1269 Arts and sciences poems

Locate I love you

(for Harry Clifton) I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay, For everybody knows or else should know That if nothing drastic is done Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out, Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in Until the town lie beaten flat. All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That's Ophelia, that Cordelia; Yet they, should the last scene be there, The great stage curtain about to drop, If worthy their prominent part in the play, Do not break up their lines to weep. They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; Gaiety transfiguring all that dread. All men have aimed at, found and lost; Black out; Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, And all the drop scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages, It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce. On their own feet they came, or on shipboard, Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back, Old civilisations put to the sword. Then they and their wisdom went to rack: No handiwork of Callimachus Who handled marble as if it were bronze, Made draperies that seemed to rise When sea-wind swept the corner, stands; His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem Of a slender palm, stood but a day; All things fall and are built again And those that build them again are gay. Two Chinamen, behind them a third, Are carved in Lapis Lazuli, Over them flies a long-legged bird A symbol of longevity; The third, doubtless a serving-man, Carries a musical instrument. Every discolouration of the stone, Every accidental crack or dent Seems a water-course or an avalanche, Or lofty slope where it still snows Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch Sweetens the little half-way house Those Chinamen climb towards, and I Delight to imagine them seated there; There, on the mountain and the sky, On all the tragic scene they stare. One asks for mournful melodies; Accomplished fingers begin to play. Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

Reading in the paper a summary of a five-year psychological study that shows those perceived as most beautiful are treated differently, I think they could have just asked me, remembering a kind of pudgy kid and late puberty, the bloody noses and wisecracks because I wore glasses, though we all know by now how awful it is for the busty starlet no one takes seriously, the loveliest women I’ve lunched with lamenting the opacity of the body, they can never trust a man’s interest even when he seems not just out for sex (eyes focus on me above rim of wineglass), and who would want to live like this? And what does beauty do to a man?— Don Juan, Casanova, Lord Byron— those fiery eyes and steel jawlines can front a furnace of self-loathing, all those breathless women rushing to him while hubby’s at the office or ball game, primed to be consumed by his beauty while he stands next to it, watching. So maybe the looks we’re dealt are best. It’s only common sense that happiness depends on some bearable deprivation or defect, and who knows what conflicts great beauty could have caused, what cruelties one might have suffered from those now friends, what unmanageable possibilities smiling at every small turn? So if I get up to draw a tumbler of ordinary tap water and think what if this were nectar dripping from delicious burning fingers,

Larry Levan (snake), 2006, by Elia Alba Hip hip hip hip hip makes the man as the conga, serpentine, slides across the frame and the disco dub — tilt and sway — sewing pelves in the room, as if  Larry, still, were levitating streetwise Blacks, Drags, Latinos, Punks: Saturday Mass, 1985, in the Paradise Garage — Evelyn “Champagne” King, Kraftwerk, Ashra. No. He’s black-and-white, a head shot, one two three four five, on this S curve of 21st-century revelers, mask on the one body down, shimmer slant of a hoop earring under the ten-leg- hop-and-pulsate — glide on through. And Larry, Dour Father, bubble pop-popped, afloat, asking repeatedly:Who, My Friends,is fronting? Who is not? You, Velvet Valance, over the sequineddrag of curtain. Black is Black, Brown is Brown, Gay is Gay discopulsing up and through seventeen years of not-forbidding bodies. Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui lætificat juventutem meam.Gather youto me and to one another. Grind.

Struck a pair of stones to start off. Left behind ten men curled like scythes round the fire. Left behind the bracing moon. Passed a pack of ibex, passed the mammoth. Left the carious canines before the rath, left the scapula— freed space for petal dyes, for fixatives. Passed (in a dream)

In the garrulous present Threadbare nouns find What raiment’s left From forefathers Who perhaps struck poses But wrote of frenzy Out of deepest urgency Hammering voices In no dumbfounded age. Theirs the grace Of unfaltering Fealty to the word. Yet then I picture Pound Prematurely stilled By his own tongue —Tempus tacendi. Did he ever revisit The barbed floodlit quad Where bareheaded he’d Stood in all weather Mouthing surreal Greek, Fashioning a rhythm Out of life’s ruin, That life he would unspeak Half a lifetime later Arriving on the tarmac Of Eisenhower Italy, Breath caught in the throat? I heft his burdened book Only to let it drop —A stoneweight dropping down Well’s jaggy darkness That anyhow comes back In stonecold dialect: Pisa! A pure echo Purged of memory. On my lap his poems’ Esoteric call Has no words at all Or just those selfsame ones Quarried from a rock —Red and ocher bison Emblaze the solitude Of an old draughtsman Who long hours daubs In Altamira’s shade: Let those I love try to forgive What I have made.

“I am playing my oldest tunes,” declared she, “All the old tunes I know,— Those I learnt ever so long ago.” —Why she should think just then she’d play them Silence cloaks like snow. When I returned from the town at nightfall Notes continued to pour As when I had left two hours before: “It’s the very last time,” she said in closing; “From now I play no more.” A few morns onward found her fading, And, as her life outflew, I thought of her playing her tunes right through; And I felt she had known of what was coming, And wondered how she knew.

shambles this way antipodean being come full circle sparks in darkness lightning’s eternal return flipped the ecliptic

Extravagant sweep of clear sky darkening in the big picture window beside the bed, lights here and there already flashing all across the city down below us— Ellen and the girls out somewhere, you and I alone, you with your eyes closed, I with a drink in hand: you suddenly in character, your voice a wraith’s voice, faint, stumbling, slurry with morphine, and yet still artful as ever, even if the art was obvious, the dying brother playing the dying brother— Do you think you have a problem with that?

It’s as if she were an earn, gebidende prey for her eyrie. Perched alertly, a hægtesse on their innards. In bitter morgenceald, her hoar-glittered feathers. Suddenly she sees a fox on the westene. At that she rouses, heaved up on high, and heads straight at him, in harrowing hæste. Hearing her, he freezes his tail. He’s terrified. Sees,bestelð, with ēagan flashing, talons overtake him, dash him down in torment, overtake him again, swengeð him on the eorðan. One yelp as she pincers his liver. Wyrd—pierces aorta.