1269 Arts and sciences poems

1. I was born on a Tuesday in April. I didn't cry. Not because I was stunned. I wasn't even mad. I was the lucky egg, trained for gratitude inside the belly for nine months straight. Two workers welded bunk beds at the end of the delivery room. One on top of the other. My universe might have been the white lime ceiling, or the embodiment of Einstein's bent space in the aluminum springs of the bed above that curved toward the center. Neither cold, nor warm. "It was a clear day," my mother told me. It's hard to believe there were a few romantic evenings when I was conceived, a buzz in the retina and red-laced magma decadently peeling off a silver candlestick. Infants' cries and milk fever turned to salt from the stench of bleach— abrasive, unequivocal. With a piece of cloth wrapped on the end of a stick, the janitor casually extends the negative space of the black-and-white tiled floor like a mouth of broken teeth, a baleen of darkness sieving out new human destinies. 2. 1968. At the dock, ships arriving from the East dumped punctured rice bags, mice and the delirium of the Cultural Revolution. A couple of men in uniform cleared out the church in the middle of the night. The locals saw the priest in the yard wearing only his underwear, shivering from the cold. Their eyes, disillusioned, questioned one another: "Wasn't he the one who pardoned our sins?" Icons burned in front of their eyes, icons and the holy scriptures. Witnesses stepped farther back, as if looking at love letters nobody dared to claim. Crosses were plucked from graves. And from each mouth spilled irreversible promises: mounds of dirt the rains would smooth down sooner or later. Children dragged church bells by the tongue. (Why didn’t they think of this before?) Overnight, the dome was demolished, instantly revealing a myriad of nameless stars that chased the crowd like flies on a dead horse. And what could replace Sunday mass now? Women brought cauldrons into the yard. Men filled up their pipes; smoke rose into the air, against gravity's pull. Nails in worn out shoes exposed stigmata that bled in the wrong places— a new code of sanctification, of man, by man. 3. "Read!"—I was told. Who said that? Angel Gabriel, or my first-grade teacher who had dark roots underneath her bleached curls? Language arrived fragmentary split in syllables, spasmodic like code in times of war. "Continue where your classmate left off!" A long sentence tied us to one another without connotation as if inside an idiom. Someone would get to read the noun, another the verb, a third one a pronoun. . . I always got the exclamation mark at the end— a mere grimace, a small curse. A tall cast-iron stove below the portrait of the dictator, puffing smoke from its temples, enough heat for everyone. On the blackboard, leftover diphthongs from yesterday or the day before rubbed against one another like kittens. After dusk, I looked for another language outside the window, my eyes glued to a constellation (they call these types "dreamers") my discovery possibly a journey into the past, toward a galaxy already dead, nonexistent, the kind of news that needs millions of years to reach me. "Read!"—the angel shook me for a third time her finger pointing to an arbitrary word a million light years apart from its object. (It didn't matter who was first). Negative space sketched my onomatopoeic profile of body and shadow in an accidental encounter. 4. Language is erosive. It makes us recluses, a wind through the canyons carving our paleontological eras for everyone to read. Under the revised testament of my skin bellows a gold-cast bull, an alluring object, a need for attention. Then comes the unleavened bread and a last supper, which, remarkably, is repeated several times between ice ages. Lower yet, Sodom. I recognize it from the stench of sulfur. I hold my nose. Freud would have done the same. And then Cain, a crow taught him how to bury his own brother. . . And at the bottom, Adam’s gentlemanlike sin under which scientists discover earlier epochs of famine. Between unidentified layers, wanderings in the sand, the search for a new prophet. . . I try to understand my people. Their language is plain. Some words, were actually never uttered, like pages stuck together in a book fresh off the press and long after it sits on a shelf. This, too, lives inside me within insidious bubbles of air, negative spaces where I can find little historical rest, but also where utter ruin may originate. 