1269 Arts and sciences poems

The letter A is awesome! It simply is the best. Without an A, you could not get an A+ on a test. You’d never see an acrobat or eat an apple pie. You couldn’t be an astronaut or kiss your aunt goodbye. An antelope would not exist. An ape would be unknown. You’d never hear a person say “Afraid” or “All Alone”. The A’s in avocado would completely disappear and certain words would be forgot like “ankle”, “arm”, and “ear”. Without the A, you couldn’t aim an arrow in the air. You wouldn’t ask for apricots or almonds at a fair. Aruba and Australia would be missing from a map. You’d never use an ATM, an apron, or an app. The arctic fox and aardvark would be absent from the zoo, and vowels, as you know them, would be E, I, O, and U. There wouldn’t be an A chord on the instruments you play. Let’s appreciate, admire, and applaud the letter A!

Miss A, who graduated six years back, has air-expressed me an imposing stack of forms in furtherance of her heart's desire: a Ph.D. Not wishing to deny her, I dredge around for something laudatory to say that won't be simply a tall story; in fact, I search for memories of her, and draw a blank—or say, at best a blur. Was hers the class in that ungodly room whose creaking door slammed with a sonic boom, whose radiators twangled for the first ten minutes, and then hissed, and (this was worst) subsided with a long, regretful sigh? Yes, there, as every Wednesday we would try to overlook cacophony and bring our wits to bear on some distinguished thing some poet sometime wrote, Miss A would sit calm in a middle row and ponder it. Blonde, I believe, and quiet (so many are). A dutiful note-taker. Not a star. Roundheads and Cavaliers received their due notice from her before the term was through. She wrote a paper on . . . could it have been "Milton's Idea of Original Sin"? Or was it "Deathbed Imagery in Donne"? Whichever, it was likely not much fun for her. It wasn't bad, though I've seen better. But I can hardly say that in a letter like this one, now refusing to take shape even as wispy memories escape the reach of certitude. Try as I may, I cannot render palpable Miss A, who, with five hundred classmates, left few traces when she decamped. Those mortarboard-crowned faces, multitudes, beaming, ardent to improve a world advancing dumbly in its groove, crossing the stage that day—to be consigned to a cold-storage portion of the mind . . . What could be sadder? (She remembered me.) The transcript says I gave Miss A a B.

For a Statue of Napoleon A conqueror as provident as brave, He robbed the cradle to supply the grave. His reign laid quantities of human dust: He fell upon the just and the unjust.

1978-1979 for Vincent Woodard It is not just my problem. It belongs to us all. I have been cajoled into coming to the emergency room where everything scares me. Black folk shoot and cut each other until they end here where guards have guns. I refuse to be taken upstairs and locked away. I was trying to think of a poem. It got me to this place. With my mother, I stand against the wall, guards on either side. They have guns, and this is my mother. It is now everybody’s problem. A bird is singing in my hair, more important than Thorazine. My head is a tree stretching its leaves to burn in the sun. They say if I make a treaty to take the medicine, I can leave with my family since my family is crazy. I look at the guns on the hips of the guards and know I must be as still and quiet as death or this will turn into psychosis as sick as nightmares. I am angry that they would have me here with my mother, angry at white doctors. I am in a whale in the ocean. Who can swim out to me? Who can cast a line? If I take out the first guard by breaking his neck, I can protect my mother, but it is more important that we are all now underwater, inside a whale who laughs. Later the therapist they say likes me keeps talking about the appointment. She is doing something subliminal with the word “come,” repeating, repeating. She leans to me when she says it. It bothers me that such people think crazy people are stupid, but it is more important that my head is a tree with a bird singing in it inside a whale in the ocean. The most important thing of all is that this whale that ate us likes to laugh a lot. He has the blues.

