1269 Arts and sciences poems

On summer nights I sleep naked in Jerusalem. My bed stands on the brink of a deep valley without rolling down into it. In the daytime I walk around with the Ten Commandments on my lips like an old tune someone hums to himself. Oh touch me, touch me, good woman! That’s not a scar you feel under my shirt, that’s a letter of recommendation, folded up tight, from my father: “All the same, he’s a good boy, and full of love.” I remember my father waking me for early prayers. He would do it by gently stroking my forehead, not by tearing away the blanket. Since then I love him even more. And as his reward, may he be wakened gently and with love on the Day of the Resurrection.

Canal du Midi, France Arcades of plane trees arc Aves above the canal. I know they are not a choir. I know they are not Kabuki, tusk, knuckle, or the swords and flames St. Joan rode into, though it’s true I think of them as these, and as the sky’s deep pockets of snow, white keys, mammoth teeth. It is my way and my need: mes amours, sycamores. My emblems on a crest, gallery of visible ghosts. Mostly I love the light they hold inside, the all-too-much and aged toujours of them, their airborne electricities. Who’s to explain affinities like these? Two seas were joined this way in 1681, sparing sailors from piracy and storms. In the 1830s, planes were planted on its banks to protect vacationers from sun. Now a careless tourist nicks a tree with rope and spreads disease that will kill them all.Ceratocystis platani, traced to munitions boxes brought by World War II GIs. 42,000 must be felled and burned to save, scientists hope, the remaining planes, cousin to our sycamore, that is the wood that made the box that held the fungus riding in the waters of the canal. Measures have been taken. The road to hell, etc. St. Joan, finally, was burned to death for the cross- dressing; Kabuki theaters incinerated by soldiers for their drag shows and wartime sympathies. Sorrow. Desire. There are so many auto fatalities on plane-lined streets here, the French joke about why the tree crossed the road. They burn the hollows out sometimes. Inscribe vaginal lips around the gashes in swaths of hot pink paint. What we leave behind and what is left of us are related questions. The graves in town are up to three centuries old. Some crypts, forged crosses, chipped wreaths of ceramic flowers. Earth gouged, trees felled, buildings razed, never mind the lives. In the new world, a fungus-resistant sycamore is bred to replace relatives destroyed at the canal. Measures taken. Like swapping out the burnt-out bulbs on a string of Christmas lights. So what if we are replaceable? Mostly I love how we burst the prisons of our skins and shine. Outside the cemetery, someone’s magic-markered a locked electrical box with the words Sexe Toyes. The plaques on the graves nearby are inscribed Souvenirs and Regrets. Which are, even in my language, polite ways of saying Done.

On such a day we put him in a box And carried him to that last house, the grave; All round the people walked upon the streets Without once thinking that he had gone. Their hard heels clacked upon the pavement stones. A voiceless change had muted all his thoughts To a deep significance we could not know; And yet we knew that he knew all at last. We heard with grave wonder the falling clods, And with grave wonder met the loud day. The night would come and day, but we had died. With new green sod the melancholy gate Was closed and locked, and we went pitiful. Our clacking heels upon the pavement stones Did knock and knock for Death to let us in.

It was Adolphe Sax, remember, not Saxo Grammaticus, who gets the ovation. And by the time he had brought all the components together–the serpentine shape, the single reed, the fit of the fingers, the upward tilt of the golden bell– it was already 1842, and one gets the feeling that it was also very late at night. There is something nocturnal about the sound, something literally horny, as some may have noticed on that historic date when the first odd notes wobbled out of his studio into the small, darkened town, summoning the insomniacs (who were up waiting for the invention of jazz) to their windows, but leaving the sleepers undisturbed, evening deepening and warming the waters of their dreams. For this is not the valved instrument of waking, more the smoky voice of longing and loss, the porpoise cry of the subconscious. No one would ever think of blowing reveille on a tenor without irony. The men would only lie in their metal bunks, fingers twined behind their heads, afloat on pools of memory and desire. And when the time has come to rouse the dead, you will not see Gabriel clipping an alto around his numinous neck. An angel playing the world’s last song on a glistening saxophone might be enough to lift them back into the light of earth, but really no further. Once resurrected, they would only lie down in the long cemetery grass or lean alone against a lugubrious yew and let the music do the ascending– curling snakes charmed from their baskets– while they wait for the shrill trumpet solo, that will blow them all to kingdom come.