5. Little left of the snow three days ago. Its blanket ripped away, exposing dog shit and the bruises of routine. Negative space gives form to the woods and to the mad woman—a silhouette of the goddess Athena wearing a pair of flip flops, an owl on her shoulder. It’s minus zero. The factory’s gate gnashes its teeth behind the back of the last worker. Blowing noses, shivering, mucus. . . A virus circulates through the workplace, secretly, intimately touching one person after another, a current of sensuality. It softens the tone. But nothing unites them more than their frailty, The one-sizes-fits-all shoes you must grow accustomed to By filling the extra space with cotton, Or curling your ill-fitting toes. 6. In Halil’s yard, rules were sacrilege. His eight children entertained themselves by carrying famine on their shoulders, recalling St. Bartholomew’s flayed skin. Starving, filthy, hazel-eyed— three qualities that unexpectedly coalesce in the bright light, strung together like sneezes. One’s famine was another’s consolation. “Look at them! It’s a sin for us to complain. They’re even worse off than us!” But even Halil found his own consolation in the old woman Zyra, “barren and paralyzed,” the root origin of despair. This was our highlands landscape, hierarchical, where each family would make out a different expiration date on the roof below their own. Schadenfreude was the only river that could turn mills. But if this hierarchy shifted, and our roof gave signs of ruin, my mother would plant tulips in the garden, white tulips, our false image, a scarecrow to keep predators away. 7. Nearly nothing was mentioned in the letters he sent from prison, just two lines, on top of the page: “I am well. . .” and “If you can, please send me a pair of woolen socks.” From them, I learned to read between the lines: negative spaces, the unsaid, gestures, insomnia that like a hat’s shadow fails to shade your chin and ears. And in the photographs’ white background, acrophobia adds to the color of their eyes: blue, green, gray, and ultimately, chesnut brown, as, earthward, we lower our gaze. I learned to read the empty spaces the dead left behind—a pair of folded glasses after the reading’s done and discourse commences. Or the musical chairs game called "love," where there are less empty seats than people. If you don’t want to be the last one standing you must predict when the music will stop. (Who, though, has really succeeded?) Perhaps a little practice can be useful in this case. I don’t mean squatting, jumping, stretching, but listening to the same music every day from the start, the same miserable vinyl record so that you’ll recognize its cracks before it recognizes yours. 8. Midnight. Snoring, meaningless sounds that stain the side of the wall that belongs to no one. So where are we? What dimension? Who foots the bill at a time like this without lambs or sinners, when even angels record nothing? The street’s clearly visible under the neon 24-hour-service sign above the funeral home. There was a music shop next to it that closed down a few months ago; the shop shared a wall with the funeral home, shared the same water pipes and the same gate to heaven. But the coffins won, the wide-shouldered coffins that narrow down in the shape of a mummy, not a human. Wood of the highest quality, swears the owner, and pure silk inside, pleated like a stomach that can digest even a bulldozer. When asleep we're simply five limbs. Starfish. If you cut one limb, it will grow back. Even a single limb could recreate us from the beginning, a single hope. Negative space is always fertile. 9. No one knows if it was simply a matter of mixed or some other reason why I used to see what I wasn't supposed to see— the ending of things. It wasn’t a mystical gift, but like a blood clot in the darkness of a vein, I held on to reason, as it circulated from the bottom up and not the other way around as we were told. I used to start from the edges and with my left hand or a croupier’s stick gather the balls and dice from the corners and then watch the bettors as neither a winner nor a loser. There's nothing sillier than watching a film in reverse where after the climax, the protagonists are replaced by circumstances, and circumstances replaced by minor characters, their tongues plastered behind a single, fatal smirk Life and my short lunar calendar slipped away like carbon paper sending off as much light as necessary, skipping the details, the contrast and sharp colors. Lunar time is short. Until the actual end, there are years enough, the negative spaces. What to do with them when the verb has already been uttered, a conclusive sentence with Latin syntax, or more than that: didactic.

