1269 Arts and sciences poems

I find it helpful to imagine writing in a blizzard with every inscription designed to prevent snow crystals from drifting in. Avoid the hive mind. Go fly a kite, raise a stained glass window in the sky. It’s the opposite of making love to drudgery, what I do for a dying. Remove the bitter sediment trapped in the brewer. It will be new whether you make it new or not. It will be full of neo- shadows. Full of then— both past and next, iridescent with suspense. Remember time is not the treasure revealer. More a midge larva creeping through a waterfall releasing suction feet. The curiosity rover lands on Mars! New is a hooligan. It breaks the reckoning frame and rests in pieces. Let me collect its dna from the tears on your desk.

90th and Third, NYC We almost missed him, although his face, As blunt as a busy Picasso, all shifting Planes, was wedged in a picture frame. We almost missed him, the way one can stop Seeing hunched-over bodies along the street Or a favorite picture above the sofa In the living room, so familiar it seems Invisible, until it has drifted askew Or been removed.  "If only he had something More contemporary," my companion offered. The man in the frame extended his crushed Paper coffee cup, fingers hugging its Greek Pillars and statues, white and blue. "Spare any change?" he asked.  I brought Forth a quarter.  His eyes, brilliant, said I am a masterpiece.  This is where I live.

His blue guitar is lacquered so brightly when he leans a certain way into his song I can see my head in my hands reflected. And when he leans back into the emotion of another chorus his guitar returns to blue: the blue of unboiled lobsters fading to a general Biro-lid blue and with a patina of fine tiger stripes the color of sky midway towards a springtime horizon. I’ve had a long time to consider this. The man with the blue guitar has a little tin for his plectrums, with a cartoon pelican on its lid, standing on top of the words “Pelican Throat Lozenges.” Between songs he tells me that he found it in the abandoned house from the song. Which song? My next song. It’s called “The Abandoned House.” The man with the blue guitar reads his lyrics from a special leather book where he has written all his lyrics. Sometimes he forgets the words and searches the page as he plays, his face scrunching as he sings new noises in their place. I prefer the noises.This song is called Halloween Moon this song is called Lovesick Bougainvillea this song is called Bourbon Canal this song is called St. Michael’s Boots My Cousin’s Old Coat The Wrestler’s Arm The Old Arm Wrestler Dead Man’s Stetson Panama Morning The Skulls of the Cathedral Lawn Shadow in the Gully in the Foothills of My Youth My Heart Is a Love Letter the Folds Are Worn Through.

Give me the night, you beasts hissing over the face of this dead woman, I climb into your eyes, looking. To those who would sleep through the wounds they inflict on others, I offer pain to help them awaken, Ju-Ju, Tom-Toms & the magic of a talking burning bush. I am the queen of sleight of hand wandering the forest of motives, armed with horoscopes, cosmic encounters & an X-Acto knife. My right eye is a projector flickering Hottentot & Huey Newton, my left eye is prism of Wild Style, gold grills, lowriders, black dahlias, blunts & back alleys. At twenty-one, I stood at the crossroad of Hell & Here, evil peering at me behind a blue-red eye. I armed myself with the memories of Pentecostal tent revivals, apple orchards, the strawberry fields I roamed with my mother & aunts in the summer, & the sightings of UFO lights blinking in the black of an Ohio nightsky. I am a weapon. I believe in hoodoo, voodoo, root workers, Dead Presidents,Black Tail,Black Inches&Banjees. I believe in the ghosts of 60 million or more & black bones disintegrating at the bottom of the Atlantic, below sea level,Not Just Knee Deep.I believe that children are the future: love them now or meet them at dusk at your doorstep, a 9mm in their right hand & a head noisy as a hornet’s nest later. Your choice. Black, still, in the hour of chaos, I believe in Royal Crown, Afro-Sheen, Vaseline, Jergens & baby powder on breasts, the collective conscious, cellular memory, Public Enemies, outlaws, Outkast, elevations, “Elevators” &Encyclopedia Britannica. Under my knife, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz laughs with Muhammad Ali, a Lady named Day cuddles with a Boxer named Mister after traumatically stumbling on strange fruit dangling from one of the most beautiful Sycamores evah. Under my knife, Marilyn Monroe enjoys an evening out with Ella Fitzgerald, meanwhile,Life shows me a gigantic photo. I am a weapon. I chart voyages of unlove, high on a man called crazy who turns nigger into prince. I believe in Jong, Clifton, “Dirty Diana” & Dilla, paper, scrilla, green, gumbo, coins, Batty Bois & Video Vixens. I believe that beads at the ends of braids are percussive instruments in double Dutch. In the reflection of my knife, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington & Thelonious Monk argue in a Basquiat heroin nod. I am a weapon. I believe in goo-gobs of deep brown apple butter, alphabets, Alaga Syrup, Affrilachians, A-salaam Alaikum, Wa-Alaikum-Salaam, & African Hebrew Israelites. I believe in Octoroons, Quadroons, Culluds,Cooley High, Commodores, Krumpin, Krunk &Burn, Hollywood, Burn. I am Sethe crawling a field toward freedom with a whitegirl talking about velvet. I believe in tumbleweaves, hot combs & hair lyes, Chaka Khan, Shaka Zulu, Mau Mau, Slum Village &Buhloone Mindstate: “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless. Like water.” I believe in water. My body is pulp. I bleed ink. I believe in the Fantastic, Vol. 2, The Low End Theory, Space Is the Place&The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Tucked in the corner of my right ventricle sprouts a Tree of Knowledge, lives a Shining Serpent & a middle finger. I’m on a quest for the Marvelous. My face is a mask of malehood, malevolence, one big masquerade. Metaphysically niggerish, I am a weapon wandering the forest of motives, a machete in one hand, a mirror in the other, searching for the nearest body of water.

