1269 Arts and sciences poems

CV Not-Orpheus is singing   He sings his nothing   He sings his night He sings all the names   The name of nothing   The only name    Since long ago   He didn’t know it   And knew it in his night All things sing   All names sing   Every tonal difference, every sound   All music in its destruction   In its sublation   Toward which point? The mountain of nothing hovers   Before it crushes us   With its night   With its song In the evening I walked through town with you, Dearest, along the river A clear cold spring evening, the half-moon shone   As if walking in a foreign city Though I recognized parts of it   You said it was almost like walking in Prague, where we would have been if my mother hadn’t fallen ill When we stood by one corner of the Hotel Svea, where I played in a dance band in 1957, the huge flock of jackdaws, in the trees by the bastion near the castle, flew out over the river, in micropolyphonic conversation    As in a piece by Ligeti That night I dreamed I crossed a bridge spanning the river, now very broad The long bridge was swaying, huge ocean swells entering the river from the sea I walked with a girl, kissed her on the mouth, on the opposite bank In the morning you came into my bed, Dear, we slinked like teenagers, so my mother wouldn’t hear us, where she slept, in the room outside ours   She’s already much better I look at my face in the bathroom mirror   Will I manage to go out into the Brain Trucks pass   Traffic goes on, in the great exchange of goods Gulls, trees, people   The degree of virtuality in different goods, the phantasms also in what we eat, conceptions of origin, contents, effects Fear    Cultivated tastes    We are in the immediacy of memory    Only in a flash of astonishment can memory be broken   But even lightning is informed    I look at the magical diagrams of Giordano Bruno, read his texts   See that all this is exactly as in Jung, fundamental magical forms, for guiding the divine, the unknown within the soul   Also the similarity with tantric forms Yes, that’s how it is, I think, both Freud and Jung are magicians, the difference in rationality is only marginal, Jung’s a little older, Freud’s more modern, a continuation of Descartes, developed later in Spinoza’s pneumatic model for the passions, and yet both are found, subsumed in Bruno’s love-flow, the lineage backward, the tantric flow, also Plato’s Diotima, her flow . . . Hölderlin saw the stream of people in dark water, streaming over the ledges in the human-geological world, the levels of the abyss,   Para- dise’s various degrees of stasis What use can I make of these magical forms? I’m no magician    And yet I acknowledge their power, also within my self   If they prevail, sovereignty is crushed   Libero arbitrio   There the forms also break down The stream of love breaks down    Fluid lightning    The flash of vibrating being But also the flash of darkness   The light of Beatrice’s eyes, their lightning flash   How am I to understand this? How to understand unknowing   That I do not!

