1269 Arts and sciences poems

His last composed poem, "Over My Head," closes with the evening tide coming in as the light fails over Brighton Beach. In the years of The Great Plague, he lived with his mother and brother and wrote the Elegies that remain unpublished, under the eaves in an unfinished room above his mother's late-night television vigil. He wrote to a ghostly laugh-track in the night. Though he cut out and saved lurid, five-color magazine pictures of The South Pacific, The Aegean; though he hoped for a winter crossing by steamer until his final weakness set in, underneath he was a city boy whose poems drifted like a dinghy in small inlets—Gravesend, Rockaway— out too far for safety, in sight of land.

I. Dusk, thus: a shirt drops, the bellybutton rune showing. Clouds are soaked, the sea now iron, muscle-heavy. The pond begins reflecting on astronomy. The fruit wait. The furniture call back their atoms. The tree asks for its leaves. II. Winter brought into the room is the whisk of holly. The purse is a hare limp on the table, its eye gone amber. The birdcage is the work I am after: bold-barred, so no bird leaves. The celadon throat, the iceberg teeth, the matted grass of an armpit . . . A pear, or maybe a stone, the chilled shoulder shifts under cover, not persuaded into similitude. III. In the snail-tracked sky, the mineral grains, a dozen eyes. You tell me thread is for seam and hem, not the mica bead-stitched on the dark. You refuse to have the shards the broom gathered be the moon, seen as aftermath. But like the thimble, I have no guile. So let your window open to the rain coming down, drumming on the hidden shells. IV. Black cherries. Glass of milk on a tablecloth. An arm of bread. The coins. Green scarab beetle. The compact’s sleeping mirror. The fig branch. The sundial. The harlequin leaves. V. Votive-light evening, cipher ridden. The marsh air, and my finger in places. Among the lesser constellations, the fractured kite, the anemone. The geese thread-pulled into the hard sleep. The clothespin, the gold in your hair. The seeds spread are a flung field. I sleep on stone, you on moss. VI. The red-haired figure in the station, the man selling carnations. The scarecrow landscape, the suitcases getting heavier with every stop. Those served as props. I dreamed we each played a part. One of us was given to say: I wanted your distance whispered down small enough for this room. And one to say: I saw you always just a little out of reach, with white hair. VII. A fish-scale moon: who doesn’t want to be left used windsock-hollow? Now for morning: the lit wick of each grass-blade, the saplings like legs of deer, the four walls verifying the house, and the slip of last night’s chive in your teeth.

On this first day of spring, snow covers the fruit trees, mingling improbably with the new blossoms like identical twins brought up in different hemispheres. It is not what Housman meant when he wrote of the cherry hung with snow, though he also knew how death can mistake the seasons, and if he made it all sound pretty, that was our misreading in those high school classrooms where, drunk on boredom, we had to recite his poems. Now the weather is always looming in the background, trying to become more than merely scenery, and though today it is telling us something we don't want to hear, it is all so unpredictable, so out of control that we might as well be children again, hearing the voices of thunder like baritone uncles shouting in the next room as we try to sleep, or hearing the silence of snow falling soft as a coverlet, even in springtime whispering: relax, there is nothing you can possibly do about any of this.