As I sit looking out of a window of the building I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal. I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace, And envy them—they are so far away from me! Not one of them has to worry about getting out this manual on schedule. And, as my way is, I begin to dream, resting my elbows on the desk and leaning out of the window a little, Of dim Guadalajara! City of rose-colored flowers! City I wanted most to see, and most did not see, in Mexico! But I fancy I see, under the press of having to write the instruction manual, Your public square, city, with its elaborate little bandstand! The band is playing Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov. Around stand the flower girls, handing out rose- and lemon-colored flowers, Each attractive in her rose-and-blue striped dress (Oh! such shades of rose and blue), And nearby is the little white booth where women in green serve you green and yellow fruit. The couples are parading; everyone is in a holiday mood. First, leading the parade, is a dapper fellow Clothed in deep blue. On his head sits a white hat And he wears a mustache, which has been trimmed for the occasion. His dear one, his wife, is young and pretty; her shawl is rose, pink, and white. Her slippers are patent leather, in the American fashion, And she carries a fan, for she is modest, and does not want the crowd to see her face too often. But everybody is so busy with his wife or loved one I doubt they would notice the mustachioed man’s wife. Here come the boys! They are skipping and throwing little things on the sidewalk Which is made of gray tile. One of them, a little older, has a toothpick in his teeth. He is silenter than the rest, and affects not to notice the pretty young girls in white. But his friends notice them, and shout their jeers at the laughing girls. Yet soon all this will cease, with the deepening of their years, And love bring each to the parade grounds for another reason. But I have lost sight of the young fellow with the toothpick. Wait—there he is—on the other side of the bandstand, Secluded from his friends, in earnest talk with a young girl Of fourteen or fifteen. I try to hear what they are saying But it seems they are just mumbling something—shy words of love, probably. She is slightly taller than he, and looks quietly down into his sincere eyes. She is wearing white. The breeze ruffles her long fine black hair against her olive cheek. Obviously she is in love. The boy, the young boy with the toothpick, he is in love too; His eyes show it. Turning from this couple, I see there is an intermission in the concert. The paraders are resting and sipping drinks through straws (The drinks are dispensed from a large glass crock by a lady in dark blue), And the musicians mingle among them, in their creamy white uniforms, and talk About the weather, perhaps, or how their kids are doing at school. Let us take this opportunity to tiptoe into one of the side streets. Here you may see one of those white houses with green trim That are so popular here. Look—I told you! It is cool and dim inside, but the patio is sunny. An old woman in gray sits there, fanning herself with a palm leaf fan. She welcomes us to her patio, and offers us a cooling drink. “My son is in Mexico City,” she says. “He would welcome you too If he were here. But his job is with a bank there. Look, here is a photograph of him.” And a dark-skinned lad with pearly teeth grins out at us from the worn leather frame. We thank her for her hospitality, for it is getting late And we must catch a view of the city, before we leave, from a good high place. That church tower will do—the faded pink one, there against the fierce blue of the sky. Slowly we enter. The caretaker, an old man dressed in brown and gray, asks us how long we have been in the city, and how we like it here. His daughter is scrubbing the steps—she nods to us as we pass into the tower. Soon we have reached the top, and the whole network of the city extends before us. There is the rich quarter, with its houses of pink and white, and its crumbling, leafy terraces. There is the poorer quarter, its homes a deep blue. There is the market, where men are selling hats and swatting flies And there is the public library, painted several shades of pale green and beige. Look! There is the square we just came from, with the promenaders. There are fewer of them, now that the heat of the day has increased, But the young boy and girl still lurk in the shadows of the bandstand. And there is the home of the little old lady— She is still sitting in the patio, fanning herself. How limited, but how complete withal, has been our experience of Guadalajara! We have seen young love, married love, and the love of an aged mother for her son. We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and looked at colored houses. What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do. And as a last breeze freshens the top of the weathered old tower, I turn my gaze Back to the instruction manual which has made me dream of Guadalajara.

Into the rood wood, where the grain's current splits around the stones of its knots, carve eyelashes and eyelids. Dye the knots, too—indigo, ink-black, vermillion irises. These will be his eyes, always open, willing themselves not to close when dust rises or sweat falls, eyes witnessing, dimly, the eclipse that shawls the shuddering hill, Jerusalem's naked shoulder. The body itself? From a wick that still whiffs of smolder, wax, because wax sloughs a smooth skein on the fingers just below sensation's threshold. Prop the cross upright and let the tear-hot wax trickle, slow, clot, taper into a torso, thighs, calves, feet. Of Gideon Bible paper, thinner than skin, cut him his scrap of cloth; embed iron shavings in his forehead, and, as the wax cools, scrape the rust off an old fuel can to salt the whole wound that is the man. Cry, if you feel like crying, and if no one else is there. Then set it on the counter with your other wares.

The climate thinks with its knees. When the wound opens, music suspires. Opening a gate, I gain the color below the roof tiles and the tree limbs. You gave me the late quartets a black bird and a white and the Garden of Eden. Your death belongs to anyone but me. I wonder so as not to forget. At night in Brooklyn, the tendrils of a white sex denuded the sky, shimmering at the tall needle- ends of buildings. The traffic was identical in the spring. I am protected by only music I cannot remember. Why is it that the best minds ended by composing fairy tales? Death swarms. There are many new beings, the odor of hearts. The order of the hour of mating ends. These are many new butterflies, and death is no longer to be eyed by a young girl, perhaps twelve years old, slyly, as though the future were a man’s sleeve or stride. I wonder so as not to end dinner in a farmhouse. We sat at a low table. Our host was dying but unaware, as she would be murdered the next day in a distant city. There is an out- side of language that is not silence. There is an outside of God that is not isolation, a domestic animal teaching a dying woman to hunt. A wound opens. A gate opens. Tendrils climb.