A tribute The elephant's trunk uncurling From the lightning flashes In the clouds was Marie Antoinette, As usual trumpeting. The greedy suction Was her tornado vacuuming across the golden Kansas flatness. Meanwhile, the count was talking to the swan. The swan liked what he was saying and got Right out of the pond. Meanwhile, grown men in Afghanistan. The count had fought in Algeria. Meanwhile, neon in Tokyo. Madame la Comtesse waved to us from the top step, Waved to her count, their swan, their ornamental pond,et moi. We were a towering cornucopia Of autumn happiness And gourmandise rotating counterclockwise, Backwards toward the guillotine. I kept a rainbow as a pet and grandly Walked the rainbow on a leash. I exercised it evenings together with the cheetah, A Thorstein Veblen moment of conspicuous consumption: A dapper dauphin in a T-shirt that said FRED Parading with his pets decked out in T-shirts that said FRED'S. I left my liver in the Cher. I ate my heart out en Berry. We drank and ate France between the wars, And every morning couldn't wait. It felt sunshiny in the shadow of the château. And when the rainbow leapt from there to here, It landed twenty years away from the Cher. The place it landed was the Persian Gulf. It landed twinkling stardust where I'm standing in my life With one-hump Marie Antoinette, my wife, Who resembles that disarming camel yesterday. In fact, the camel yesterday was smitten. She left the other camels to come over. You have a lovely liquid wraparound eye. She stood there looking at me sideways. They feed their racing camels caviar in Qatar. The ruler of Dubai has said that he will try to buy Versailles. A refrigerated ski slope, five stories high, Lives improbably inside a downtown shopping mall in Dubai. Arab men, wearing sneakers under their robes, hold hands. Faceless black veils stop shopping to watch through the glass. Seeing the skiers emphasizes the desert, Like hearing far-off thunder at a picnic. Both the word thunder and the word picnic are of course Arabic. Indeed, Arabic was the language of French aristocrats Before the Terror, bad body odor perfumed. It is the language of the great Robert Frost poems, Which have the suicide bomber's innocence Walking safely past the checkpoint into the crowd. They pay payola to Al Qaeda to stay away from Doha. The emir was in his counting-house, counting out his oil and gas. Another sunny Sunni day in the UAE! A candidate for president Who wants to manumit our oil-dependent nation First has to get the message to every oily girl and boy To just say no to up and down and in and out, Labanotation Of moaning oil rigs extracting oil joy. My fellow Americans, I see a desert filled with derricks Pumping up and down but never satisfied: Obsessional hydraulics and Jimi Hendrix has hysterics. I smash my guitar to bits on stage and that's all, folks! It isn't. I contemplate the end of the world. It isn't. I have my croissant and café and the Trib and walk the rainbow Around the block. The young North African hipsters in the bitter banlieues Contemplate the end of the world. I contemplate the end of the world but in my case It's not. There are still things to buy. I walk the rainbow in the dark. The world is the kiosk where I get my Herald Tribune. The world is my local café where my café au lait is quadroon. I go to the strange little statue of Pierre Mendès-France In the Jardin du Luxembourg, in Paris, France. I make a pilgrimage to it. My quaint political saint and I visit. The young North African hipsters in the bitter banlieues Contemplate the end of the world, which isn't The end of the world, though yes, quite true, In Algeria and Afghanistan Jihad is developing a dirty nuclear bomb That smells like frangipani in flower To keep Frangipani in power. Ayatollah Frangipani has returned from his long exile in France To annihilate vice. I stomp the campfire out and saddle up my loyal Mayflower— Who is swifter than a life is brief under the stars! My prize four-wheel-drive with liquid wraparound eyes! We ski the roller coaster ocean's up and down dunes. We reach land at last and step on Plymouth Rock.

“There is no muse of translation,” the translator reminds as he struggles with Pindar’s victory odes, and what he means is that the imagery is overwhelming: the hissing of snakes as Medusa’s sisters mourn her death, the baby Iamos “lying on a bed of yellow and purple violets,” Heracles with his baby hands strangling the two serpents sent “to devour him on the day of his birth” so every translator must beware of “rank transplantation.” Just imagine, if one were to translate the line as “Forge your tongue on the anvil of truth.” How ridiculous that admonition to a king. Better to transpose to the vague modern, though Pindar “perversely, from our point of view—often seems to relish... the concrete image,” and it’s just there that I think perhaps all being is translation; the child I was at the kitchen table, translating my mother into my father, my father into my mother; each one’s “inviolate honey” becoming the “blameless venom” of the other. So now I too prefer the naked tongue, even pained and writing, caught in hammer and tongs, flexed and torqued upon the anvil, until the metal turns mercurial, quick, spilling into and out of the shape of everything that is. For all day, while that pair of grey-eyed serpents feeds the abandoned child on honey, and the e-mail box fills with a multitude of voices debating the distinctions of the hoaxes of authorship—the pseudonym, the heteronym, all the masks we can put on—I have trembled because of my tongue. Because it insisted upon saying I love you. So it waits and waits for some word from you. It’s late in the afternoon when you finally reply and then to the quote I sent to a list. I read obliquely, wondering if I should hope because you say you’re thinking of Shakespeare’s sonnets (the beloved and the lover’s love) or if I’m lost to the shadows you’re going off to dispel with a cup of coffee, that “best” at the end of your letter, my allotment from now on. Is it too much love or too little that I have translated into being? Oh by now I’m mistyping forget your tongue upon the anvil that the tongue itself has made.