It would have been dark but not lugubrious. It would have been fairly short but not slight. It would have contained a child saying something inadvertently funny that was not said by my daughter, something strangely like what your daughter or sister said once if you could remember. The child's voice flies across a small parking lot where, in one of the cars, a man and a woman sit listening to the silence between them. The child's voice probably hurts them momentarily with a sense of beauty apparently very possible yet somehow out of reach. In the missing poem this is implied, conveyed, transmitted without being flatly said. And it does a dissolve into the look of a soccer field after a game—the last three or four players walk slowly away, their shin-guards muddy, their cleats caked, one player dragging a net bag full of soccer balls— the players seem to have known what it was all for yet now they look somehow depleted and aimless there at the field's far end; and a block away on a wood-grainy porch the eyes of a thin woman sixty-three years old search the shadows in each passing car, as the poem recalls what she wants to recall. Hours later the field is dark and the hills are dark and later even Firehouse Pizza has closed. In the missing poem all this pools into a sense of how much we must cherish life; the world will not do it for us. This idea, though, in the missing poem is not smarmy. Remember when you got the news of the accident— or the illness—in the life of someone more laced into your life than you might have thought; the cool flash of what serious is. Well, the missing poem brings that. Meanwhile not seeming like an imitation of Mark Strand or Mark Doty or Mark Jarman! Yet not like just another Halliday thing either. Instead it would feel like a new dimension of the world, the real world we imagine. With lightness! With weight and lightness and, on the hypothetical radio, that certain song you almost forgot to love.

It does not do you like it Imperfect copy's forgery Posts its vermillion decree These anointed mistakes Neither robust nor

The stars grow lemon in the field, spread like tea leaves in a cup; red-wing blackbirds fold themselves into the fence, corn dreamers. The sky undulating with clouds returns gold-throated arpeggios to the one walking at sunrise, sunfall. Light as the air I sit on my cottage steps; a tom cat come home to die for the day.

The cruelty of ages past affects us now Whoever it was who lived here lived a mean life Each door has locks designed for keys unknown Our living room was once somebody’s home Our bedroom, someone’s only room Our kitchen had a hasp upon its door. Door to a kitchen? And our lives are hasped and boundaried Because of ancient locks and madnesses Of slumlord greed and desperate privacies Which one is madness? Depends on who you are. We find we cannot stay, the both of us, in the same room Dance, like electrons, out of each other’s way. The cruelties of ages past affect us now

for R.G. As if sliding down the green, scuffed face of the wave, a seaplane falls and turns together, keeping the waters of the ear flat: a dead calm. But when the window’s frowning strip of shoreline, the battalions of tropical-drinks umbrellas guarding the sandcastles and saltboxes of the rich, when these flip upside down, and the pale clouded sky floats below the ocean, then we jolt awake— But this is not her dream, not water or land. Tell me again, what illness do I think I have? The ropes of blood coil through her neck, they twist as it twists, as the head looks for parents and young men, for nurses, strangers, year upon year attending until the pulpy blood knots up at last, and the warrens of the brain dry and crackle, a town of names she saunters one long night: streets without signs lead to a girlhood park, to songs under stars, and lipstick, old houses forever unbuilding themselves—but within the blue jungle scaffolding, a gallery of faces stares back at her, portraits she can’t place . . . and then the town flattens and crumbles behind her, it grows to dry scrabbled pasture under a dishplate moon, hanging there in the tints of the sky, yet like a stopped clock, right twice a day: Now ma’am, can you remember the name of the President who was shot in the ‘60s? —Lincoln? And if the names had sunk beneath the sea, rolling hump and hollow, leopard spotted foam—surgeons would haul up the big sharks and club them silly, knife off a fin, then drop them bleeding onto the docks of Alcatraz, warning the inmates: “See that? No inside fin, they’ll  swim round this Rock forever. . . .” The convicts build the prison, then move inside, their block minds ignite a thousand homes by dawn, then melt in the butter sun of breakfast porridge. . . . But this is not the Philosopher’s circle prison, no lidless Eye radiates from the center, beneficent and watchful: the neutered grounds here at the Residence for Life are groomed like the campus of Depression State U: past the dwarfish berms and drumlins a mazy cobalt walkway slithers to the storage lake, with its hooded fount of aqua vitae sudsing the green larvae, its dry Gazebo Isle no one shuffles to . . . One night, the distraught Residence cook shoots himself dead: everyone mourns, but only the young staff seek counseling, their threshold of death not yet raised to that of teetering Mr. On-His-Toes, of Ms. Wheelchair-With-Political-Bumper-Stickers, or elegant Mrs. Whisper, polite confused survivors of wiped-out families, trolley cars, jobs learned and lost, a cosmos squeezed beneath the blood boulder— Why can’t I remember my problem? They do not scream. They who once made things happen now watch things happen to them: they hand their middle chapters to their children, and quietly appraise the spindle of a leafless sapling outside, staked to three larger poles of wood: all of them under arrest. And you must calm yourself. In the acrid hold of their boat, whose strangely knotted sail whips the wind round on each side, anchorless boat that hugs the dock, and keeps the dock from drifting to sea, you can hear the first, reeling chapters, of pierside painters crowding a rustic barrel-and-shanty scene so clichéd the locals called it “Port Motif Number One”—: the washy dab and smear of the medical test, Can you tell me what day this is? —You mean now? The brush like an oar rinses off its paints; a filmy rainbow upon the waters, coils and ribbons you trace in your own sweet time.