Contemporary Folk Poetry of Crete FROM COUPLETS SENT BY SMS FROM YORGOS VITTOROS, MAYOR OF KYPARISSI Whose garden are you blossom to, to whom do you belong? Whose velvet down, whose feather are you, whose rejoicing song? *       *       * BY MANOLIS PASPARAKIS (BLIND RHYMESTER) My heart, it doesn’t fool me, even with the games it plays: All my nights are dark, but that’s the same with all my days. *       *       * FROM YANNIS PAVLAKIS’S CRETAN FOLK POETRY COLLECTION Take a look around you when the trees are all in bloom, And wonder why you’ve chosen that old desiccated broom. * The everything of the world is zero, the life of the world is naught; It is from nothing to nothing that eternity is wrought. * When they open wide the church door to bear his body hither, I’ll drag forth such a savage cry the wild greens will wither. * I want my darling filthy—it’s the dirty girl I trust— To keep her to myself and make the rest flee in disgust! * There is a sheer cliff at the end of the foot-path of our lives, But he whose soul possesses wings unfurls them and survives. *       *       * FROM 6,000 COUPLETS OF ARISTIDES CHAIRETIS The world is something I can handle when she’s in my clasp— But when she’s far away, it is too huge for me to grasp. * If I’d saved all the tears from when I first began to weep, I’d have a sea by now and I could float upon the deep. *       *       * FROM THE BARD OF SITIA, CRETE, YANNI DERMITZAKI Lower your branches, little one. This favor’s all I seek, Because when lightning strikes, my dear, it always finds the peak. *       *       * COUPLETS BY ANDREAS PAPYRAKIS, FROM THE VILLAGE OF KORFES, MELVIZIOU, CRETE, AS TOLD TO NICK PAPANDREOU ON NOVEMBER 13, 2008 Five thousand dreams I fashioned every hour of every day, But then along came wind and rain to sweep them all away. * Deep underground where no sun rises, no moon shines above, That is the place where he must dwell, the man who loses love. * Heart, break. Flesh, decompose. And Soul, desert the body’s frame. Since you denied me, go back to the dirt from which you came.

Geneticist as driver, down the gene codes in, let's say, a topless coupe and you keep expecting bends, real tyre-testers on tight mountain passes, but instead it's dead straight, highway as runway, helix unravelled as vista, as vanishing point. Keep your foot down. This is a finite desert. You move too fast to read it, the order of the rocks, the cacti, roadside weeds, a blur to you. Every hour or so, you pass a shack which passes for a motel here: tidy faded rooms with TVs on for company, the owner pacing out his empty parking lot. And after each motel you hit a sandstorm thick as fog, but agony. Somewhere out there are remnants of our evolution, genes for how to fly south, sense a storm, hunt at night, how to harden your flesh into hide or scales. These are the miles of dead code. Every desert has them. You are on a mission to discover why the human heart still slows when divers break the surface, why mermaids still swim in our dreams.

