1269 Arts and sciences poems

For a while after he died my father didn’t seem to discern dream visitors, but I was amazed nonetheless to witness his swift and serene rejuvenation. From time to time I’d find him dining outdoors in beautiful locales, a multicolored grain on his plate I’d never seen elsewhere. Yes, laughed the server, it’s a staple here; a sort of national dish, I guess, like potatoes in Ireland, pasta in Italy, couscous in Morocco, rice in Japan or Madagascar. We can’t get enough of it, and it’s remarkably nutritious. What’s it called? I asked. She replied, metaphysics.

In the dirt you dig fragments. Turn them and ponder. Weed chard. Forms morph like clouds. At lunch, you write down how in this jungle a gem-backed toad startled and hopped away— how June tiger lilies trumpet the sun. In the bean patch brown spiders, egg sacs on their backs. Toddling through shadows, sturdy, wobbling, fragile, pregnant as summer is—

—1509 I've already grown a goiter from this torture, hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy (or anywhere else where the stagnant water's poison). My stomach's squashed under my chin, my beard's pointing at heaven, my brain's crushed in a casket, my breast twists like a harpy's. My brush, above me all the time, dribbles paint so my face makes a fine floor for droppings! My haunches are grinding into my guts, my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight, every gesture I make is blind and aimless. My skin hangs loose below me, my spine's all knotted from folding over itself. I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow. Because I'm stuck like this, my thoughts are crazy, perfidious tripe: anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe. My painting is dead. Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor. I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.

Ito ran to a window. He danced. He howled. He cursed the moon, interned in a camp before he was carted on a ship back to Tokyo. Hadn’t he almost died for art the evenings he ate bread soup? If he wished to forget those days & nights dancing in drawing rooms in London, or translating Fenollosa’s notes on Noh, he’d have to unbraid himself from At the Hawk’s Well, & then let go of the Egyptian mask Dulac painted him into — claws, beak, feathers, & legend. Why did that silly boy tell a story about his grandmother weeping when she first saw him dressed in his grandfather’s samurai armor to hold the gaze of Lady Cunard? He was again studying the fox holding a biscuit in his hand, saying, “I went to a great hill in Hampstead & I made my soul into the soul of a fox.” Finally, he would let go of his Europe, & not think of those he loved & taught, Isadora lost. Now, powerless & alone, he dances his ten steps again & again, wanting to know if a hawk could peck the eyes out of a fox.

Man of himself’s a little world, but join’d With woman, woman for that end design’d, (Hear cruel fair one whilst I this rehearse!) He makes up then a complete universe. Man, like this sublunary world, is born The sport of two cross planets, love, and scorn: Woman the other world resembles well, In whose looks Heav’n is, in whose breast Hell.

Red-Wigglers, Night-Crawlers & Other Worms look out into the crapulous moonlight: figures of women cascading through the Sunday night; no beer in sight. I remember the Night-blooming Cereus by Dr. Thornton, Engraver, Blake’s patron, it hangs in the hall outside the bedroom swaying hungrily like these giant white goddesses of the dark grotto… there are touring cars and men with large guns singing through the woods behind us.

I pace the sounding sea-beach and behold How the voluminous billows roll and run, Upheaving and subsiding, while the sun Shines through their sheeted emerald far unrolled, And the ninth wave, slow gathering fold by fold All its loose-flowing garments into one, Plunges upon the shore, and floods the dun Pale reach of sands, and changes them to gold. So in majestic cadence rise and fall The mighty undulations of thy song, O sightless bard, England's Mæonides! And ever and anon, high over all Uplifted, a ninth wave superb and strong, Floods all the soul with its melodious seas.

My daughter wouldn’t hurt a spider That had nested Between her bicycle handles For two weeks She waited Until it left of its own accord If you tear down the web I said It will simply know This isn’t a place to call home And you’d get to go biking She said that’s how others Become refugees isn’t it?

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that was how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar, casting beer money from a thin reel of ones, the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy. And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two other things, but they were wrong, as it happened. So I made him look at the poem. “There’s a lot of that going around,” he said, and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He laughed amiably. He didn’t look as if he thought bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do. If they were baseball executives they’d plot to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game could be saved from children.   Of course later that night he fired his pianist in mid-number and flurried him from the stand. “We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,” he explained, and the band played on.

You could say, I suppose, that he ate his way out, like the prisoner who starts a tunnel with a spoon, or you could say he was one in whom nothing was lost, who took it all in, or that he was big as a bus. He would say, and he did, in one of those blurred melismatic slaloms his sentences ran—for all the music was in his speech: swift switches of tempo, stop-time, double time (he could talk in 6/8), “I just ruined my body.” And there, Exhibit A, it stood, that Parthenon of fat, the tenant voice lifted, as we say, since words are a weight, and music. Silence is lighter than air, for the air we know rises but to the edge of the atmosphere. You have to pick up The Bass, as Mingus called his, with audible capitals, and think of the slow years the wood spent as a tree, which might well have been enough for wood, and think of the skill the bassmaker carried without great thought of it from home to the shop and back for decades, and know what bassists before you have played, and know how much of this is stored in The Bass like energy in a spring and know how much you must coax out. How easy it would be, instead, to pull a sword from a stone. But what’s inside the bass wants out, the way one day you will. Religious stories are rich in symmetry. You must release as much of this hoard as you can, little by little, in perfect time, as the work of the body becomes a body of work.