The secretive hart turns at bay, lowers his tines to the hounds’ cry. The sword enters the bull’s heart— still he stands, amazed on the red sand as the stony unbeliever might, who has seen God. Soon now horns will sound dedow for the unmaking. Beaters flush the grey heron like a coney from its warren, the peregrine’s jet eyes flash. They go ringing up the air, each in its separate spiral stair to the indigo rim of the skies, then descend swift as a murderer’s hand with a knife. Death’s gesture liquefies in bringing the priestly heron down. Her prize, the marrow from a wing-bone in which she delights, her spurred fleur-de-lys tongue stained gold-vermilion— little angel in her hangman’s hood.

“A fine Sunday in Bath empties every house of its inhabitants, and all the world appears on such an occasion to walk about and tell their acquaintance what a charming day it is.” — northanger abbey I awoke from the tunnel to the fields of yellow rape, seventeenth-century buildings, and cobbled streets as she would have seen them. It was rainy; the rain came and went, came and went so that you could not escape its dampness. I understood the need for tea and the luxury of cremes and pastries and why the ladies longed for a strong shoulder to see them through the winter. The seagulls cried overhead, though there was no sea, only a muddy river from Bath to Bristol. The scavengers lived on the rooftops and if desperate enough would swoop down and take a sandwich from your hand. I secured my room at the Royal Bath Hotel. It was a hovel, really, with a carpet as old as the early century. Walking through the hotel, I sensed something lurid in the air, every eye upon me as if they knew I was a foreigner in a strange land. Over the bed, a burgundy bedspread dusty and faded as vintage wine, made me long for the bright color of red. In the next room, sleepless, I heard through thin walls the sounds of an un-tender coupling. I looked in the warped mirror and found myself ugly and when I turned from it, could not escape the vision. It lingered. The rain came and went, came and went. I took an umbrella and began my walk, hoping to come upon her quarters. I passed the Roman Baths, the statues not beautiful, but puckered and fossilled and the Pump Room where her protagonist, other self, doppelgänger, good, strong, loyal Catherine, longing for companionship, fell under the seduction of Isabella and her reprehensible brother. Even then her coming out seemed less magisterial, and Bath a representation of the emptiness and evils of society where a woman’s dowry might confine her forever, than a reprieve from country life. I gave up my search. Images were everywhere. And my mind had been made up. I perceived no romance in the wind, no comfort in the hard glances of strangers, girls with chipped nail polish, lads unkempt as if there were no hope of glory. The next morning I boarded the train to the modern world and it wasn’t until a sheet of blue slipped out like a love letter from its envelope of dark gray sky that I knew the journey had ended and, like Catherine, I was finally safe.

I was so happy in the gem room. The sun was president, I was just dug up, all hell had shrunk to a sulphur crystal. Something danced on the point; it must have been me. I had a hundred faces, and one of them served up the ceiling in a perfect slice — like a twelve-year-old saint in some countryside where they only read Revelation. I had some small nugget of sense, for once, I was a mind that understood the light    ... Rain rained in my aquamarine. The world’s knuckles gripped the bedstead. I felt the red dynamiting of me in Missouri, where all outdoors was my candy store, where color sucked at its all-day self and never became less sweet, less new. “I want to put it in my mouth,” said someone, “I almost want to eat it    ...    ” I had dozens of uses, but I was mostly flat beautiful. Visitors just gasped in the matte-black room where I freely fluoresced. They saw me laid on a dictionary to demonstrate my transparency, which was complete; they could read the word everything through me. My name meant blood, meant seawater, meant lemon. The eye in my agate never blinked. I was believed to be formed of frozen moonlight. I was cut so that a star shone back. The purest and wind-clearest hunk of me they carved into a horse. When I was split to the purple and somehow still standing, they called me a cathedral. Yet just to the left of that I spilled all over velvet. The velvet is what did it — I wanted to be smuggled. Wanted to ride past all the alarms, just before that drop of sweat hit the floor. Wanted to end up in god- knows-whose hands, a heist. “Obscene,” said a man behind me, “just in piles like that    ...    obscene.” Then I spilled another carat, laughing. In Missouri you could pluck me straight up off the ground. Gumdrops, gobstoppers, jujubes. I thought: try to suck me down to nothing, and find yourself up against one million years. In piles like that. Just out there. For anyone. Obscene. The legs of the real thing were opening, flash and flash and flash. I said: go ahead and smash the glass. Give me a break-in like a kaleidoscope. Someone will entirely drip with me as soon as I get out of here.

