1269 Arts and sciences poems

Piping down the valleys wild Piping songs of pleasant glee On a cloud I saw a child. And he laughing said to me. Pipe a song about a Lamb; So I piped with merry chear, Piper pipe that song again— So I piped, he wept to hear. Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe Sing thy songs of happy chear, So I sung the same again While he wept with joy to hear Piper sit thee down and write In a book that all may read— So he vanish'd from my sight. And I pluck'd a hollow reed. And I made a rural pen, And I stain'd the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear

My book is largely growing; Its leaves are multiplied; Its pages are much longer, And nearly twice as wide. At first I thought the reader Had not the time to spare, To hail my little volume As it floated in the air. I thought perhaps while floating Away through empty space, Perchance would there discover Some long forgotten race. I knew not it would mingle Among the great and wise, Or that it would be subject Unto the critic’s eyes. I thought it was inferior, And of the minor class, I knew not how the ladies Would read it as they pass. But now I find it’s useful, And laden every page, For truly it must mingle With those of every age. Therefore I should have measured; Should not have thought it vain To make its little mysteries Unto the reader plain. But surely there’s no secret Where thought is not sublime, That I have thus destroyed By keeping up my rhyme. But if I should in future Find this to be the case, I’d take my silver pencil And all these lines erase. I’d rather use a license, Or grammar’s laws dispense, Than for to let my metre Or rhythm govern sense. The read will remember My chances are but slim, Or else this little volume Would be in better trim. Remember, too, in Dixie That I was born a slave. And all my early genius Was locked within the grave. Remember my condition— A mark within my eyes— And all my inspirations Are showered from the skies. I cannot read of authors, Nor those of noble fame, For I’m just a learning The author, Milton’s, name. I cannot borrow subjects, Nor rob them of their style, My book amid their volumes, Like me, is but a child. Therefore, I bless this volume, And send with it my heart, That it may to the critic My better thoughts impart. Go forth, then, little volume, Much good from thee may spring, If thou continueth pleading The merits of thy King. And others yet may follow, All changed within their scale, But thou, upon thy mission, I am sure can never fail.

On an island, an open road where an animal has been crushed by something larger than itself. It is mangled by four o'clock light, soul sour-sweet, intestines flattened and raked by the sun, eyes still watchful, savage. This landscape of Taiwan looks like a body black and blue. On its coastline mussels have cracked their faces on rocks, clouds are collapsing onto tiny houses. And just now a monsoon has begun. It reminds me of a story my father told me: He once made the earth not in seven days but in one. His steely joints wielded lava and water and mercy in great ionic perfection. He began the world, hammering the length of trees, trees like a war of families, trees which fumbled for grand gesture. The world began in an explosion of fever and rain. He said, Tina, your body came out floating. I was born in the middle of monsoon season, palm trees tearing the tin roofs. Now as I wander to the center of the island no one will speak to me. My dialect left somewhere in his pocket, in a nursery book, a language of childsplay. Everything unfurls in pictures: soil is washed from the soles of feet, a woman runs toward her weeping son, chicken bones float in a pot full of dirty water. I return to the animal on the road. When I stoop to look at it it smells of trash, rotting vegetation, the pitiful tongue. Its claws are curled tight to its heart; eyes open eyes open. When the world began in the small factory of my father's imagination he never spoke of this gnarled concoction of bone and blood that is nothing like wonder but just the opposite, something simply ravaged. He too would die soon after the making of the world. I would go on waking, sexing, mimicking enemies. I would go on coaxed by gravity and hard science.

