1269 Arts and sciences poems

1. THE SACRIFICE On this tile the knife like a sickle-moon hangs in the painted air as if it had learned a dance of its own, the way the boy has among the vivid breakable flowers, the way Abraham has among the boulders, his two feet heavy as stones. 2. NEAR SINAI God's hand here is the size of a tiny cloud, and the wordless tablets he holds out curve like the temple doors. Moses, reaching up must see on their empty surface laws chiseled in his mind by the persistent wind of the desert, by wind in the bulrushes. 3. THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT We know by the halos that circle these heads like rings around planets that the small donkey has carried his burden away from the thunder of the Old Testament into the lightning of the New. 4. AT THE ARMENIAN TILE SHOP Under the bright glazes Esau watches Jacob, Cain watches Abel. With the same heavy eyes the tilemaker's Arab assistant watches me, all of us wondering why for every pair there is just one blessing.

"They won't attack us here in the Indian graveyard." I love that moment. And I love the moment when I climb into your warm you-smelling bed-dent after you've risen. And sunflowers, once a whole field and I almost crashed, the next year all pumpkins! Crop rotation, I love you. Dividing words between syl- lables! Dachshunds! What am I but the inter- section of these loves? I spend 35 dollars on a CD of some guy with 15 different guitars in his shack with lots of tape delays and loops, a good buy! Mexican animal crackers! But only to be identified by what you love is a malformation just as embryonic chickens grow very strange in zero gravity. I hate those experiments on animals, varnished bats, blinded rabbits, cows with windows in their flanks but obviously I'm fascinated. Perhaps it was my early exposure to Frankenstein. I love Frankenstein! Arrgh, he replies to everything, fire particularly sets him off, something the villagers quickly pick up. Fucking villagers. All their shouting's making conversation impossible and now there's grit in my lettuce which I hate but kinda like in clams as one bespeaks poor hygiene and the other the sea. I hate what we're doing to the sea, dragging huge chains across the bottom, bleaching reefs. Either you're a rubber/ gasoline salesman or like me, you'd like to duct tape the vice president's mouth to the exhaust pipe of an SUV and I hate feeling like that. I would rather concentrate on the rapidity of your ideograms, how only a biochemical or two keeps me from becoming the world's biggest lightning bug.

Lucretius grabbed my arm and led me to the spot where he went nuts. I watered little drums right away and entangled the Sava River with knitting needles. I putrefied a small soup, dismembered seven towels. There, He — The Terrible — burnt on the stake, squatted, too. My god, I beat him up his ass. Puff, puff, but no one had heard a thing. Now here, I’m flooded with flowers by cumin. Even Tarkovsky appears. Now I will suck you with my thumbs, mold you like clay with my horns, till he’d vaporize and see into what and where I’ve traveled to. Into honor. Into white birch trees. Into the pouch used for bread. I hung around the world a lot, frothily crushing the mountain range. With no avail, with no day’s pay, sticky are my laws. I protected an elephant as much as I could, stared at the back of the horse. Joshed the others now, too, tested spring mattresses. Kept gulping nirvana. Loosened feathery leaves, wrapped the emperor into a roll. To not let my senses perish, to gallop without a break.

married a woman who was perfectly happy to turn half their apartment into a laboratory including the cadavers necessary to her husband’s explorations in surgery. He also wrote articles on the ears of birds and in Latin, an anatomist, standing motionless in the middle of the road thinking that electricity must activate the blood while the muscles, themselves living Leyden jars, flowered among those who found it difficult to believe that electricity is an animal lost in a garden of showering towers and, as with all living things, a certain degree of the domestic filtered down between his hands to land in a dusting of involuntary silver across the surface of every nerve.

Lie me down to heal in sleep, do not let me wake In sin, the tongue Cancels another year, another painted storm In the coral caves, some pious poet Drunk on vapors Swatting tomb-bats in the nightwood, would that Wayward bark sunned white Be also thunder, a hill of bones drumming—thud Thud, a wake Of buzzards braiding into the loosening skull—the redoubled fists Of students like an island in the bramble chained—I have been told To reason, lawless, empty, without rights— But I am old Not age, I have been told To match its columns by our footfall, prophet—I am not The straw or garland of our Sirens, not the brow Of holly, nor the warble Of any lark

“i” has not found, started, finished “i’s” morning poem, the poem “i” was writing about “i” having sex with the man “i” left her husband for the night before or maybe just this morning. a sex poem, so to speak, so to say, so as to lay... a foundation for... what???????? SEX i lost my sex /poem! how did it go? i know it was called SEX something about my bosky acres, my unshrubb’d down ‘bout all being tight and yare (bring in tiresias?) did you say soothe? tiresias, who lies fucking more? whoops. who likes fucking more ? (“bring in // the old thought //(allen grossman doing yeats) that life prepares us for//what never happens”) today (the color of )

The Magic of Numbers—1 How strange it was to hear the furniture being moved around in the apartment upstairs! I was twenty-six, and you were twenty-two. The Magic of Numbers—2 You asked me if I wanted to run, but I said no and walked on. I was nineteen, and you were seven. The Magic of Numbers—3 Yes, but does X really like us? We were both twenty-seven. The Magic of Numbers—4 You look like Jerry Lewis (1950). The Magic of Numbers—5 Grandfather and grandmother want you to go over to their house for dinner. They were sixty-nine, and I was two and a half. The Magic of Numbers—6 One day when I was twenty-nine years old I met you and nothing happened. The Magic of Numbers—7 No, of course it wasn’t I who came to the library! Brown eyes, flushed cheeks, brown hair. I was twenty-nine, and you were sixteen. The Magic of Numbers—8 After we made love one night in Rockport I went outside and kissed the road I felt so carried away. I was twenty-three, and you were nineteen. The Magic of Numbers—9 I was twenty-nine, and so were you. We had a very passionate time. Everything I read turned into a story about you and me, and everything I did was turned into a poem.

No one would burn your name for not seeing the ant’s careful antennae testing the air next to your shoe, six legs almost rowing it along. Who would be upset if you brushed one off-handedly off your arm, undone by the tiny steps:what do they want

Earth’s Wrath at our assaults is slow to come But relentless when it does. It has to do With catastrophic change, and with the limit At which one order more of Magnitude Will bring us to a qualitative change And disasters drastically different From those we daily have to know about. As with the speed of light, where speed itself Becomes a limit and an absolute; As with the splitting of the atom And a little later of the nucleus; As with the millions rising into billions— The piker’s kind in terms of money, yes, But a million 2 in terms of time and space As the universe grew vast while the earth Our habitat diminished to the size Of a billiard ball, both relative To the cosmos and to the numbers of ourselves, The doubling numbers, the earth could accommodate. We stand now in the place and limit of time Where hardest knowledge is turning into dream, And nightmares still contained in sleeping dark Seem on the point of bringing into day The sweating panic that starts the sleeper up. One or another nightmare may come true, And what to do then? What in the world to do?

The farmer in the dell The farmer in the dell Ox chip gastrology The farmer in the dell The farmer takes a wife The farmer takes a wife Pupa reconnaissance The farmer takes a wife The wife takes a child The wife takes a child Sweetbread electrolyte The wife takes a child The child takes a nurse The child takes a nurse Cheese futz habitual The child takes a nurse The nurse takes a cow The nurse takes a cow Flatworm collateral The nurse takes a cow