At quite uncertain times and places, The atoms left their heavenly path, And by fortuitous embraces, Engendered all that being hath. And though they seem to cling together, And form “associations” here, Yet, soon or late, they burst their tether, And through the depths of space career. So we who sat, oppressed with science, As British asses, wise and grave, Are now transformed to wild Red Lions, As round our prey we ramp and rave. Thus, by a swift metamorphosis, Wisdom turns wit, and science joke, Nonsense is incense to our noses, For when Red Lions speak, they smoke. Hail, Nonsense! dry nurse of Red Lions, From thee the wise their wisdom learn, From thee they cull those truths of science, Which into thee again they turn. What combinations of ideas, Nonsense alone can wisely form! What sage has half the power that she has, To take the towers of Truth by storm? Yield, then, ye rules of rigid reason! Dissolve, thou too, too solid sense! Melt into nonsense for a season, Then in some nobler form condense. Soon, all too soon, the chilly morning, This flow of soul will crystallize, Then those who Nonsense now are scorning, May learn, too late, where wisdom lies.

were copped from Gramophone. cassettes jammed into a factory- issued stereo deck of the hoopty i rolled around in. a bucket. bass and drum looped with some string sample, fixed. a sliver of perfect adjusted. the scrapes of something reconstituted. there was so much space to fill. an invitation to utter. Iqra- Allah said to the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon Him). a- to b-side and around again. a circle a cipher. i’d drive down and back in my mom’s Dodge for the latest volumes of sound. i’d stutter and stop and begin again. lonesome and on fire. none. no one i knew rapped. i’d recite alone on Clark St. free, styling, shaping, my voice a sapling, hatchling, rapping my life, emerging in the dark of an empty car. • there was a time when hip-hop felt like a secret society of wizards and wordsmiths. magicians meant to find you or that you were meant to find like rappers i listened to and memorized in history class talked specifically to me, for me. • & sometimes you’d see a kid whisper to himself in the corner of a bus seat & you asked if he rhymed & traded a poem a verse like a fur pelt/trapping. some gold or food. this sustenance. you didn’t have to ride solo anymore. • Jonathan was the first kid i met who rapped. he was Black from a prep school, wore ski goggles on top his head & listened to Wu-Tang which meant he was always rhyming about science and chess. his pops made him read Sun Tzu. his mans was Omega a fat Puerto Rican who wrote graffiti and smoked bidis. & they’d have friends & the backseat would swell & the word got passed/scooped like a ball on the playground. you’d juggle however long your mind could double Dutch. sometimes you’d take what you were given/lift off like a trampoline rocket launch. sometimes you’d trip & scrape your knees. tongue-tied, not quick. words stuck on loop, like like words, stuck, like that. but break thru, mind, knife sharp, mind darts polished & gleaming we’d ride for the sake of rhyming. take the long way home or wherever the fuck we were going cruise down Lake Shore & back, blasting blazing. polishing these gems. trying to get our mind right.