dress, and the backdrop is marbled in what looks to me like veins and arteries. But when I flick through the sketchpad in the B&B, all the pages, what is left of them, are clean. Next day, she leaves it in the car. When she moves away, she will leave it again, a sketchpad with no name on it and only the faintest traces of where she made skies of darned linen, and unfastened every stitch.

I “At odds again,” hands moving out of the shadows. And now, now everything seems definite, discrete, fingers webbed with sunlight the tree lets through, arms still in their own time, circling, catch up, catch hold at the wrists, like cell chains in a watchcrystal completing themselves. Together again. Shoulders, torso, each one of us one, once more. It is hard to imagine minutes just past. II “At odds again,” hands moving against the wind like loose flapping things, washcloths, words long frayed with careless use. You wanted to say it was beginning to bother you, beginning to wish, wondering if thought in broken light could ever touch itself, reassemble itself. The King, our promise, broken, the sword we imagined gone, hovers like leafmold in the light. Say it, then, the stain of things remains. III “At odds again,” elbow cupped into wet leaves. After love, there are moments of clutter, and no amount of practice will teach you to regard them as anything more than what you lean against catching its buried chill. Keep your fancy to yourself; facts do not fade but are momentarily obscured, the work of hands, touch and its out- come, the absence of touch, and distance, the inevitable space between, shapes all our limitations. IV “At odds again,” knee raised slightly, sunlight and shade, patchwork coverlet. Bits and pieces, the story of each thing connected, end to end, this instant extended in every direction. Not a thing in space or things in spaces or spaces between what space seems occupied for this moment, the next. We are not snowstorms of ourselves, spindrift and curl. The whorl of action is a template in time: the casual shifting of leaves, hands moving, the certain flex of possibility.

We’re all pagans and shamans and clap your hands now we won’t stop the beat We believe in divine healing and we hate to see that evening sun go down We know when the sight of our women dressed in white each ritual night, is touching, hypnotizes The animals blush and split for us as revival, as revealed to themselves These are triumphant women. Even Sister Fame hiding out in the alley turning tricks and singing verses from the undid scripture, is touching Thank you jesus, thank you jesus, that you jesus, baby, is that you, she mutters up high between rocks and lace — his eagerness — it was all night long Sometimes he’d interrupt a recording session to tell us about his early Motown days or expand on his views of   Heaven and Hell One time he was saying how important it was to love one’s father. Do you love yours? I asked him Why don’t you tell him Why don’t you tell your father, he said I will if you do You go first

Where does such sadness in wood come from? How could longing live in these wires? The box looks like the most fragile coffin tuned for sound. And laid across the knees of this woman it looks less like a baby nursed than some symbolic Pietà, and the stretched body on her lap yields modalities of lament and blood, yields sacrifice and sliding chants of grief that dance and dance toward a new measure, a new threshold, a new instant and new year which we always celebrate by remembering the old and by recalling the lost and honoring those no longer here to strike these strings like secrets of the most satisfying harmonies, as voices join in sadness and joy and tell again what we already know, have always known but forget, from way back in the farthest cove, from highest on the peaks of love.

I turn around. I feel Monday’s well-shaven face lightly caress my left shoulder most cherished part most crucial here and now