1269 Arts and sciences poems

Always the caravan of sound made us halt to admire the swinging and the swift go-by of beasts with enormous hooves and heads beating the earth or reared against the sky. Do not reread, I mean glance ahead to see what has become of the colossal forms: everything happened at the instant of passing: the hoof-beat, the whinny, the bells on the harness, the creak of the wheels, the monkey’s fandango in double time over the elephant’s back. When the marching was over and we were free to go on there was never before us a dungfall or a track on the road-sands of any kind: only the motion of footprints being made crossing and recrossing in the trampled mind.

I would try to do it in my way, forgetting Velázquez . . . .  So, little by little, I would paint my Meninas . . . they would be “my” Meninas. — Pablo Picasso My meninas are as changeable as the moon. Black and white and in color. Happy, sad, and how many words there are for red enough and the pallor of skin. Their moments of verisimilitude do not outweigh their flashes of pathos. Whole days go by when they cannot appreciate the humor of which the dog is one manner, the dwarf another. My meninas are not puppets, but puppet theaters. That it is the puppet master who draws the curtain in the stairwell is pure whimsy on my part. A minuet of despair, andante of foolhardiness. How many times have I tried to explain these differences, the sting of  joy, a lilt of crimson, the dark and the light of the moon not the moon, the soul but a sphere predisposed to rotation? The man in the doorway. The dog who lies sleeping. These are my meninas. The sun in the mirror. The sun and the moon and the man behind the easel, mostly invisible, like the pictures on the wall. The moon is not more changeable, however, than they, my meninas, who never stop changing and waiting on the children of the sun and of the moon, for they will always be my meninas, their eyes of every minim on the palette, blue and tragical, white on white against a black ground, until the moon sings every shape and shade of gray from hope to ample. And again.

The wallful of quoted passages from his work, with the requisite specimens pinned next to their literary cameo appearances, was too good a temptation to resist, and if the curator couldn’t, why should we? The prose dipped and shimmered and the “flies,” as I heard a buff call them, stood at lurid attention on their pins. If you love to read and look, you could be happy a month in that small room. One of the Nabokov photos I’d never seen: he’s writing (left-handed! why did I never trouble to find out?) at his stand-up desk in the hotel apartment in Montreux. The picture’s mostly of his back and the small wedge of face that shows brims with indifference to anything not on the page. The window’s shut. A tiny lamp trails a veil of light over the page, too far away for us to read. We also liked the chest of specimen drawers labeled, as if for apprentice Freudians, “Genitalia,” wherein languished in phials the thousands he examined for his monograph on the Lycaenidae, the silver-studded Blues. And there in the center of the room a carillon of Blues rang mutely out. There must have been three hundred of them. Amanda’s Blue was there, and the Chalk Hill Blue, the Karner Blue (Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov), a Violet-Tinged Copper, the Mourning Cloak, an Echo Azure, the White-Lined Green Hairstreak, the Cretan Argus (known only from Mt. Ida: in the series Nabokov did on this beauty he noted for each specimen the altitude at which it had been taken), and as the ads and lovers say, “and much, much more.” The stilled belle of the tower was a Lycaeides melissa melissa. No doubt it’s an accident Melissa rhymes, sort of, with Lolita, The scant hour we could lavish on the Blues flew by, and we improvised a path through cars and slush and boot-high berms of mud-blurred snow to wherever we went next. I must have been mute, or whatever I said won from silence nothing it mourned to lose. I was back in that small room, vast by love of each flickering detail, each genital dusting to nothing, the turn, like a worm’s or caterpillar’s, of each phrase. I stood up to my ankles in sludge pooled over a stopped sewer grate and thought— wouldn’t you know it—about love and art: you can be ruined (“rurnt,” as we said in south- western Ohio) by a book or improved by a butterfly. You can dodder in the slop, septic with a rage not for order but for the love the senses bear for what they do, for detail that’s never annexed, like a reluctant crumb to a vacuum cleaner, to a coherence. You can be bead after bead on perception’s rosary. This is the sweet ache that hurts most, the way desire burns bluely at its phosphorescent core: just as you’re having what you wanted most, you want it more and more until that’s more than you, or it, or both of you, can bear.

Divide the year into seasons, four, subtract the snow then add some more green, a bud, a breeze, a whispering behind the trees, and here beneath the rain-scrubbed sky orange poppies multiply.

