1269 Arts and sciences poems

Pushing the seed into the ground isn't enough. Whatever blooms in this place is dumb and blind. Foreclosure is a one-eyed man. Nothing falls from a sky like this except a little rain, never enough rain. All night my wife looks down the neck of my guitar passing the bottle back and forth like a story she's been telling for years. So many baskets of hard bread. You take the shovel to the ground. The land stares back at you. The corn drifts towards the sky. You don't know what dirt is until you bury your first daughter.

We are of one mind and too much has not been said about all the quiet afternoons childhood offered us, lit gray like a cat, or blue, and cursed with an early moon. When father wore an apron or crept like a bear, we screamed. Nothing is so gone. Where is his record player or the channel that forked a distant year toward us, kind, slow magnet? There was a song we shared without your listening, you widowed soul crawling away on your elbows. I sing it to my child, with a full hand I flick its rapeseeds everywhere, clear, and slow, with all the sincerity its author indeed felt in his ten-gallon hat and his thin, whisky-soaked shirt.

I sing of simple people and the hardier virtues, by Associated Stuffed Shirts & Company, Incorporated, 358 West 42d Street, New York, brochure enclosed of Christ on the Cross, by a visitor to Calvary, first class art deals with eternal, not current verities, revised from last week's Sunday supplement guess what we mean, in The Literary System, and a thousand noble answers to a thousand empty questions, by a patriot who needs the dough. And so it goes. Books are the key to magic portals. Knowledge is power. Give the people light. Writing must be such a nice profession. Fill in the coupon. How do you know? Maybe you can be a writer, too.

I remember them saying, these poems, their something for someone at sometime for me too, at one time. That got in the way; so I sent them away back into history— just temporarily. They won’t come back now. I can’t remember how the words spoke, or what they said, except: We are all dead

A little called anything shows shudders. Come and say what prints all day. A whole few watermelon. There is no pope. No cut in pennies and little dressing and choose wide soles and little spats really little spices. A little lace makes boils. This is not true. Gracious of gracious and a stamp a blue green white bow a blue green lean, lean on the top. If it is absurd then it is leadish and nearly set in where there is a tight head. A peaceful life to arise her, noon and moon and moon. A letter a cold sleeve a blanket a shaving house and nearly the best and regular window. Nearer in fairy sea, nearer and farther, show white has lime in sight, show a stitch of ten. Count, count more so that thicker and thicker is leaning. I hope she has her cow. Bidding a wedding, widening received treading, little leading mention nothing. Cough out cough out in the leather and really feather it is not for. Please could, please could, jam it not plus more sit in when.

I know a little language of my cat, though Dante says that animals have no need of speech and Nature abhors the superfluous.   My cat is fluent.   He converses when he wants with me.   To speak is natural.   And whales and wolves I’ve heard in choral soundings of the sea and air know harmony and have an eloquence that stirs my mind and heart—they touch the soul.   Here Dante’s religion that would set Man apart damns the effluence of our life from us to build therein its powerhouse. It’s in his animal communication Man is true, immediate, and in immediacy, Man is all animal. His senses quicken in the thick of the symphony, old circuits of animal rapture and alarm, attentions and arousals in which an identity rearrives. He hears particular voices among the concert, the slightest rustle in the undertones, rehearsing a nervous aptitude yet to prove his. He sees the flick of significant red within the rushing mass of ruddy wilderness and catches the glow of a green shirt to delite him in a glowing field of green —it speaks to him— and in the arc of the spectrum color speaks to color. The rainbow articulates a promise he remembers he but imitates in noises that he makes, this speech in every sense the world surrounding him. He picks up on the fugitive tang of mace amidst the savory mass, and taste in evolution is an everlasting key. There is a pun of scents in what makes sense. Myrrh it may have been, the odor of the announcement that filld the house. He wakes from deepest sleep upon a distant signal and waits as if crouching, springs to life.

