1269 Arts and sciences poems

Oh: I am analytic & 0-1 in a given region (unloved/ labial) and such unlikeness in a most minor foot : signs suggest : an ampersand. To be old is to be ode. To be qualified is a stipulation : a slope on the sycamore : a day when pancakes are the middle of a week. Ode to weakness, whatever I am: the situation inside the marriage (phonetic notation). (situation) to the rodeo. The fleece demeans the contribution. Pajamas. It would be impractical (lateral tap) to explain impoverished speakers. In English: to pronounce sounds. I care if I am kissed. My father came back floral (Augmentations in Audio) and floral is a door. Oh: middle low IPA key. Rhyme the half long phones. Oh half in the past. Oh. And again. Oh.

1/ THE MOUTH Not English Somali Italian French the mouth blown open in the Toyota battle wagon at KM4 speaks in a language never heard before. Not the Absolute Speaker of the News, not crisis chatter's famine/flame, the mouth blown open at KM4 speaks in a language never heard before. Speaks back to the dead at KM4, old men in macawis, beards dyed with henna, the women wearing blue jeans under black chadors. Nothing solved or resolved, exactly as they were, the old wars still flickering in the auras round their faces, the mouth of smoke at KM4 mouths syllables of smoke never heard before. 2/ THE CONCERT Lake water in smooth still sun moves in and out of synch with the violin playing at the villa— the bow attacking the strings looks like a hand making some frantic motion to come closer, go away— it's hard to say what's being said, who's being summoned from the dead, from red sand drifting across the sheen of the shining floor. The pianist's hands taking wing to hover above a chord become the flight path of a marabou stork crashing down on carrion, the piano levitating up and up above red sand that it starts to float across the way a camel's humps far off in the mirage rise and fall fall and rise until mirage overbrims itself and everything into its shimmering disappears. And the ones who died the day before, blown up at the crossroads at KM4, scanning the notice board for scholarship results, put their fingers to their names as the onlookers applaud. 3/ ORACLE The little man carved out of bone shouts something to the world the world can't hear. All around him the roads, lost in drifted, deep red sand, die out in sun just clearing the plain. Dried out, faded, he makes an invocation at an altar: an AK-47 stood up on its butt end in a pile of rock. The AK talks the talk of what guns talk— not rage or death or clichés of killing, but specs of what it means to be fired off in the air. No fear when it jams, no enemy running away, no feeling like a river overflowing in a cloudburst— forget all that: the little man of bone is not the streaming head of the rivergod roaring at Achilles; nor dead Patroclos complaining in a dream how Achilles has forgotten him. The AK wants to tell a different truth— a truth ungarbled that is so obvious no one could possibly mistake its meaning. If you look down the cyclops-eye of the barrel what you'll see is a boy with trousers rolled above his ankles. You'll see a mouth of bone moving in syllables that have the rapid-fire clarity of a weapon that can fire 600 rounds a minute. 4/ "BEFORE HE BLEW HIMSELF UP, HE LIKED TO PLAY AT GAMES WITH OTHER YOUTHS." And there, among the dead, appearing beside your tent flap, at your elbow in the mess hall, waiting to use, or just leaving, the showers and latrine, the boy with his trousers rolled appears like an afterimage burned into an antique computer screen, haunting whatever the cursor tries to track. So he liked to play at games with other youths? The English has the slightly too-formal sound of someone being poured through the sieve of another language. Syllable after syllable piling up and up until the boy, buried to the neck, slowly vanishes into overtones that are and are not his. As if he were a solid melting to liquid turning to gas feeding a flame. 5/ TIME TO FORGET There's a camel a goat a sandal left in red sand. Over there's a water tower, under that's the bore hole and here the body asks and asks about the role it's asked to play: no matter how it's dressed. Like a nomad like a journalist like the hyena who eats even the bones and shits bone-white scat from the calcium. No matter if it sleeps under a dome of UNHCR plastic, baby blue in the sun, or hides in a spider hole or walks around in uniform behind plate glass, the body makes itself known before it becomes unknown. On the television the blade runner is facing down the skinjob, and of the two, who is the more human? On the table there isn't a glass of whiskey but the ghost of whiskey that keeps whispering,It's OK to be this way, nobody will know. And then the boy who rolls his pantlegs up above his ankles because to let them drag along the ground is to be unclean turns right before your eyes into a skeleton. 6/ THE COMING At KM4 a wall of leaves spits green into the air and hangs there beautiful and repulsive. Between the leaves, in the interstices where birds don't stir in sun and heat, the smell of raw camel meat wakes you to the vision of what keeps going on in the wound— the wound inside your head that you more or less shut out as you go round and round the roundabout at KM4 where your friends the soldiers in the Casspir are all pretending to be dead. The TV Ken doll anchor keeps complaining to their corpses, Hey, can't you get my flak jacket adjusted so it doesn't crush my collar?

