1269 Arts and sciences poems

The eyelids glowing, some chill morning. O world half-known through opening, twilit lids Before the vague face clenches into light; O universal waters like a cloud, Like those first clouds of half-created matter; O all things rising, rising like the fumes From waters falling, O forever falling; Infinite, the skeletal shells that fall, relinquished, The snowsoft sift of the diatoms, like selves Downdrifting age upon age through milky oceans; O slow downdrifting of the atoms; O island nebulae and O the nebulous islands Wandering these mists like falsefires, which are true, Bobbing like milkweed, like warm lanterns bobbing Through the snowfilled windless air, blinking and passing As we pass into the memory of women Who are passing. Within those depths What ravening? What devouring rage? How shall our living know its ends of yielding? These things have taken me as the mouth an orange— That acrid sweet juice entering every cell; And I am shared out. I become these things: These lilies, if these things are water lilies Which are dancers growing dim across no floor; These mayflies; whirled dust orbiting in the sun; This blossoming diffused as rushlights; galactic vapors; Fluorescence into which we pass and penetrate; O soft as the thighs of women; O radiance, into which I go on dying ...

Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being. Fifty-four years before I could see Rouen cathedral is built of parallel shafts of sun, and now you want to restore my youthful errors: fixed notions of top and bottom, the illusion of three-dimensional space, wisteria separate from the bridge it covers. What can I say to convince you the Houses of Parliament dissolve night after night to become the fluid dream of the Thames? I will not return to a universe of objects that don’t know each other, as if islands were not the lost children of one great continent.  The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches, becomes water, lilies on water, above and below water, becomes lilac and mauve and yellow and white and cerulean lamps, small fists passing sunlight so quickly to one another that it would take long, streaming hair inside my brush to catch it. To paint the speed of light! Our weighted shapes, these verticals, burn to mix with air and change our bones, skin, clothes to gases.  Doctor, if only you could see how heaven pulls earth into its arms and how infinitely the heart expands to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Mourning doves are not owls after a while away from the city      not because the country appears of a softer feather       less predatory you're thinking a sound more naturally friendly less edgy and dangerous than the subway but because the city city to city within itself so sharply details for you   actually walks you through a training in the amplitudes of form after a while that sharpness wipes the smile the natural had you putting on everything. Really owls       are so soft       their deadly accuracy of flight depending on it they are all but silent      a recognizable law nobody says shit you learn       the city has taught you to  pick up on     which wings bring the disk of their sun for around your neck each day and which take you out; and that your green act of good is natural in that it too depends on the weather.

—for Lynne McMahon In her bedroom, she set a convex mirror on a stand, so that when the visitor looked in expecting to see the familiar line of lip and brow, what appeared instead was the head up-ended— the mouth a talking wound— above the eyes, upside down, fluttering, like the eyes in the skull of a calf slung on the blood-hook— or a baby's lightning blink, dropped low in the bone cage about to be born Walls washed down with the cold pardons of the nurse. Gem green paint restored from old scrapings. Here and there, a trifling, a lightening beyond the author's original intent, which was in the drawing room, positively spleenish. From razor bits of palette, touch-ups: Mrs. Woolf's favorite color. The Trust ladies place the still-ticking brain of Leonard's wireless next to the empty brass stalk with its single blossom: old black hat she wore like pharaoh gazing down the Nile-green Nile. That's her: the flat drainboard of a face set so fiercely against the previous owner's trompe 1'oeil beard and jug. The simpleton's request: a picture of her young— So the trees walk up burning, the birds speak Latin for the dull-witted, drenched palette the glimpse of whirlwind in the pond where their handfuls of ash drifted down and over the great mown meadow next door where the Rodmell August Fair is on. My daughter astride a steam engine, bored as any child with the past. Later makes an X (her favorite letter) with two sticks held up to the window of the great writer's garden study. But the mirror standing in the air a glass knot tying and retying itself would repolarize, and she, drawing near, reverse herself. A woman's rapt beautiful face drawn downward by gravity, sorrow, lit upward by the flame of age— could turn over, floating, then submerge, amniotic! Across the green from the bedroom window she saw it: a fin cleaving dark waters— "and that became The Waves." The ladies sip and look. Vanessa, pregnant, laughing, crosses the garden. Two women walk among the hollyhocks with shears. The hedge dented by one's fluttering hands. Inside her sister's body: fluttering hands. Annie's white sweater catches on the thorns of blackberry canes. I pull her free then pick six little ones, busy, like the swarm cells of a fetus. Or the enlarging failure in those rooms, unchecked growth: death-drawn, claustrophobic. The wind, up from the South Downs, blew the two women across the garden, their shadows like crossed sticks. Sisters. One shrugging slightly, a loose mauve shawl. Where her sculpted head sits now, a stone wall. She sat at this table eating mutton and bread. He was talking about the socialist initiative and she turned away: someone was knocking at the window. It was the French photographer we surprised on our way out, shooting the forbidden interior through the dark glass.