What should the wars do with these jigging fools? The man behind the book may not be man, His own man or the book’s or yet the time’s, But still be whole, deciding what he can In praise of politics or German rimes; But the intellectual lights a cigarette And offers it lit to the lady, whose odd smile Is the merest hyphen—lest he should forget What he has been resuming all the while. He talks to overhear, she to withdraw To some interior feminine fireside Where the back arches, beauty puts forth a paw Like a black puma stretching in velvet pride, Making him think of cats, a stray of which Some days sets up a howling in his brain, Pure interference such as this neat bitch Seems to create from listening disdain. But talk is all the value, the release, Talk is the very fillip of an act, The frame and subject of the masterpiece Under whose film of age the face is cracked. His own forehead glows like expensive wood, But back of it the mind is disengaged, Self-sealing clock recording bad and good At constant temperature, intact, unaged. But strange, his body is an open house Inviting every passerby to stay; The city to and fro beneath his brows Wanders and drinks and chats from night to day. Think of a private thought, indecent room Where one might kiss his daughter before bed! Life is embarrassed; shut the family tomb, Console your neighbor for his recent dead; Do something! die in Spain or paint a green Gouache, go into business (Rimbaud did), Or start another Little Magazine, Or move in with a woman, have a kid. Invulnerable, impossible, immune, Do what you will, your will will not be done But dissipate the light of afternoon Till evening flickers like the midnight sun, And midnight shouts and dies: I’d rather be A milkman walking in his sleep at dawn Bearing fat quarts of cream, and so be free, Crossing alone and cold from lawn to lawn. I’d rather be a barber and cut hair Than walk with you in gilt museum halls, You and the puma-lady, she so rare Exhaling her silk soul upon the walls. Go take yourselves apart, but let me be The fault you find with everyman. I spit, I laugh, I fight; and you, l’homme qui rît ; Swallow your stale saliva, and still sit.

Wiretaps and tapes, concealed bugs and mikes, intercepted letters full of passionate declarations, contradictory intelligence— how attached he’d grown to the subject’s documents, revising and rearranging the influx of intelligence with a sentiment, he acknowledged, almost like love: he felt the cool gray eyes of his superiors trained on him, rebuking him for swerving, for letting himself go—such tender obsession occasioned by the file! Not quite the professional style he or the Agency expected… But such official loyalties seemed mere protocol to this!— what was wrong with him, he wondered, that he construed the documents to make the subject seem a hero, a bastard whose sole patrimony was a pair of shoes and a rusted sword left by an unknown father beneath a stone? And yet his exploits in the tabloids, the headlines screaming, SCOURGE OF MONSTERS STRIKES AGAIN! HERO FOUNDS REPUBLIC were these heroic different in kind from the rumors, unverified, of a rape, a murder? —But to have met undisguised the devouring monster! To have escaped the twisting tunnels of the maze… On balance, for such a life, the hero’s reputation wasn’t bad: think of the opportunities for evil a man of such qualities must have had! How well he knew him—an essential innocence that followed impulse, blind to protocol, not noticeably more kind than he was cruel. But to stamp Case Closed and cease gathering intelligence, to give the hero up, almost, he admitted, like a lover…: such limits the hero unknowingly transgressed! And the Agency, cold-blooded where limits were concerned (“mere protocol”?— more like a second backbone!), committed to keeping order, could not afford such sentiments—the Chief of Security felt an awful pang: that the work of intelligence should lead to this… He leaned back in his chair and sighed: a forged genealogy certifying that the hero’s father was a king; a mutual assistance pact to aid in taking back the usurped crown: he could see them now, the wind blowing lightly, the two of them sweating as they climbed the cliff, discussing the terms, exchanging information, intelligence— how would his own face look staring down across the sea as he gestured earnestly toward some island, saying, “According to our sources, the tax revenues…” And then, edging the hero closer to the cliff, pointing out the harbor, he’d push.

That she was not pretty she knew. The flowers delivered into her hands post-concert by the young girl, pretty, would be acknowledged only. To display was to invite comparison. Skilled at withholding, she withheld; it was a kind of giving. As when meditation is a kind of action, a way of leaning into music the way one leans into winter wind, the way a mule leans into a harness, the way a lover leans into the point of deepest penetration. After a ship’s prow cuts the water, the water rushes back twice as hard.