On the tip of a hill, the silhouette is of something not of this world, the body silent in the birth of another shadow, swelling still among stars & veins. The sun dropping below the mountains left hardly any light, except what glimmers on the membrane & slips into the high grass. Alone, I pulled over to the side of 81 where semis’ blowing horns descend beyond the sloped field. Pieces of barbed wire snapped from the line. I stepped through the fence, its blood-colored rust rubbed into my hands. For a moment, it is something that stays with me, like a memory that does not give up easily. I try wiping my hands onto my jeans, but nothing. It is anything it wants to be—calf, half-life, angel—its fur a glaze of cricket sounds & cool air, a thing of stars burnt into hooves, a haze, & I stood there, not knowing whether it would be right to touch the one not breathing, its nose drying in the grass next to my hands, grit in the creases & burning now with the dust of splinters. Like flies, my fingers hover over the dead face.

A clamor, in the distance. A crowd running under the rain beating down, between the canvases the sea wind set clattering. A man passes crying something. What is he saying? What he knows! What he has seen! I make out his words. Ah, I almost understand! I took refuge in a museum. Outside the great wind mixed with water reigns alone from now on, shaking the glass panes. In each painting, I think, it’s as if  God were giving up on finishing the world. Translated from the French

Must I, in this question I am asking, include myself Asking it? Must I include my face— My face that I cannot see—through which I speak This question about my eyes, about the field Of vision, in which my hands press down these letters Unattached to my arms? The sunlight Comes in the window and lights up my hands As they work. The world is not being kind But there is the sensation of kindness. There is an appeal to a rule when we realize a term Behaves uncomfortably. God falls down Into grammar and says

It must be somewhere, the original harmony, somewhere in great nature, hidden. Is it in the furious infinite, in distant stars’ orbits, is it in the sun’s scorn, in a tiny flower, in treegossip, in heartmusic’s mothersong or in tears? It must be somewhere, immortality, somewhere the original harmony must be found: how else could it infuse the human soul, that music?

A sycamore grove, and in its limbs the orchestra played Má vlast, so I saw boughs bouncing and tuxedo legs swinging sap-spotted above the splayed blades of the ground feathered black in moss, in the sweat of the set sun, and the players’ faces where moths roosted, where leaf-points drew water-stripes on brows and eyelids, their hands that stirred in pollen like a fog, were masked by birds’ nests and bows and flaking vines. That you were last to climb down, trumpet tied to your back with blue twine, is the only thing I believe in, and after you landed, drifting through a stream, in a mat of orange needles, you whistled to what light could float through the leaves’ screen and canopy, diffuse like tracing tissue, a scrum of benday dots, and not much at that, now that more than the concert has ended, my musician.

Music is time, said the violin master. You can’t miss the stop or you’ll miss the train. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.

Oh father, oh music man with a whistle instead of a coin to toss on your walks, keep these things for us until we're ready to come home: our baby teeth, fragments of bone that rattle in a domino box. Tuck it in your pocket but please don't gamble it away the way you lost our christening gowns in poker. We had outgrown them, true, but what other proof did we have that all seven of our outfits could be stacked and shuffled like a deck of cards. Keep the bottle cap opener hanging by a string. Wear it like a locket and stay collared to our after-school bliss when we found you underneath a tree that scattered glass fruit around your feet. The boys lined them up for death by slingshot, and the girls giggled when the bodies shattered. Take good care of our drawings, our crooked handwriting exercises, the scribbles of our names, and sew a suit with sailboats on the sleeves, a coat with Qs sliding down a wire, and pants that celebrate our prepubescent autographs. And in your shoe— don't tell us which! let us guess!— save the coin you told us came from China. It had a hole in the middle because the merchants slid their change on chopsticks. We pictured them on market Sundays holding up their earnings like a shish kabob. We know you hid the coin because all seven of us wanted it and so you took it with you. Or so I claimed. Can I be blamed, oh father, oh story man, for wanting to possess the single thing that couldn't be shared? You saw me slide it out the window of your wallet while you napped and didn't snap to attention to complain. Of all your sons and daughters it is I who wanted to escape the most, to anywhere. I learned the desperate alchemy of flowering a barren day with song from you, oh master. A minstrel needs his freedom. And so you let me take it.