Now that the ticket to eternity has your name on it, we are here to pay the awkward tribute post-modernity allows to those who think they think your way but hear you only faintly, filtered through a gauze of echoes, sounding in a voice that could be counterfeit; and yet the noise seems to expand our notion of the true. An ivory forehead, landscape drunk on light, mother-of-pearl that flashes in the night: intimations of the miracle when the null steps forward as the all— these were signals, sparks that spattered from the anvil of illusions where you learned the music of a generation burned by an old myth: the end that will not come. There is no other myth. This sun-drenched yard proves it, freighted with the waiting dead, where votive plastic hyacinths relay the promise of one more technicolor day —the promise that is vouchsafed to you, scribe, and your dictator, while your names get blurred with all the others, like your hardest word dissolving in the language of the tribe.

There are never any suicides in the quarter among people one knows No successful suicides. A Chinese boy kills himself and is dead. (they continue to place his mail in the letter rack at the Dome) A Norwegian boy kills himself and is dead. (no one knows where the other Norwegian boy has gone) They find a model dead alone in bed and very dead. (it made almost unbearable trouble for the concierge) Sweet oil, the white of eggs, mustard and water, soap suds and stomach pumps rescue the people one knows. Every afternoon the people one knows can be found at the café.

When you walked in it was like recognizing the moon when he returns. His lover bites his cheek; she has no choice. All we see is the dissolution, then await the reconstruction. Each time, the sky yanks her into his orbit. I want to say I’m sorry. I want to say You win.Our bodies are like the confessional booth these poems are stuck in. Even the priest can see that sin. You’ll be all spit and honey— or maybe I’m the poisoned flower gnawing on its own lip because it has no hands to reach for you. Only words that are as useless as the pollen for saying anything. I continue to serve them even with your hands around my throat from across the room. Your voice is home, I answer it like a bat guided across the atmosphere. This is a narrative that cannot end well but wants to, but must. I’ll continue to go down kicking and you’ll be sweet as anything until you bite back. No, it can’t end here—we won’t let it. Billions of years have passed since an asteroid last hit the moon: clearly some magnetic fields can be sustained.

I back the car over a soft, large object; hair appears on my chest in dreams. The paperboy comes to collect with a pit bull. Call Grandmother and she says, Well you know death is death and none other. In the mornings we’re in the dark; even at the end of June the zucchini keep on the sill. Ring Grandmother for advice and she says, O you know I used to grow so many things. Then there’s the frequent bleeding, the tender nipples, and the rot under the floormat. If I’m not seeing a cold-eyed doctor it is another gouging mechanic. Grandmother says, Thanks to the blue rugs and Eileen Briscoe’s elms the house keeps cool. Well. Then. You say Grandmother let me just ask you this: How does a body rise up again and rinse her mouth from the tap. And how does a body put in a plum tree or lie again on top of another body or string a trellis. Or go on drying the flatware. Fix rainbow trout. Grout the tile. Buy a bag of onions. Beat an egg stiff. Yes, how does the cat continue to lick itself from toenail to tailhole. And how does a body break bread with the word when the word has broken. Again. And. Again. With the wine. And the loaf. And the excellent glass of the body. And she says, Even. If. The. Sky. Is. Falling. My. Peace. Rose. Is. In. Bloom.