1. Betrayed by his five mechanic agents, falling Captive to consciousness, he summons light To all its duties, and assumes the world Like a common penance. Rust on the green tongue burns Like history’s corrosive on his living tree. But all the monsters of his sleep’s dark sea Are tame familiars in the morning sun. 2. He sees the nation browse across burnt miles Of toast, toward the time-clock. Deafened, hears A Gettysburg of breakfast food explode Against the surd tympanum of the air. The roads outside to No-and-Any Where Trigger all space-time to a zero Now. The punctual goddess blossoms on his brow— Pragmatic emblem of the daylit need. 3. Now with his thought the rank and maundy world (That lost between quanta and mechanic wave All pulp and passion sprawls around the globe). He stiffens, as a hand informs a glove, And drags each lank potential into form. Thus the hieratic arrow of his glance Creates St. Sebastian Avenue Street Place— All of sublunary circumstance Crowds on the casual platform of his gaze. 4. Like money sealed in a pneumatic tube He whirls beneath the city’s stony floor To where the cold coordinates of work Advance their cross-hairs on the target hour. There surplus value’s mathematic flower (All X squared Y squared like a tesseract Or ghostly dirigible) grows unseen Across the lean dimension of in fact. 5. Grows all unseen as Jason Quint pursues The windy hazard of the Absolute Through icy tundras, farther than the Horn, Vaster than Asia in their wuthering snows. The sweat of progress and humanity Colors no litmus in those latitudes; In a rustle of banknotes and casualty lists The Bomb is shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. 6. The quitting whistle lofts a flag of truce, And all hope’s flutes and harpsichords compound The lonely leisure. The Great Nocturnal Drift Sets to its Deep. He walks the park. Profound Unease returns to Quint. The sleepy lathes Of hummingbirds machine the emerald Of garden silence which his feet confuse. The statues hoist, on labyrinthine paths, The mineral grandeur of a public smile. 7. And the world goes blank, and heavy as a stone Rolls into night. It is the human hour. Imperfect. Lovers, food and politics Command the air, and Jason Quint alone, Clothed in abstraction, like a bush that burns In the blind frequencies where none may pass, Stalks through that only country of the poor— The lamplit hour the quitting whistle mourns. 8. Imperfect. The stability of dextrous stars Offers him comfort, but their light is cold. A storm of sentiment, sudden as a cloud Of migrant birds, sings in his head. Now stirs The terrible friend, companion of his dreams, With his emotional algebra of need and loss— The hateful witness to his mortal part And confirmation of his loneliness.

Both guitars run trebly. One noodles Over a groove. The other slushes chords. Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair. They close my eyes. I close their eyes. A horn Blares its inner air to brass. A girl shakes Her ass. Some dude does the same. The music’s Gone moot. Who doesn’t love it when the bass Doesn’t hide? When you can feel the trumpet peel Old oil and spit from deep down the empty Pit of a note or none or few? So don’t Give up on it yet: the scenario. You know that it’s just as tired of you As you are of it. Still, there’s much more to it Than that. It does not not get you quite wrong.

One stood among the violets listening to a bird. One went to the toilet and was struck by the moon. One felt hopeless until a trumpet crash, and then lo, he became a diamond. I have a shovel. Can I turn it into a poem? On my stove I’m boiling some milk thistle. I hope it will turn into a winged thesis before you stop reading. Look, I’m topless! Listen: approaching hooves! One drowned in a swimming pool. One removed his shoes and yearned off a bridge. One lives with Alzheimer’s in a state facility, spittle in his white beard. It turns out words are no help. But here I am with my shovel digging like a fool beside the spilth and splosh of the ungirdled sea. I can’t stop. The horses are coming, the thieves. I still haven’t found lasting love. I still want to hear viols in the little beach hotel that’s torn down and gone. I want to see again the fish schooling and glittering like a veil where the waves shove against the breakwater. Gone is the girl in her white slip testing the chill with one bare foot. It’s too cold, but she goes in, so carefully, oh.

Surely there are teeth so small. I have listened for their turning, this frail swell and fall like old blood yearning upwards through the skin of days. Slowly, I am learning their count, though numbers fray in me, and the loaded instants graft, coming always to the same tangle: the distant cry merging with the song at hand, the rain’s insistent opening in daylong dryness, the plain moon draining into dawn. And below it all, hewn from the pliant light of some Geneva noon, they spin time’s thrum. Stopped, I have bent my ears to them. I have become sound inside their years. Surely I have known the whole of grief and grace in gears.