The jay streaks through the lilacs in color clash. I note down: Invent outdoor birdswing so birds drunk on berries fall off in plaid in front of my window. I file it.  After all, the pussy willow’s barely tufted— I have time. At the drain, lifting its feet, a Modigliani bird—another invention? The brook agrees so brookishly, gulping at runoff like a bear in spring, like my husband. He didn’t trust my patents: the squirrel-free gutter chain the collapsing arthritic’s cane a lever for pulling old stumps in heavy rain. But every act harbors a corresponding gadget. It is that way with God: adjusting the acorn, locking the tree. With the womb, He was clearly Italianate, the bulbous lines, the excess. I often think of Him humming Beatles songs like me, over six Mason jars of pickling— my offspring? The dog laughs. You heard it: a choke, then black gums, a frothing irony. He’s all wet from rescuing bones from the brook. He drops them in, then goes in after. The brook’s rising with bones and I’m afraid the electricity will fail. Will the dog save me with his laughing? That’s what this invention’s for: the automatic rosebush waterer, hooked to the sun and this wheel, in perpetuity. Once a pirate working on my outboard told me, Betty, better sand trickling in the hourglass than a shifting dune. Even the Sudanese plant borders of aloe against the drifts. But I like the look of roses. Oh, that’s the husband at the door, scratching. Nights his furry self stands naked before me, until the dog removes his stuffing. O bear! Only by opening the blinds do I see he’s bleeding. It’s him, not me, aching with overdue maternity. A simple drawerful of cobwebs kept for emergency does for him, self-sticking, then together we apprise the chimney, holding hands and chatting about the soot stains. That was in winter before he died, the deft air stealing all we were speaking. Yesterday a patent came for my speech retrieval unit, an unusual event, even for me, because the government usually can’t get past the drawings. And these were intricate: I had the duck by the neck, her feet in food coloring, each step inked in. It all made sense—listen to the ducks now. And just in time for the aspect— ghosts are aspects, aren’t they? Of all but speech I have memory, that one sense shy of mimicry. In the spring, now, in fact, I take the blackfly larvae off rocks in the rapids. On toast, pre-maggot, the very eggs of mortality, eating them I figure I can lure Death itself, a raccoon washing and washing in the dark, and from there, patent the trap. I’ll be rich if its works. Works, go the frogs,works, works.

“What can or ought the public care about the identity of the portrait?” said James McNeill. Did he look down from neutral heaven on the dealer wearing flannel plaid, adjusting to my denim chair, to make the arrangement, pocket my check in black and smudge and white? The agents said they could easily find it if I had no carbon. FBI with their silk knots and sober suiting just like the famous oil though on different body parts. I could be Mrs. Whistler, but I was the dupe, eyes lowered, the menswear pair noble shadows, tracking down the evil and clever eBay forger (not the original cormorant-tousled Martinez I thought I was purchasing with his true (M) mark from his 19th-century hand). Inspectors with their pointed interrogations — they were way beyond clues — who when they left would form, and be, long shadows at each end of day. Make shapes you might assume would fall from mountain goats in frightening terrain. They reported answers they knew all along. Thigh-high in paintings, I thought to wade out with my honest eyes so little notorious, from mistaken tonalists, expressionists, Society of Six ... The crook posed in tartan, I fine-tuned to the agents; he talked ordinary — that was my best judgment. So what? He warmed, and got richer in, my denim wingback. I thought of Anna’s stern profile; and were they profilers? And as they shook my hand good-bye, I said, Do your wives collect anything? What do you think? they implied.

Señora, it is true the Greeks are dead. It is true also that we here are Americans: That we use the machines: that a sight of the god is unusual: That more people have more thoughts: that there are Progress and science and tractors and revolutions and Marx and the wars more antiseptic and murderous And music in every home: there is also Hoover. Does the lady suggest we should write it out in The Word? Does Madame recall our responsibilities? We are Whores, Fräulein: poets, Fräulein, are persons of Known vocation following troops: they must sleep with Stragglers from either prince and of both views. The rules permit them to further the business of neither. It is also strictly forbidden to mix in maneuvers. Those that infringe are inflated with praise on the plazas— Their bones are resultantly afterwards found under newspapers. Preferring life with the sons to death with the fathers, We also doubt on the record whether the sons Will still be shouting around with the same huzzas— For we hope Lady to live to lie with the youngest. There are only a handful of things a man likes, Generation to generation, hungry or Well fed: the earth’s one: life’s One: Mister Morgan is not one. There is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. He that goes naked goes further at last than another. Wrap the bard in a flag or a school and they’ll jimmy his Door down and be thick in his bed—for a month: (Who recalls the address now of the Imagists?) But the naked man has always his own nakedness. People remember forever his live limbs. They may drive him out of the camps but one will take him. They may stop his tongue on his teeth with a rope’s argument— He will lie in a house and be warm when they are shaking. Besides, Tovarishch, how to embrace an army? How to take to one’s chamber a million souls? How to conceive in the name of a column of marchers? The things of the poet are done to a man alone As the things of love are done—or of death when he hears the Step withdraw on the stair and the clock tick only. Neither his class nor his kind nor his trade may come near him There where he lies on his left arm and will die, Nor his class nor his kind nor his trade when the blood is jeering And his knee’s in the soft of the bed where his love lies. I remind you, Barinya, the life of the poet is hard— A hardy life with a boot as quick as a fiver: Is it just to demand of us also to bear arms?