Finding myself in a mesmeric orientation, before me appeared Benjamin Franklin, who magnetized his French paramours at dinner parties as an amusing diversion from his most serious studies of electricity and the ethereal fire. I like thinking about how he would have stood on tiptoe to kiss their buzzing lips and everyone would gasp and clap for the blue spark between them. I believe in an honest and forthright manner, a democracy of plain speech, so I have to find a way to explain I don’t care to have sex anymore. Once I was a high school teacher and there was a boy who everyday came in late, who only came to school at all to sell drugs out of his backpack, upon which he laid his head like a pillow and closed his eyes while I pointed at a chart diagramming the anatomy of a sparrow. The vice principal was watching and taking notes as I taught this class, so I slid the bag from under his cheek, as if not to wake him, wrapped his fingers around a pen. I was trying to be a gentle mother and also trying to show I was in control of an unstable situation. The boy, also trying to be in control of himself, walked so slow to my desk and we stood to watch him push everything—binders, piles of ungraded papers, a beaker of red pens to the floor. He was so calm.How do you like it when I touch your things. I do not like it. I live in a house with many blue mason jars, each containing a feather collection or starfish collection or vertebrae collection, and also there is a fully articulated fetal alligator skeleton. Each window is pressed by the design of a sweet-gum branch, all the little orange and red stars of its leaves, you can’t see the perfect geometry this close, just haphazard parabolas, but beneath the foundation the roots mirror the branching. I have a chart of this to pull down. The view is flat and so quiet on the inside. Have I been forthright yet? What I want to know is what happens if I decide to never have sex again? Or more precisely, can I decide to not have sex again and still be kind? And be a joy to others? I should mention I am a wife. I should mention I was told my sole purpose is to be joy to others. The sidewalks outside are very full of people and when I look at them I feel hopeless. Benjamin Franklin was so jolly with his kite and his key and his scandalous electricity. He was so in love with women and drink and democracy. Before I was this way, I was not a house, I was just a jar and what I wanted was to be broken. A cool trick you can do that I once showed a class is crank a wheel covered in felt against another felt wheel. Static bristles and sparks and makes your hair stand on end . But hook it to a Leyden jar and the electricity fills up in there, invisible as air. Becomes a glass battery, until you too much the thing, then wow! broken glass everywhere. I remember wanting that. Do I have to always want that? My house is blue and quiet. I can hardly hear the squirrel in my sweet-gum tree dancing like a sunbeam to sing his riddles: “A house full, a hole full, but you cannot gather a bowl full.” The air of everywhere is wet with electric fluid, you can’t even tell, but pop, whiz, everywhere. “In this field,” Ben says, “the soul has room enough to expand, to display all of her extravagances.” The sweet gum has 10,000 sticky, spiky seed balls. They start green but grow black and fall for want of a barren season. They look like sea urchins. I call them tree urchins and think it’s a funny joke. I don’t tell it to anyone, as I am tired of being told what is not. Such a secret, I know, is an extravagance, and I like best how it’s an extravagance so small you must keep it in a jar with others of its kind for it to ever mean anything at all.

I’m a’kickin’ but not high, and I’m a’flappin’ but I can’t fly. — Florence Church A carpet of light, the ocean alive < half a moon muting the stars. I tell myself despair    is just a bad attitude:Get up, I say.Look— and the shimmer spends its name in my head. _____ These days    midlife holds the jagged edge: my nephew in prison, a prisoner> friends insane with work or sick of trying to be loved, my parents handing over their lives like evidence: my good mother, her mind     a trail of crumbs in a woods flocked with birds. --/-- To raise a child    break it like a wild horse — bend the will:get up, get dressed. I remember Emlen School staring me down, my lunch box, September: the spiked fence freshly painted. Then, the goodbye from my mother who’d fought my hard hair, lipstick like mist on my cheek. --/-- That instant when eyes meet and slide away — even love blinks, looks off like a stranger. With: Who are you with? --/-- I suspect everything. Outside the air moves a giant bird I cannot see. Still laced in this brown body: my aging heart — a-loom     a-loomdoom— still minds my thoughts, but rolls his eyes. _____ To see >< to be seen:  the life of the visible.  Don’t be shy. Glances pick my face. Once, I was a sperm and an egg, but they didn’t see me. --/-- Too small to walk alone: I held my father’s index finger. Philadelphia police caped in their black jackets — big badges     almost hungry — looking at us. --/-- In a mall: say a food court on Saturday     or a stadium just before the game. There’s this drone, this steady, muttering thrum punctured by packages — plastic this, paper that — torn and torn. “It’s hard not to be hungry.” --/-- Time     for bed: my mother reading The Three Little Pigs