1269 Arts and sciences poems

I. WHAT was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river ? Spreading ruin and scattering ban, Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat With the dragon-fly on the river. II. He tore out a reed, the great god Pan, From the deep cool bed of the river : The limpid water turbidly ran, And the broken lilies a-dying lay, And the dragon-fly had fled away, Ere he brought it out of the river. III. High on the shore sate the great god Pan, While turbidly flowed the river ; And hacked and hewed as a great god can, With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed, Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed To prove it fresh from the river. IV. He cut it short, did the great god Pan, (How tall it stood in the river !) Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man, Steadily from the outside ring, And notched the poor dry empty thing In holes, as he sate by the river. V. This is the way,' laughed the great god Pan, Laughed while he sate by the river,) The only way, since gods began To make sweet music, they could succeed.' Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed, He blew in power by the river. VI. Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan ! Piercing sweet by the river ! Blinding sweet, O great god Pan ! The sun on the hill forgot to die, And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly Came back to dream on the river. VII. Yet half a beast is the great god Pan, To laugh as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man : The true gods sigh for the cost and pain, — For the reed which grows nevermore again As a reed with the reeds in the river.

They talk of short-lived pleasure–be it so– Pain dies as quickly: stern, hard-featured pain Expires, and lets her weary prisoner go. The fiercest agonies have shortest reign; And after dreams of horror, comes again The welcome morning with its rays of peace. Oblivion, softly wiping out the stain, Makes the strong secret pangs of shame to cease: Remorse is virtue’s root; its fair increase Are fruits of innocence and blessedness: Thus joy, o’erborne and bound, doth still release His young limbs from the chains that round him press. Weep not that the world changes–did it keep A stable, changeless state, ’twere cause indeed to weep.

Swirl and smash of waves against the legs and crossgirders of the pier, I have come to Brighton, come as the fathers of our fathers came, to see the past’s Peep Show. On two good legs, on one, they came, veterans and stay-at-homes of the Great War, all casualties, to stroll the West Pier’s promenade, past bands, flags, and minstrel shows, past Gladys Pawsey in a high-necked bathing costume riding her bicycle off the high board, past Hokey-Pokey and Electric Shocker, to the old Penny Palace, pennies burning hotly in their hands, the worn watery profile of Queen Victoria looking away from it all. I bend to the mutoscope’s lit window to see “What the Butler Saw”: a woman artlessly taking off her clothes in a jerky striptease I can slow down or speed up by turning the handle of the mutoscope. Easily I raise her from darkness— the eye eternally aroused by what it can’t touch— to watch her brief repeating performance that counts for so little. Or so much. I can’t be sure which. Abruptly, THE END shuts down the image, but her story continues as she reverses time’s tawdry sequence to dress and quickly disappear down a maze of narrow streets and alleys filled with the ghostly bodies and bodiless ghosts of causality, the unredeemed and never-to-be-born bearing her along to a flight of shabby stairs, a rented room where she is free as anyone to dream her dreams and smoke a cigarette, smoke from the lit tip spiraling in patternless patterns toward the room’s bare light bulb, the light I see her by harsh, violently unforgiving, as she makes tomorrow into a question of either/or: to leave this room, this vacancy forever, or go on exactly as she has before. Old ghost, your history is nameless and sexual, you are your own enigma, victim or heroine of an act of repetition that, once chosen, will choose you for a lifetime. I peer into the tunneled past, so small, so faraway and fragmentary, and yet, not unconnected to what I am now. Dilapidation upon dilapidation, Brighton is crumbling, fading to sepia tones, as your unfunny burlesque continues past your life, perhaps past mine, the past preserved and persevering, the sentimental past.

There is a brand of play called muteness Beneath the play yard’s interlacing branches. It appeals to children born Entre deux guerres, whose specialty it is. It is mutiny; that is, a tongue Of foreign origin ending in grunts. One such child uses his tongue On a frozen fence for the embrace of it For the mutating appendage makes of speech A combat; an internment. There is a brand of child assisted to the play yard By his keeper fussing with his zipper. Yes, it is cold in the high hemisphere And nothing will be the death of him As he sets hard sweets on his tongue He neither chews nor swallows. Such children can never swing too freely From the elm’s loping barkless arm. It is mutual. There is smoke on the air, tarry, Commuting the industry on high As the children simmer within Their word-cloud. And someone or something is calling them home A familiar voice, if they have one.

