1269 Arts and sciences poems

got up early left the house immediately tore out grass bits of leather in his pockets hit fences with his handkerchief answered yes and no to his own questions lies under grass wilted flowers in his pockets at the fence I pull my handkerchief he liked to say no “I’m no longer the same man” and “nothing is happening to me”

She stands beside me, stands away, the vague indifference of her dreams. Dreaming, to go on, and go on there, like animals fleeing the rise of the earth. But standing intangible, my lust a worked anger a sweating close covering, for the crudely salty soul. Then back off, and where you go? Box of words and pictures. Steel balloons tied to our mouths. The room fills up, and the house. Street tilts. City slides, and buildings slide into the river. What is there left, to destroy? That is not close, or closer. Leaning away in the angle of language. Pumping and pumping, all our eyes criss cross and flash. It is the lovers pulling down empty structures. They wait and touch and watch their dreams eat the morning.

1    Dear Milton, Rain. But when you are here, alone, what does it mean. It means psalm — that song sung to the harp. Like trees, we too hold on to the earth — pull and twang for another tongue.It(whatever it is, and who knows that) is a sacred song.It is strange for we are the ones who glorify mystery with our arms. We call it testament because it pries at our souls with many branches, and so you say with a huge eye, we must practice our art like the third stomach of a cud-chewing animal: “Myrtle, Woodbine, Appletrees, Trillium, here they are, the strength of your arm stalls at the open gate of the stars. Feel everything, trust everything!”

Line the wordcaves with panther skins, widen them, hide-to and hide-fro, sense-hither and sense-thither, give them courtyards, chambers, drop doors and wildnesses, parietal, and listen for their second and each time second and second tone.

Because this song’s made of the airwaves a time machine, you start to play the air guitar of memory, making a country so you can walk back into it, like a man on rewind in a silent film, his whiskey tumbler filling up again as he rises from his stool and steps backwards towards the avenue, where the cars, cabs, trucks reverse away from him, and the lights, for once, turn amber to green; where the two hands on his watch unravel time, like a maiden aunt unpicking a whole evening’s worth of knitting over the dropped stitch that means she must go back before she can go on. You raise the record from its sleeve again, hold it grail-like into the wayward light to read the liner notes on a life you’ve lived all wrong. Wind in the sycamores outside, rain coming down in a town you left behind and not this one, where the backward longing can strike you anytime — breath on the nape of your neck when you’re the only one in line, cat with a broken spine dragging itself off into the undergrowth to die. Where the silence might give way to a high-hat or snare drum, the lub-dub of the bass, a brass section. After a long absence, you take up the thread again, take up the line, what you listen for, try not to listen for, stirring the tiny hairs within your inner ear, weighting the wet tip of your tongue, like the scuff and fumble of the blind needle finding its way from silence to the first track on side one. You nod your head “yes.” You sing along. You tap the steering wheel of the car in which you pass under a strobe of stars, a quarter moon, until, despite yourself, you are sixteen again and walking home in a downpour with your Ken Dodd quiff, your flowers of sulfur, toward the box of records from which you’ll pick a tune to name the afternoon. Its scattered showers with a chance of sunny spells later, its gust and bluster from Rathlin to Cape Clear. This one would sound good in a stadium. It’s all guitar shimmer, tremolo arm, a chorus that staggers smitten toward the open bar. This one’s a plea, a paean on just six strings until the horns cut in, like the bully at a prom. It recalls the taste of cigarettes and bubblegum on the tongue of the first girl you ever kissed. All broken glass and bruised finger, its swoon circles forever the turntable in that blue room where you fed and watered every slight and scar. And so you’d like to thank the engineer, his assistant who provides the harmonies and made the tea; the trumpet player, his spit still wet in the mouth of a solo that the vinyl keeps pristine, black box recorder to your submerged plane. The singer with a bone stuck in her throat, which is another way to say “longing.” The producer, who fills in on Hammond organ. You could go on like this, lost in the noise again, in your baroque joy at what was and is, and what the words become, talking to yourself in the second person, as if you’re fooling anyone, reading the liner notes on a life you measure song by song.

At the Portals of the Future, Full of madness, guilt and gloom, Stood the hateful form of Slavery, Crying, Give, Oh! give me room– Room to smite the earth with cursing, Room to scatter, rend and slay, From the trembling mother’s bosom Room to tear her child away; Room to trample on the manhood Of the country far and wide; Room to spread o’er every Eden Slavery’s scorching lava-tide. Pale and trembling stood the Future, Quailing ‘neath his frown of hate, As he grasped with bloody clutches The great keys of Doom and Fate. In his hand he held a banner All festooned with blood and tears: ‘Twas a fearful ensign, woven With the grief and wrong of years. On his brow he wore a helmet Decked with strange and cruel art; Every jewel was a life-drop Wrung from some poor broken heart. Though her cheek was pale and anxious, Yet, with look and brow sublime, By the pale and trembling Future Stood the Crisis of our time. And from many a throbbing bosom Came the words in fear and gloom, Tell us, Oh! thou coming Crisis, What shall be our country’s doom? Shall the wings of dark destruction Brood and hover o’er our land, Till we trace the steps of ruin By their blight, from strand to strand?

On Hearing Kelley’s Music to ‘Macbeth’ O melody, what children strange are these From thy most vast, illimitable realm? These sounds that seize upon and overwhelm The soul with shuddering ecstasy! Lo! here The night is, and the deeds that make night fear; Wild winds and waters, and the sough of trees Tossed in the tempest; wail of spirits banned, Wandering, unhoused of clay, in the dim land; The incantation of the Sisters Three, Nameless of deed and name – the mystic chords Weird repetitions of the mystic words; The mad, remorseful terrors of the Thane, And bloody hands – which bloody must remain. Last, the wild march; the battle hand to hand Of clashing arms, in awful harmony, Sublimely grand, and terrible as grand! The clan-cries; the barbaric trumpetry; And the one fateful note, that, throughout all, Leads, follows, calls, compels, and holds in thrall.

I have been cherish’d and forgiven By many tender-hearted, ’Twas for the sake of one in Heaven Of him that is departed. Because I bear my Father’s name I am not quite despised, My little legacy of fame I’ve not yet realized. And yet if you should praise myself I’ll tell you, I had rather You’d give your love to me, poor elf, Your praise to my great father.

The lightning struck him and left a scar. The wind stopped blowing and the wheat stood up. Self-tensed self, who is this I that says I ? I had a scar in the shape of  lightning That split in half when I opened my mouth. The sun  just a circle of  heat in the sky Throwing absence in the shape of clouds Down on the field. Another life placed In the middle of  the life I called my own. A lesser god commanded the front: return. A little god knocked about in the germ. The third person put me outside my own sphere. A small god chanting lightning in the synapse. Wind blows the wheat down. He calls it prayer.

I did not have exactly a way of life but the bee amazed me and the wind’s plenty was almost believable. Hearing a magpie laugh through a ghost town in Wyoming, saying Hello in Cambridge, eating cheese by the frothy Rhine, leaning from plexiglass over Tokyo, I was not able to make one life of all the presences I haunted. Still the bee amazed me, and I did not care to call accounts from the wind. Once only, at Pompeii, I fell into a sleep I understood, and woke to find I had not lost my way.