NO was a violin, NOT a viola, and NEVER a cello. They were noble instruments, but highly nonconformist. Prickly in personality, if sexy. Wayward. Always went in their own direction. Made odd choices. Loved the difficult. Naysayed the popular. Collectively unified in a single reaction to the mainstream: negative. When they first chanced to come together, they doubted they would ever meld. But the minute they began to make music, they discovered a numinous core to their triangle. They couldn’t see this core, smell it, or touch it—and neither could their slender audience (thirty people on folding chairs in a church). But all felt it was a natural union of sound, nimble and sublime. That night they became the Negativo Trio. Retiring to nestle in the velvet warmth of their cases, they whispered to each other, debriefing and musing in the first of many nightly pajama parties. This very first evening they discovered that what they wanted above all were two things. One was to play their music with the very nacre of its nature, and the other was fame. Night after night they played. Increased their bookings. Recorded. And were downloaded. They raised money to pay off the debt of their obscure choices. On stage they each shone with the patina of centuries: maple, spruce, and willow with an elegant varnish of gum arabic, honey, and the whites of eggs. But they weren’t famous, even though they played a nocturne as if every note were a black pearl. Yet NO, NOT and NEVER did everything everyone advised them to be famous: they networked, they nodded nicely to publicists, they flashed their Negativo news on social media. But the fact was, the trio wasn’t for everybody. “Do you think it’s our name?” NOT the Viola asked. “Would we be more famous as the Nightingale Trio?” “Nope,” said NEVER the Cello. “Negativo has our brio.” And NEVER was right. The three of them played with nerve. The knottier the piece, the better. They made their audiences reach. “We should be sexier,” NO the Violin said. “Naughtier. It’s our propensity for the minor key; we should lighten it up.” But when they played in the minor key, their audiences felt they had arrived at the navel of the universe. The instruments could never give up the minor. Would the Negativos ever learn what the people in the seats knew? The trio wasn’t famous because, well, they kind of unnerved people. You had to have nettle to take them on. Though they certainly wouldn’t have said no to notoriety, eventually they had to admit that they could not surrender their quirks. “We will never be famous,” NEVER said one night after they had nestled in their cases for their midnight debriefing. “I’m nauseous,” said NO extravagantly. “And neglected,” said NOT excessively. “Never,” said NEVER decisively. They would never fill the biggest halls. Or be the first name on the tips of tongues. And with the inverted logic of misplaced dreams, even though they had toured, had notched up review, and had triumphs and fans, and websites and bloggers, and a body of criticism devoted to them, they felt they had reached their nadir. The next morning they couldn’t seem to get up. They lay immobile, as if their velvet-lined cases were coffins. A netherworldly silence descended. The dust of despair drifted through the crack between the case tops and bottoms onto these living dead. Time dragged like a dirty hem. Naught into Nil. Desolation into Dormancy. Dormancy into . . . . . . Rest. Rest into Snoozing. Snoozing into Sleep. Sleep into Healing. The nostrum of sleep lasted until the pinkish light that heralds spring. A noisy nuthatch drilled for insects in a nearby tree. It was a forest sound, yodel-y and ebullient. It awoke the maple and spruce and willow of the Negativo’s constitutions. Their bodies couldn’t help responding to the vernal signal given when spring utters its only word:Nevertheless. If not fame, nevertheless music. “Numbskull nuthatch!” NEVER growled. “Ninny nuthatch,” NO yawned. “Bumptious bird,” NOT shifted, inadvertently jostling the snap to the dusty case. It sprang open. NO unclicked and climbed out, too. And NEVER heaved the lid. They played immediately of course, trying a violin piece by the underrated Nardini. Most thought him a lightweight, but the Negativos gave it their signature interpretation of naked necessity. “Oh it was NOTHING,” they began to say to one another as they did musical favors for themselves, producing scores of synchronicities and the occasional juicy nihilistic dissonance. They buoyed on their notes, as if a midnight Pacific of calm, rich, dark negatives were effused with luminescence. How relieved their listeners were to have them back. Again their audiences were made aware of the noses between their ears. That slight, brief piquancy in the nostrils was the smell of earthly harmony. It came from within the airy column that united the instruments, the nucleus of their refusal to suit. Such accord, though it is as rare as ease, seems like nothing. And so the Negativo Trio was known as a trio’s trio. Not famous, but known. Contrary to the vicissitudes of fame, ease is the path of the known, smooth as the satin of the instruments’ finish. To be recognized, yet not to suffer the disadvantages of fame, is a state so ideal it is the pinnacle of a career. NO, NOT and NEVER had at last woken up to that.

