1269 Arts and sciences poems

There were seven colors of mourning, one was lilac. That kind of blossom always has its crowd, fanned out, surrounded by crushing likeness, smell of itself. Fabric has to breathe, at least 2%, like skin. A little milkfat, elastane even in the gravest print. Not knowing how to grieve can poison like a directionless dart. And although fabric has been known to swirl and clasp, be clasped — without mother there’s only art. To hug the body: a swath, anathema, magical, seventies lace and spacedust, all too far gone to truly love. But to twist it, to learn to hate-want. To sway, tear, burrow, be borrowed, everybody’s animal. To float like water seeking its own, stampede like buffalo, seeking its hide. Face painted on torso on horsehair on chesty silk it’s a deathmask for the stigmata slash of the model’s body. • I don’t think I understand what studying is. I listen, I read, I remember, I absorb. I let myself be moved and changed. Is that “studying?” Never five-fingered, you never use them all, gloves will be like hooves, split-footed, hand-stitched. When concept perceived — a womanly gist, let’s say, or a curve of mind — is more than itself (surpassing, all maw) I make it part of me. I take it in, drink a corrosive. I let it overtake me, change everything it can, lip to tip to rim. My eyes just drink the fabric that covers each surface of this world. Suck up the plastic through a polished straw. Everything’s inspiration: trees reflected in windows on buildings, distorted buses endless frames, all too glass, so much lens, textures so tall, and once you start to see things this way, vision’s a performance, shocking and true after all these centuries, a Shakespearean volta, like nectar is poison to the occasional queen bee. Everything actually is blurred, not just how you see. Glasses and shoes are solutions to problems that are real problems, that of blurred world, that of touching the ground. A glass corset for the heart to see out its chest. For without glasses, the eye better sees the wind, by feeling it and closing against its grains, its grasses. For without shoes, my feet become shoes. When I am really feeling, I get very tired, I fall asleep for the seventeenth time on the unfinished skirt of glass eyes and lemon zest hemmed first, grown last. I experience the world as infinite invertedness: no wholes broken, just potential fragments straining, skull-like, at the seams. Anything could give. But no, just takes and takes and takes. • I’ve been trying to write the words, “I cried. Cried really and wetly, and for good.” Old-fashioned writing with intense excitement: the spell of quill and ink spill, quelled. What is beautiful, what is terrifying, what is absurd in me? Every possibility that colors are believable, various, not that mirage I thought I’d seen and can be held apart as unreal, too exterior, distinct from each other wildly as sparks to seaweed or flower to meteor. It collapsed, can’t draw it can’t cut it out of itself. There is no color but what’s already inside the eye, no power or invention or new way to wake up in the morning outside the seeing mechanism, our own orbs. Yet I can’t see myself. I can never see you again. I can only see from inside my skull and when I look down I close everything not just my eyes. I wrap my own tender nether flesh in calfskin leather so buttery, melted back together like so: a newborn softened in its own mother’s milk. • I awoke in a panic (no ma no ma) to the smallest day yet. I dreamed I already dreamed all the dreams I’d get. This morning I dressed in my last dress’s last dress, fit only for a genteel gothic murder, covered up well — airtight, would only fit the stabbed one, after bloodlet. Then, like a glove. Who wears it and where? I will, from the bed to the chair. Headrest, clotheshorse. Designer and model: mutually orbiting the best metaphor for bodiless idea. Amorphous, amorous, amoral, immortal. Red is dead, said blue, to you too? Hindquarter-gauze with silver face clamp and sickened ears pulled, unskulled. Broken backpiece. Shadow sensible by other than sight. To smell a shadow. To strike it. To trace it later, to measure a body by its line. Light’s so quiet. You’d think its cuttings, its edge-hole, those mousy children, would squeak at least a bit. They run like a stocking down the leg of the mind. Why not quieter then? There is no body without life. There is no mind without body. There is no without.

Sometimes something like a second washes the base of this street. The father and his two assistants are given permission to go. One of them, a woman, asks, “Why did we come here in the first place, to this citadel of dampness?” Some days are worse than others, even if we can’t believe in them. But that was never a concern of mine, reasoned the patient. Sing, scroll, or never be blasted by us into marmoreal meaning, or the fist for it. Kudos to the prince who journeyed here to negotiate our release, if you can believe it. You’re right. The ballads are retreating back into the atmosphere. They won’t be coming round again. Make your peace.

Recurrences. Coppery light hesitates again in the small-leaved Japanese plum. Summer and sunset, the peace of the writing desk and the habitual peace of writing, these things form an order I only belong to in the idleness of attention. Last light rims the blue mountain and I almost glimpse what I was born to, not so much in the sunlight or the plum tree as in the pulse that forms these lines.

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree, morality: any working order, animate or inanimate: it has managed directed balance, the incoming and outgoing energies are working right, some energy left to the mechanism, some ash, enough energy held to maintain the order in repair, assure further consumption of entropy, expending energy to strengthen order: honor the persisting reactor, the container of change, the moderator: the yellow bird flashes black wing-bars in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay, startles the hawk with beauty, flitting to a branch where flash vanishes into stillness, hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight: honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics, the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies of control, the gastric transformations, seed dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge, blood compulsion, instinct: honor the unique genes, molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into sets, the nucleic grain transmitted in slow change through ages of rising and falling form, some cells set aside for the special work, mind or perception rising into orders of courtship, territorial rights, mind rising from the physical chemistries to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper racial satisfaction: heat kept by a feathered skin: the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen burner under the flask) so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and necessary worked out of random, reproducible, the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf.