Everything is made of everything. — Leonardo da Vinci I found Rome in the woods. Fair to admit it’s mostly tundra to the west in the park, past Toklat the Denali I revised, low grasslands engineered to freeze deep by October — this being Alaska — the great Tabularium close to the Temple of Castor and Pollux I rebuilt that same summer — not superimposed, exact as any scheme in secret — the Arch of Septimius Severus at the gravel bar where fox drank from a river turned stream, a Theater of Marcellus near the ranger station where one raven, such a brat, complained of my Circus Maximus, Trajan’s Column, my Baths of Diocletian, too many spots soaked in unpronounceable Latin. I really did, I shouldered bits of it, a ruin-hushed haunted business, my brain a truck bed, a lift, pulleys big as a whale’s heart, expletives of cheap wonder all over my woodlot and expanse. One self-anoints to embellish day, years, life thus far, and think oneself so ... Then busted — by a raven! Well, that’s memory for you, that’s so-called civilization for you, to layer up, to redo the already done. I mean it’s a fact, the puny life span we’re allotted. And proof — Denali in August, fireweed, spunky scrawny first Latinate —Erechtites hieracifolia— giving off flowers to mark what weeks left, little time bomber, time traveler, ancient slips red-flagging the countdown to winter by climbing its own stalk. Something perverse about that. Something perfectly fiendishly self-conscious about that. • From the start perverse, any premise. Ask ... We can’t know. To be compelled makes an occasion. Rome’s grand past horrific, fire and ash, swamp into bog, lust and bloodlust — The Alaska Range dreams lurid as Rome, the worst way below being fire, summer snow at night off the highest peaks by noon as distant from our cabin as the size of a hand if I held up the one with an eye in the middle to know how this works. Some have the power to raise from the dead a before, before scary and beautiful back to mystery cults, in caves, rubble far under a Roman street, the altar to Mithras still slaying his bull, crumbling the stonework. All things being equal. But they’re not. Agony, it’s older. Ask the moose at Denali, the snowshoe hare, the lynx, such a wily courtly lot. Ask Ovid banished to his hovel on the Black Sea, aching for Rome’s exalted rude cacophony, each exiled month a big thick X down Februarius, Aprilis to home-shattered sick enough for an undersong. Look it up!Undersong: a strain; a droning; the burden of a song —

In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see the people of the world exactly at the moment when they first attained the title of ‘suffering humanity’ They writhe upon the page in a veritable rage of adversity Heaped up groaning with babies and bayonets under cement skies in an abstract landscape of blasted trees bent statues bats wings and beaks slippery gibbets cadavers and carnivorous cocks and all the final hollering monsters of the ‘imagination of disaster’ they are so bloody real it is as if they really still existed And they do Only the landscape is changed They still are ranged along the roads plagued by legionnaires false windmills and demented roosters They are the same people only further from home on freeways fifty lanes wide on a concrete continent spaced with bland billboards illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness The scene shows fewer tumbrils but more strung-out citizens in painted cars and they have strange license plates and engines that devour America

Alone in the library room, even when others Are there in the room, alone, except for themselves: There is the illusion of peace; the air in the room Is stilled; there are reading lights on the tables, Looking as if they're reading, looking as if They're studying the text, and understanding, Shedding light on what the words are saying; But under their steady imbecile gaze the page Is blank, patiently waiting not to be blank. The page is blank until the mind that reads Crosses the black river, seeking the Queen Of the Underworld, Persephone, where she sits By the side of the one who brought her there from Enna, Hades the mute, the deaf, king of the dead letter; She is clothed in the beautiful garment of our thousand Misunderstandings of the sacred text.