Snow everywhere, like the salt electrons jump from, as gas snaps and the tube hisses with light. I am holding just now the hooked underbeak of the great flamingo: cool glass, a little dusting of phosphor. Just off through the tree-line, the New Year waits with its bells, as in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel, stretched thirty feet up to the promenade deck, the back-kneed, S-necked mate waits with its own ringing, its soft, rattle-whistle of argon. What a pair they will make: ice-pink tubeworks north and south on the ballroom floor. And below: foxscarves, carnations, the pull and push of the long trombones. Flamingos! And now the moon pressing back through the tree-line. Close your eyes. Let us say we are children together, ten, perhaps twelve. I see neon: a steadfast landscape of DEPOT, HEIDELBERG, VACANCY. And you? Women in cardigans? A certain leaf tree? Perhaps the gleam of your dress shoe as you welcome the New Year. The ballroom is thick with smoke and laughter. Two birds, of course, north and south. Then the catch in your breath as an uncle explains the impact of vapor and salt, how a light that has never been curls up through the century—swank, incredibly still. Our times , he laughs, and in from the thin roadways all the WELCOMES, the PALMISTS and EXITS, all the boneworks blown to their plush, just bearable tones curl up to a wing and S-neck. High above you, cupped left, right on the ballroom floor, that ice-pink, still parenthesis. Then foxscarves. The flick of the black shoes.

1 Stars are the campfires of exiles. Language exists to pull things close. * Stop that! Communications are being monitored. Collusion is forbidden. Humanity will be punished with the profusion of new jargons. 2 Inverted in glass, a white cup invents the underworld. * Fog thins to chiffon, nylon, Easter. * In the universe next door, I’m gone and the shadows of the leaves of the elm I had pulled down still make a fuss over the earth.

After knowledge extinguished the last of the beautiful fires our worship had failed to prolong, we walked back home through pedestrian daylight, to a residence humbler than the one left behind. A door without mystery, a room without theme. For the hour that we spend complacent at the window overlooking the garden, we observe an arrangement in rust and gray-green, a vagueness at the center whose slow, persistent movements some sentence might explain if we had time or strength for sentences. To admit that what falls falls solitarily, lost in the permanent dusk of the particular. That the mind that fear and disenchantment fatten comes to boss the world around it, morbid as the damp- fingered guest who rearranges the cheeses the minute the host turns to fix her a cocktail. A disease of the will, the way false birch branches arch and interlace from which hands dangle last leaf-parchments and a very large array of primitive bird-shapes. Their pasted feathers shake in the aftermath of the nothing we will ever be content to leave the way we found it. I love that about you. I love that when I call you on the long drab days practicality keeps one of us away from the other that I am calling a person so beautiful to me that she has seen my awkwardness on the actual sidewalk but she still answers anyway. I say that when I fell you fell beside me and the concrete refused to apologize. That a sparrow sat for a spell on the windowsill today to communicate the new intelligence. That the goal of objectivity depends upon one’s faith in the accuracy of one’s perceptions, which is to say a confidence in the purity of the perceiving instrument. I won’t be dying after all, not now, but will go on living dizzily hereafter in reality, half-deaf to reality, in the room perfumed by the fire that our inextinguishable will begins.