That morning under a pale hood of sky I heard the unambiguous scrape of spackling against the side of our wickered, penitential house. The day mirled and clabbered in the thick, stony light, and the rooks’ feathered narling astounded the salt waves, the plush coast. I lugged a bucket past the forked coercion of a tree, up toward the pious and nictitating preeminence of a school, hunkered there in its gully of learning. Only later, by the galvanized washstand, while gaunt, phosphorescent heifers swam beyond the windows, did the whorled and sparky gib of the indefinite wobble me into knowledge. Then, I heard the ghost-clink of milk bottle on the rough threshold and understood the meadow-bells that trembled over a nimbus of ragwort— the whole afternoon lambent, corrugated, puddle-mad.

And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures. —KORAN In Heaven a spirit doth dwell “Whose heart-strings are a lute”; None sing so wildly well As the angel Israfel, And the giddy stars (so legends tell), Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell Of his voice, all mute. Tottering above In her highest noon, The enamoured moon Blushes with love, While, to listen, the red levin (With the rapid Pleiads, even, Which were seven,) Pauses in Heaven. And they say (the starry choir And the other listening things) That Israfeli’s fire Is owing to that lyre By which he sits and sings— The trembling living wire Of those unusual strings. But the skies that angel trod, Where deep thoughts are a duty, Where Love’s a grown-up God, Where the Houri glances are Imbued with all the beauty Which we worship in a star. Therefore, thou art not wrong, Israfeli, who despisest An unimpassioned song; To thee the laurels belong, Best bard, because the wisest! Merrily live, and long! The ecstasies above With thy burning measures suit— Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love, With the fervour of thy lute— Well may the stars be mute! Yes, Heaven is thine; but this Is a world of sweets and sours; Our flowers are merely—flowers, And the shadow of thy perfect bliss Is the sunshine of ours. If I could dwell Where Israfel Hath dwelt, and he where I, He might not sing so wildly well A mortal melody, While a bolder note than this might swell From my lyre within the sky.

It is with words as it is with people: Actual beauty is rare. We call things beautiful, not as such, but because of what they mean. Because we commonly attribute beauty to whatever does us a favor, We are reduced to puzzled despair whenever actual beauty says no. Indeed, our calling a thing beautiful almost means it is not. For how can we know it is beautiful until it betrays us? A sage once said “The trouble with these great philosophers Is their only way of doing honor to an idea is to say the idea is true.” It is the same with words as it is with people: Actual beauty is rare. Humiliated, we are no longer willing to call the beautiful beautiful . . . Madrid is reading his poetry to a roomful of unearthed cultural relics. He compares the white hair on their heads | to the flag that signals surrender.

It was Jessica Grim the American poet who first advised me to read Violette Leduc. Lurid conditions are facts. This is no different from the daily protests and cashbars. I now unknowingly speed towards which of all acts, words, conditions — I am troubled that I do not know. When I feel depressed in broad daylight depressed by the disappearance of names, the pollen smearing the windowsill, I picture the bending pages of La Bâtarde and I think of wind. The outspread world is comparable to a large theatre or to rending paper, and the noise it makes when it flaps is riotous. Clothes swish through the air, rubbing my ears. Promptly I am quenched. I’m talking about a cheap paperback which fans and slips to the floor with a shush. Skirt stretched taut between new knees, head turned back, I hold down a branch,