1. We like to think of it as parallel to what we know, Only bigger. One man against the authorities. Or one man against a city of zombies. One man Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants Let loose down the pants of America. Man on the run. Man with a ship to catch, a payload to drop, This message going out to all of space.. . . Though Maybe it’s more like life below the sea: silent, Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics Of an outmoded design. Some like to imagine A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars, Mouthing yes,yes as we toddle toward the light, Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best While the father storms through adjacent rooms Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come, Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw. Sometimes,  what I see is a library in a rural community. All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population. The books have lived here all along, belonging For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face, A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies. 2. Charlton Heston is waiting to be let in. He asked once politely. A second time with force from the diaphragm. The third time, He did it like Moses: arms raised high, face an apocryphal white. Shirt crisp, suit trim, he stoops a little coming in, Then grows tall. He scans the room. He stands until I gesture, Then he sits. Birds commence their evening chatter. Someone fires Charcoals out below. He’ll take a whiskey if I have it. Water if I don’t. I ask him to start from the beginning, but he goes only halfway back. That was the future once, he says.Before the world went upside down. Hero, survivor, God’s right hand man, I know he sees the blank Surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone. He sits straight in his seat, takes a long, slow high-thespian breath, Then lets it go.For all I know, I was the last true man on this earth. And: May I smoke? The voices outside soften. Planes jet past heading off or back. Someone cries that she does not want to go to bed. Footsteps overhead. A fountain in the neighbor’s yard babbles to itself, and the night air Lifts the sound indoors.It was another time, he says, picking up again. We were pioneers. Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth Toward God-knows-where? I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark. Our eyes adjust to the dark. 3. Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone, That the others have come and gone—a momentary blip— When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic, Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding, Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere, Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones At whatever are their moons. They live wondering If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know, And the great black distance they—we—flicker in. Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last, Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want to be One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial. Wide open, so everything floods in at once. And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time, Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke. So that I might be sitting now beside my father As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe For the first time in the winter of 1959. 4. In those last scenes of Kubrick’s 2001 When Dave is whisked into the center of space, Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid, Paint-in-water, and then gauze wafting out and off, Before, finally, the night tide, luminescent And vague, swirls in, and on and on. . . . In those last scenes, as he floats Above Jupiter’s vast canyons and seas, Over the lava strewn plains and mountains Packed in ice, that whole time, he doesn’t blink. In his little ship, blind to what he rides, whisked Across the wide-screen of unparcelled time, Who knows what blazes through his mind? Is it still his life he moves through, or does That end at the end of what he can name? On set, it’s shot after shot till Kubrick is happy, Then the costumes go back on their racks And the great gleaming set goes black. 5. When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white. He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks, His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years, When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find. His face lit-up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died. We learned new words for things. The decade changed. The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time, The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is— So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

I set out now in a box upon the sea.

a love person from love people out of the afrikan sun under the sign of cancer. whoever see my midnight smile seeing star apple and mango from home. whoever take me for a negative thing, his death be on him like a skin and his skin be his heart’s revenge. * lucy one-eye she got her mama’s ways. big round roller can’t cook can’t clean if that’s what you want you got it world. lucy one-eye she see the world sideways. word foolish she say what she don’t want to say, she don’t say what she want to. lucy one-eye she won’t walk away from it. she’ll keep on trying with her crooked look and her wrinkled ways, the darling girl. * if mama could see she would see lucy sprawling limbs of lucy decorating the backs of chairs lucy hair holding the mirrors up that reflect odd aspects of lucy. if mama could hear she would hear lucysong rolled in the corners like lint exotic webs of lucysighs long lucy spiders explaining to obscure gods. if mama could talk she would talk good girl good girl good girl clean up your room. * i was born in a hotel, a maskmaker. my bones were knit by a perilous knife. my skin turned around at midnight and i entered the earth in a woman jar. i learned the world all wormside up and this is my yes my strong fingers; i was born in a bed of good lessons and it has made me wise. * light on my mother’s tongue breaks through her soft extravagant hip into life. lucille she calls the light, which was the name of the grandmother who waited by the crossroads in virginia and shot the whiteman off his horse, killing the killer of sons. light breaks from her life to her lives… mine already is an afrikan name. *

My mom brought home a violin so I could learn to play. She told me if I practiced hard I’d play it well someday. Without a single lesson, I tried to play a song. My fiddle squeaked, my fiddle squawked. The notes came out all wrong. My little brother fled the room. Mom covered up her ears. My puppy dog began to howl. My sister was in tears. My dad pulled out his wallet. He handed me a ten. He made me swear I’d never play that violin again.

Insects are small, they already know how to fly, and — best of all — they power themselves. — Emily Anthes In an air-conditioned trailer, three geeks barely beyond boyhood fist-bump and high-five at a job well done. With the click of a key a dozen soundless screens flutter. Now in the shallow of a cave near the Khyber Pass, a stack of glow sticks activated in the blast steeps the darkness green: two cans of pineapple; a mangled can of beets bleeding juice; some boy streaked black, his burns wrapped in torn canvas tent flaps. He must hear the cyborg beetle’s brains buzz like a circuit-bent keyboard above his Pashto prayers. But we know enough to leave the live feed low,audio is for the analysts. Our weapon : witnessing — : wired that way. Somewhere in Texas or California or Kentucky Taco Bell is on the table where too the kill list rests quietly satisfied, and so its discord folds inward like an origami acorn nestled sharply in the heart.

proceeds by chance and necessity becomes nonrandom through randomness builds complexity from simplicity nurtures consciousness unconsciously evolves purposelessly creatures who demand purpose and discover natural selection