Plato, despair! We prove by norms How numbers bear Empiric forms, How random wrong Will average right If time be long And error slight, But in our hearts Hyperbole Curves and departs To infinity. Error is boundless. Nor hope nor doubt, Though both be groundless, Will average out.

Humbling of Bhutto in Mecca, Bhutto kissing Hajar-e-Aswad, half the Bhutto cabinet in Ihram, kneeling. These were the first scenes, in the rolling newsreel of half-closed doors, of the doorjamb in the way of the twentieth century’s upstarts. A nationalization, by Bhutto, of religious piety? No, but a headlong scram into obeisance of all and everybody and everything to the stately rise of Islam in the neighboring, overbearing Arabia. That year Bhutto had appointed my father Hajj secretary, and we, the seven children and the ayah, were present at Melody Cinema in full regalia to see, to our amazement, on the screen, our father in Ihram like Bhutto, and in a tent in Mina, sitting on the ground in an ablution scene, the humbling of our mysophobic mother, who before her pilgrimage would have drunk water only from a glass washed three times by a servant and who wouldn't sit on the drawing-room sofa unless it was draped by a freshly laundered sheet.

Every reader loves the way he tells off the sun, shouting busy old fool into the English skies even though they were likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning. And it’s a pleasure to spend this sunny day pacing the carpet and repeating the words, feeling the syllables lock into rows until I can stand and declare, the book held closed by my side, that hours, days, and months are but the rags of time. But after a few steps into stanza number two, wherein the sun is blinded by his mistress’s eyes, I can feel the first one begin to fade like sky-written letters on a windy day. And by the time I have taken in the third, the second is likewise gone, a blown-out candle now, a wavering line of acrid smoke. So it’s not until I leave the house and walk three times around this hidden lake that the poem begins to show any interest in walking by my side. Then, after my circling, better than the courteous dominion of her being all states and him all princes, better than love’s power to shrink the wide world to the size of a bedchamber, and better even than the compression of all that into the rooms of these three stanzas is how, after hours stepping up and down the poem, testing the plank of every line, it goes with me now, contracted into a little spot within.

God made everything out of nothing; but the nothing shows through —Paul Valéry Lost from all angles but the sun’s, This woken morning, It clicks its brilliance into place at once, If you follow the fall of light— A spider web, head-high, adorning The woodshed’s entrance like a sheet Of gold-shot fabric, metal-tight, That, even so, one handswipe could delete, Collapsing all That spacious architecture to a tacky ball. It brings to mind the mathematician’s Monstrous idea, The Menger sponge, where infinite excisions Out of a solid cube delete Its substance while its form stays clear: The central ninth is cut from a square; Eight smaller squares remain; repeat For each; and so on with this lattice of air: A formula For zero volume, infinite surface area. Enough. The estuary’s slung Like gold-shot cloth Over a gulf of shifting airs. Among Cloud-drifts of beaten eggwhite floats, As though confected of such froth, The mountain. Like a Chinese screen, The fabric of the view devotes Almost all blankness to this hanging scene, This one handsweep Of water, creased like the cheek of someone roused from sleep.

THAT ONE , is a poet for all poets AH ,then I would suppose to be an edwin for all edwins

I write my God in blue. I run my gods upstream on flimsy rafts. I bathe my goddesses in foam, in moonlight. I take my reasons from my mother's snuff breath, or from an old woman, sitting with a lemonade, at twilight, on the desert's steps. Brown by day and black by night, my God has wings that open to no reason. He scutters from the touch of old men's eyes, scutters from the smell of wisdom, an orb of light leaping from a fire. Press him he bleeds. When you take your hand to sacred water, there is no sign of any wound. And so I call him supreme, great artist, judge of time, scholar of all living event, the possible prophet of the possible event. Blind men, on bourbon, with guitars, blind men with their scars dulled by kola, blind men seeking the shelter of a raindrop, blind men in corn, blind men in steel, reason by their lights that our tongues are free, our tongues will redeem us. Speech is the fact, and the fact is true. What is moves, and what is moving is. We cling to these contradictions. We know we will become our contradictions, our complex body's own desire. Yet speech is not the limit of our vision. The ear entices itself with any sound. The skin will caress whatever tone or temperament that rises or descends. The bones will set themselves to a dance. The blood will argue with a bird in flight. The heart will scale the dew from an old chalice, brush and thrill to an old bone. And yet there is no sign to arrest us from the possible. We remain at rest there, in transit from our knowing to our knowledge. So I would set a limit where I meet my logic. I would clamber from my own cave into the curve of sign, an alphabet of transformation, the clan's cloak of reason. I am good when I am in motion, when I think of myself at rest in the knowledge of my moving, when I have the vision of my mother at rest, in moonlight, her lap the cradle of my father's head. I am good when I trade my shells, and walk from boundary to boundary, unarmed and unafraid of another's speech. I am good when I learn the world through the touch of my present body. I am good when I take the cove of a cub into my care. I am good when I hear the changes in my body echo all my changes down the years, when what I know indeed is what I would know in deed. I am good when I know the darkness of all light, and accept the darkness, not as sign, but as my body. This is the A of absolutes, the logbook of judgments, the good sign.