Although the depiction of living forms was not explicitly forbidden, the only good news about famines was that the station was empty. It was about 2 A.M. The truck drove away. A tropical insect that lives in enormous cities stroked my hair awkwardly, organizing everyone's schedule. She drove me back to my hotel in a misty and allusive style, while the old schools continued the process of devolution. Part of the roof was loose and flapped noisily in the wind, who needed work like that? Poor brethren, do you have any good prose yet? The New Chinese fiction is getting better, I suspect, people walking and thinking and fussing, with a nest to fly out of, with a less intimate footing. Are we responsible for their playtimes? Keep up your music, my dears; there were a lot of people like that, with strange eyes, green fields and orchards. The little house they sat in produced simple people, cars full of blood, all they needed was a hat, extramusical sounds, purging the emotions. Expect no mercy, I said, from the sickbay. And try to imagine Howard Hughes piloting the plane that flew Cary Grant and Barbara Hutton off toward their marriage in 1950. Well, don't bother. The New Chinese fiction shouldn't concern itself with anything other than a stolen turnip and a coldness in the heart, and a lit window, a young man on a horse appearing and then disappearing.

An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface by Causes Now in Operation —subtitle of Lyell: Principles of Geology The mountain road ends here, Broken away in the chasm where The bridge washed out years ago. The first scarlet larkspur glitters In the first patch of April Morning sunlight. The engorged creek Roars and rustles like a military Ball. Here by the waterfall, Insuperable life, flushed With the equinox, sentient And sentimental, falls away To the sea and death. The tissue Of sympathy and agony That binds the flesh in its Nessus' shirt; The clotted cobweb of unself And self; sheds itself and flecks The sun's bed with darts of blossom Like flagellant blood above The water bursting in the vibrant Air. This ego, bound by personal Tragedy and the vast Impersonal vindictiveness Of the ruined and ruining world, Pauses in this immortality, As passionate, as apathetic, As the lava flow that burned here once; And stopped here; and said, 'This far And no further.' And spoke thereafter In the simple diction of stone. Naked in the warm April air, We lie under the redwoods, In the sunny lee of a cliff. As you kneel above me I see Tiny red marks on your flanks Like bites, where the redwood cones Have pressed into your flesh. You can find just the same marks In the lignite in the cliff Over our heads.Sequoia Langsdorfii

Before anything could happen, flecks of real gold on her mouth, her eyes more convex than any others, the ground spoke, the barrier of lilacs spoke. What sang in the black tree was entirely gold. Her chair was empty. New absence is a great figure dark as the underskin of fruit. At the center of the earth it surrounds and amplifies the dead whose music never slows down. She came by car. I came by train. We embraced. It was at the foot of a hill steeply crowned with apples and a ruined fortress. Imagination did not make the world. Sweetness is the entire portion. Before anything could happen, happiness, the necessary precondition of the world, spoke and flowered over the hill. When I was in Hell on the ruined palisade, either mystery or loneliness kissed my open eyes. It felt hugely convex, seeing and immediately forgetting. By contrast, what I imagined later was nothing.

All you have to do is listen to the way a man sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people and notice how intent he is on making his point even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver, and you will know why the women in science fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine when the men from earth arrive in their rocket, why they are always standing in a semicircle with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart, their breasts protected by hard metal disks.

When the strong drag of the boy’s adolescence pulls through them, the family rises into thinness and begins to break like a wave. You turned away when I kissed you, the woman says. Why? Half-lidded days of early winter. When he points toward the woman, the boy looks at his hand the way dogs will. The boy’s jaw sets. As though behind his teeth, into the soft flesh of his throat, a new set of teeth were cutting through. A mouth for what? Each of them adopts a private view. Arguments veer every which way, and who can follow? A sequence of dark non sequiturs blows in. When one, when one word, when the word suicide enters the room where they are shouting, the system closes down, prematurely becalmed. The man writes, I am not given a subject but am given to my subject. I am inside it like a parasite. He sees the woman’s face contract at the approach of other futures than the one for which her face was prepared. So they inhabit their bodies like music, for a given time. And yet he continues to act as if there were times to come. I just want you to go away, one of them screams. Expressionless and flat as a tortilla, the afternoon moon over their house. She calls the man to a corner in the basement. Those aren’t spider eggs, he says, backing up. Those are its eyes. When the encounter with the self is volcanic, nothing can follow. Tearing open the cocoon to reveal itself, a boy within the family. As if they were waiting. As if inside experience, bright with meaning, there were another experience pendant, unnameable.

Men’s voices in the dark