1269 Arts and sciences poems

The popcorn is greasy, and I forgot to bring a Kleenex. A pill that’s a bomb inside the stomach of a man inside The Embassy blows up. Eructations of flame, luxurious cauliflowers giganticize into motion. The entire 29-ft. screen is orange, is crackling flesh and brick bursting, blackening, smithereened. I unwrap a Dentyne and, while jouncing my teeth in rubber tongue-smarting clove, try with the 2-inch-wide paper to blot butter off my fingers. A bubble-bath, room-sized, in which 14 girls, delectable and sexless, twist-topped Creamy Freezes (their blond, red, brown, pinkish, lavendar or silver wiglets all screwed that high, and varnished), scrub-tickle a lone male, whose chest has just the right amount and distribu- tion of curly hair. He’s nervously pretending to defend his modesty. His crotch, below the waterline, is also below the frame—but unsubmerged all 28 slick foamy boobs. Their makeup fails to let the girls look naked. Caterpil- lar lashes, black and thick, lush lips glossed pink like the gum I pop and chew, contact lenses on the eyes that are mostly blue, they’re nose-perfect replicas of each other. I’ve got most of the grease off and onto this little square of paper. I’m folding it now, making creases with my nails.

Your bow swept over a string, and a long low note quivered to the air. (A mother of Bohemia sobs over a new child perfect learning to suck milk.) Your bow ran fast over all the high strings fluttering and wild. (All the girls in Bohemia are laughing on a Sunday afternoon in the hills with their lovers.)

Between the bent boughs of the splayed sumac the silver owl rests his head. The perimeter left by your absence is long to walk in one day. The angel in her credenza of extreme beauty dogs swim the river I look for my heart by the lamp where the light is skitter in the wet black leaves

for sandy and henry carlile Some great musicians got no place to play Above the freeway, over the music, we speak of the strategy of poems, bleeding wives who ulcerate our voices rhythming in the cut-heat Portland stink from the Willamette River; arteries of smog fixate this place in each recording, music, music, on Impulse. This little racist community has few friends; thousands of deerslayers hum into Beaverton, the one talk show driven out for their talk as the liberals dig in to KGO out of San Francisco; we troop toward the Lloyd Center for the ice-skating, the colorette bloomered dream merchants on rented skates, and the Sunday Chronicle near the big hotel. The poets, man and wife, write in the dimming air, their daughter in the toy rooms connecting them, the typewriter tacking the nails and snaps of her gown. This image of separation begins in adoption: her mother adopted out in San Jose; her father disowned, abandoned, torn out of the will; her name: Phoebe. And the sun does shine on them for this visit in squat pigeontoes, and this beach ball sings.

it begins with your face of a stone where lips repose like two seals in a coastal mist of cigarette smoke you move through the streets— listing them is as useless as naming waves.

Valentine's palette is mostly grey. Next comes blue (borage, cobalt, silk, robe, egg). Then white. Some inherent greens. But she draws most often from the greyer end of the grey scale. It could be manifest in a postmortem jaw, dusty glass, a sky, one degree Fahrenheit, a lone sock under a sickbed; the water is grey, and the long wall where one exits a car. Grey is the intermediate state she inhabits with no apparent effort. In the grey space, the bardo, the spirit starts to find shape, to find internal structure.

The wind’s tongue. The always clear cobalt sky bit at your painting. In a prehistoric poster words doze like pebbles. A gallop of  feathers kidnaps the conversation between coarse ropes and wild beasts. You paint within a blinking birthmark the marriage of  heaven and hell faster than tying a ribbon in a mirror. Children’s playground. From some rolling balls one transparent ball flies off. I call it Miró. Translated from the Japanese

I never really knew if Johanna Hirshhorn was actually Joe’s only daughter. Jim Brodey made the match and claimed as much, and then he left. It was my last weekend in Labor Day New York before boarding a one-way Milan Alitalia flight where I disembarked with less than 10 bucks to my name and this sense of wonder what would unfold and take me far. It was a blinding day, September, almost still, when Flavio Lucchini came to fetch me. It would be Giangiacomo, Montale, the irascible Nanda, Ettore Sottsass when he was still taking pictures, when he hugged me when he could. In Olga Hirshhorn’s obit in the Times, no mention of Johanna. Where art thou?Dove? Dove? Perhaps she wasn’t Joe’s daughter after all. Perhaps I’d been mistaken, misheard, misremembered. Perhaps she was a long-lost grandchild dangling on that family tree. Perhaps Jim misled me. Perhaps, perhaps my memory is faulty after all, as when I woke to the abrupt jolting of the Rome Express. All else is but a blur, a flight from memory, a future without one, far from home.

The neck of the flask pitch black-getting bored jacked also madness, insidious intended ghost (days late) I cross green & white flowered seas Valentines, May Day conferring with henchman one must keep holy the edges of fragments slots used clothes loose dried bloodspots bolster elegance Found a goldmine outside a mansion a prolongation of the art of very rich hours oil in childe ballads sung, unsung against I should say “over” though, The Cosmos slows it for us The heretofore unmentioned 26th Series (he gets the girl) sparks fall     call me if you do die

The music was already turning sad, those fresh-faced voices singing in a round the lie that time could set its needle back and play from the beginning. Had you lived to eighty, as you’d wished, who knows?—you might have broken from the circle of that past more ours than yours. Never even sure which was the truest color for your hair (it changed with each photographer), we claimed you for ourselves; called you John and named the day you left us (spun out like a reel— the last broadcast to prove you’d lived at all) an end to hope itself. It isn’t true, and worse, does you no justice if we call your death the death of anything but you. II It put you in the headlines once again: years after you’d left the band, you joined another—of those whose lives, in breaking, link all memory with their end. The studio of history can tamper with you now, as if there’d always been a single track chance traveled on, and your discordant voice had led us to the final violence. Yet like the times when I, a star-crossed fan, had catalogued your favorite foods, your views on monarchy and war, and gaily clipped your quips and daily antics from the news, I keep a loving record of your death. All the evidence is in—of what, and to what end, it’s hard to figure out, riddles you might have beat into a song. A younger face of yours, a cover shot, peered from all the newsstands as if proof of some noteworthy thing you’d newly done.