Celebrated, the moustache, And near enough ignored His “beautiful hands”. Capable on a keyboard, improvised A polonaise, his own artistic Compositions “dull and decent”. He could see, some, but much swam, out there: Knives and forks, print, street signs. Then, his mind made up, he laid about, Sank immense nets into the cultural acid. When we winched them back in, on fingertips, They rippled with rainbows—herring and sprat He could fling, raw, in the teeth Of the Bürgertum, God rot it. Ah, no God: So to invoke the impact of quanta on quanta And extirpate for keeps the German cabbage, His fingers, subject to whim, and rounded Like objects in a metephor, made good the feeble Peering eyes. Each tip housed a labyrinth, Circling in or out, from ivories an octopod Pressed the torrent of a tune. From Cretan pots Their gestures, snaking out, apprehended, Turn on turn, a tumbril in the stars. Those fingers must have held, no less, the comb To bush his hairy icon out, to primp. On long mountain walks they jotted Gothic Letters on a page, deleted angrily Brainwaves, on a page one trouser leg Segregated from his knee. What a joy, At long last, to know the knower not deceived But disobedient, at his word. Underneath The creams of language here’s a tongue can taste A universe, cyclopic, but propulsive, alien To a species blocked by self-torment, To shopping, authority—all the cockahoop Engines of flesh not fuelled by despair. When Nietzche, squinting, trimmed his fingernails, Did he care for suchlike slighter things? To a turning pot a potter’s fingers do not cling.

turns out there are no dead bodies after all unless you put them there

She sits on the mountain that is her home and the landscapes slide away. One goes down and then up to the monastery. One drops away to a winnowing ring and a farmhouse where a girl and her mother are hanging the laundry. There’s a tiny port in the distance where the shore reaches the water. She is numb and clear because of the grieving in that world. She thinks of the bandits and soldiers who return to the places they have destroyed. Who plant trees and build walls and play music in the village square evening after evening, believing the mothers of the boys they killed and the women they raped will eventually come out of the white houses in their black dresses to sit with their children and the old. Will listen to the music with unreadable eyes.

Long after Ovid’s story of Philomela has gone out of fashion and after the testimonials of Hafiz and Keats have been smothered in comment and droned dead in schools and after Eliot has gone home from the Sacred Heart and Ransom has spat and consigned to human youth what he reduced to fairy numbers after the name has become slightly embarrassing and dried skins have yielded their details and tapes have been slowed and analyzed and there is nothing at all for me to say one nightingale is singing nearby in the oaks where I can see nothing but darkness and can only listen and ride out on the long note’s invisible beam that wells up and bursts from its unknown star on on on never returning never the same never caught while through the small leaves of May the starlight glitters from its own journeys once in the ancestry of this song my mother visited here lightning struck the locomotive in the mountains it had never happened before and there were so many things to tell that she had just seen and would never have imagined now a field away I hear another voice beginning and on the slope there is a third not echoing but varying after the lives after the goodbyes after the faces and the light after the recognitions and the touching and tears those voices go on rising if I knew I would hear in the last dark that singing I know how I would listen

1 My heart’s aflutter! I am standing in the bath tub crying. Mother, mother who am I? If he will just come back once and kiss me on the face his coarse hair brush my temple, it’s throbbing! then I can put on my clothes I guess, and walk the streets. 2 I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist. Words! be sick as I am sick, swoon, roll back your eyes, a pool, and I’ll stare down at my wounded beauty which at best is only a talent for poetry. Cannot please, cannot charm or win what a poet! and the clear water is thick with bloody blows on its head. I embrace a cloud, but when I soared it rained. 3 That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks what a funny place to rupture! and now it is raining on the ailanthus as I step out onto the window ledge the tracks below me are smoky and glistening with a passion for running I leap into the leaves, green like the sea 4 Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.