If I die, you say you will let your hair turn silver, grow long, and you will go into the dark place, for you’ve already begun to forget what Mecca means. Where we come from, you and I, maqam means home, means music; the Qur’an can only be read as a song; a sheikh recites the Fatiha as if he has built a house among the lines, the ayas. We’ve both called our daughters Aya, and when they ask about their name, we play holy verses for them, listen to how the sheikh lingers long enough on each letter, how the audience claps and whistles —Is it Umm Kulthum? our daughters ask. He knows all his maqamat, this sheikh, says God is greater, and Allah, Allah, reply the faithful and the unfaithful alike, for the earth is such a small planet, and look, there is Ithaca, almost always on the horizon — float, my friend. Ithaca —It is rough, but raises good men, says Homer, but oh, the women, the women know how to house the bodies of the drowned. They sing, In the Name of the Cross, of God, the Merciful. A child in Syria has amputated legs because he has ventured into a minefield to eat grass. He still has two eyes, two arms, a mouth.God is greater, is greater, stay with me in the light a little longer. You light two cigarettes at the same time, give me one. Tomorrow you will fly to Lesbos to translate. The refugees will say shai, and you will say tea, home, Mecca, Ithaca, maqam, maqam, maqam.

Does she love you?She says yes, but really how do you know unless you undress that easy assertion, undoing its petals and laminae, and going in below all trace of consciousness, into the neuroelectrical coffer where self-understanding is storaged away, and then lifting its uttermost molecule out, to study in its nakedness as it spins in a clinical light?—the way we all, in our various individual versions of this common human urge, go in, and in, and in, the physicist down to the string-vibration underlying matter, and the Appalachia fiddler getting so (as she puts it) “into my music,” sound becomes a flesh for her to intimately (“in”-timately) enter, “its thick and its sweetbreads.” Is he cheating on you?He says no, and feigns that he’s insulted, but for certainty you’ll need to delicately strip the bark away and drill, and tweeze, until you can smear a microscope slide of the pith and can augur the chitterlings —the way the philosopher can’t accept a surface assumption of truth, but needs to peel back the fatty sheen of the dermis, soak the cambium layer into a blow-away foam, and then with pick and lightbeam helmet, inch by inch begin spelunking through those splayed-out caverns under the crust, where gems of cogitation are buried —the way the diver descends for the pearl, the miner: in, the archaeologist: in, the therapist: down the snakier roots of us and in, and in, the way the lone, leg-pretzeled yogi makes a glowing bathysphere of worldliness and sends it in, and further in, tinier and heavier and ever in, the way the man in the opium den is floating forever, toward a horizon positioned in the center of the center of his head. . . . If we could stand beyond the border of our species and consider us objectively, it might seem that our purpose in existing is to be a living agency that balances, or maybe even slows, the universe’s irreversible expansion out, and out . . . and each of us, a contribution to that task. My friend John’s wife received the news: a “growth,” a “mass,” on her pituitary, marble-sized, mysterious. And the primary-care physician said: Yes, we must go in and in.That couldn’t be the final word! And the second-opinion physician said: Yes, my sweet-and-shivering-one, my fingerprint-and-irisprint-uniqueness, someone’s-dearest, you who said the prayers at Juliette’s grave, who drove all night from Switzerland with your daughter, you on this irreplaceable day in your irreplaceable skin in the scumbled light as it crosses the bay in Corpus Christi, yes in the shadows, yes in the radiance, yes we must go in and in.

for Thomas From the five good emperors I have learned that there were five good emperors, From the lemon tree I’ve planted now I know that leaves unpummeled yet will drop, From the clock, the time, it’s five p.m., from the sun the length of day, From Quercus borealis, the queer names of the leaves of all the trees, From burning I’ve learned burning, from the aster family chickory abounds, From hawkweed of the colors bright, from sleeping, of my dreams, From mosquitoes, scratching, from fishes, fishing, from turkeys how to run and how to hop, From erect perennials I’ve learned to reach the shelf, from my cats to lick the dark part of the tin, From the sparrows I’ve learned this and that, from Germanic tribes, to gather thoughts in herds, From the window blinds, from the sun decayed, from the heart, a brimming record braised and turned.

Finding an old book on a basement shelf— gray, spine bent—and reading it again, I met my former, unfamiliar, self, some of her notes and scrawls so alien that, though I tried, I couldn't get (behind this gloss or that) back to the time she wrote to guess what experiences she had in mind, the living context of some scribbled note; or see the girl beneath the purple ink who chose this phrase or that to underline, the mood, the boy, that lay behind her thinking— but they were thoughts I recognized as mine; and though there were words I couldn't even read, blobs and cross-outs; and though not a jot remained of her old existence—I agreed with the young annotator's every thought: A clever girl. So what would she see fit to comment on—and what would she have to say about the years that she and I have written since—before we put the book away?