Now that I know That passion warms little Of flesh in the mold, And treasure is brittle, I’ll lie here and learn How, over their ground, Trees make a long shadow And a light sound. August 1922

XI 1 Why pretend to remember the weather two years back? Why not? Listen close then repeat after others what they have just said and win a reputation for vivacity. Oh feed upon petals of edelweiss! one dew drop, if it be from the right flower, is five years’ drink! _______________ Having once taken the plunge the situation that preceded it becomes obsolete  which a moment before was alive with malignant rigidities. 2 When beldams dig clams their fat hams (it’s always beldams) balanced near Tellus’s hide, this rhinoceros pelt, these lumped stone—buffoonery of midges on a bull’s thigh—invoke,—what you will: birth’s glut, awe at God’s craft, youth’s poverty, evolution of a child’s caper, man’s poor inconsequence. Eclipse of all things; sun’s self turned hen’s rump. Cross a knife and fork and listen to the church bells! It is the harvest moon’s made wine of our blood. Up over the dark factory into the blue glare start the young poplars. They whisper: It is Sunday! It is Sunday! But the laws of the country have been stripped bare of leaves. Out over the marshes flickers our laughter. A lewd anecdote’s the chase. On through the vapory heather! And there at banter’s edge the city looks at us sidelong with great eyes—lifts to its lips heavenly milk! Lucina, O Lucina! beneficent cow, how have we offended thee? ________________ Hilariously happy because of some obscure wine of thefancy which they have drunk four rollicking companionstake delight in the thought that they have thus evaded thestringent laws of the county. Seeing the distant city bathedin moonlight and staring seriously at them they liken themoon to a cow and its light to milk.

At a book of details Of all the moments when knowledge is acquired. A sort of expanded balloon Sighs and says, “We are what came before.” “The storm in the window of the mind,” The sleeping sister says while she’s walking around Wonderland watching A cat touching down and talking. Not a car in sight. A cemetery seen from the air. All the obelisks you could ever ask for.

The carpet in the kindergarten room was alphabet blocks; all of us fidgeting on bright, primary letters. On the shelf sat that week's inflatable sound. The th was shaped like a tooth. We sang about brushing up and down, practiced exhaling while touching our tongues to our teeth. Next week, a puffy U like an upside-down umbrella; the rest of the alphabet deflated. Some days, we saw parents through the windows to the hallway sky.Look, a fat lady, a boy beside me giggled. Until then I'd only known my mother as beautiful.

Saturday, April 5. Welles’s Othello: black and white grid of rage, steam of sheer fury spewing from the vent of violence that followed where they went. Wind howled on the battlements, but sun gilded glum canals. The lovers floated beneath black bridges, coupled in stone rooms. The unrepentant villain (at the start so all the rest was flashback) dangled from a cage squinting inscrutably at the funeral procession winding through the town below. The air was full of wailing. Knives of sunlight glittered on the sea. We lurched out onto Fifty-Seventh Street. You said “I think I’m dying.” Next week your eyes went out. Shining under the lamp, your blue gaze, now opaque, your face drawn sharper but still beautiful: from this extremity you can attempt to rise to rage and grief. Or you can yield to the cozy quicksand of the bed. You wave your hand at walls of books: “What do I do? Do I throw all these away?” Their anecdotes, their comforts—now black glass.

Standing at the glass-paneled wall of Liza’s kitchen at the old house half-hidden Over a mile up Canyon Road in Joshua’s gated compound I’m just smoking a joint & looking down at the dusk dusting the Malibu lights as they flare Along the coastline below & I can hear the ripped-up Buick fenders & Caddy bumpers slammed around out in the barn studio as they’re slowly Torched into art as Joshua moves the spitting arc-welder Over armatures of rebar shaping a dozen abstract guitars or mandolins while its Acetylene tongue ticks in the black shade of his visor Once in a while his back-in-the-day transistor radio hooked on a nail bent in the wall Cuts through the sizzle with a hit of his that’s slipped Lately back into fashion & I’ve watched him slowly lift the head of that torch until it angles Against the turquoise plastic moon of the radio dial As if he might melt it all back to a few black platters — those times as lost as song

She sits there on that high hill    just sits there and lets things pass through her until one snags and she fits it into the pattern of this fine mesh of    what    spirit?    But, ah, there’s a cowboy hat and a cherry bomb tattoo and it snags    and what she lets through may, 
I say,may be caught second time around like that oil pan off an old Hudson or that artificial leg    toward morning she’s collected some radio signals from a dead ship    and a janitor’s song and some folderol from a church picnic with iced tea fried chicken collards and a whole lot of stentorian god-speak with apple pie and ice cream.    I’ll be damned if all those things aren’t moving around in one another’s magnetic fields, some kind of counterpoint that happens each time she breathes    it’s a mobile only no wires    there’s a piece of mirror turning on a spider web and now she’s a    signal beacon    says come on up I’ve got something to read and somehow it all works. Then she pulls this silk thread and it becomes a form.

for Charles Fishman Before you go further, let me tell you what a poem brings, first, you must know the secret, there is no poem to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries, yes, it is that easy, a poem, imagine me telling you this, instead of going day by day against the razors, well, the judgments, all the tick-tock bronze, a leather jacket sizing you up, the fashion mall, for example, from the outside you think you are being entertained, when you enter, things change, you get caught by surprise, your mouth goes sour, you get thirsty, your legs grow cold standing still in the middle of a storm, a poem, of course, is always open for business too, except, as you can see, it isn’t exactly business that pulls your spirit into the alarming waters, there you can bathe, you can play, you can even join in on the gossip—the mist, that is, the mist becomes central to your existence.