1269 Arts and sciences poems

Jook joint's about to come alive! It's like a bee outside a hive; And when the hive begins to hum, It's like a dim and distant drum; And when the drum begins to beat, It's like a circus down the street; And when the street begins to fill, It's like a sudden summer chill; And just as summer simmers down, It's like the fireworks over town. Don't matter what the preachers say — This congregation's here to stay 'Cause when the jook joint comes alive Is when the Delta blues arrive!

I stand in Walgreens while my mother sleeps. The store is fluorescent and almost empty. My father is ailing in a nursing home, my friend is dying in the hospital. What I want tonight is lipstick. As pure a red as I can find—no coral undertones, no rust or fawn. Just red. Ignoring the salespeople, I untwist tubes and scrawl each color on my wrist, till the blue veins beneath my skin disappear behind smeared bars. I select one. Back in my mother's apartment, silence. I limn my lips back out of my wan face. There they are again: smacky and wanting.

throughout the years I have designed high-end custom homes crafting spatial poetics with vigas and latillas hand peeled by mojados whose sweat translates into profit for developers working at a nifty rate sometimes I go visit these homes as they are being finished may I help you? I am asked by the realtor standing at the door, thinking that I may be the guy who mixed the mud and pushed the wheelbarrow I introduce myself as the designer oh, well, it’s so nice to meet you, what a wonderful job! please, come in. I was once asked by a home magazine journalist if I felt insulted by such incidents well, no, I said, my mind mixing for an answer a good batch of cement is never accidental last year on my way up through Santa Fe I made a detour and drove by a house of my design the season’s first snow on the ground, smoke rising out of the fireplace chimney inch by inch I know that house through its X, Y, and Z axis but, I cannot approach the front door knock and expect to be invited in to sit in the corner of my pleasing and lounge around with the owner as we sip on cups of hot herbal tea making small talk about the weather or discussing a reading by the latest author come through as the sun’s last light streams in gallantly through the window just where I placed it and for that reason I take a handful of snow to my mouth toss another into the air my blessings upon the inhabitants que Dios los bendiga y les dé más my grandfather would have said I turn my car toward home to my mother’s house a place near and far to me she, my mother, is bedridden and my brother is the self-appointed caretaker to bathe and feed her bring her morsels of conversation it is their own world now ruled by a juxtaposition of understanding against what I have come to know, now here, so far and away I am greeted at her front yard by an old, propped up trunk hood proclaiming my brother’s spray-painted inscription Jesus Saves on the opposite side it reads Keep Out! I guess it just depends on what kind of day he’s having, someone once remarked like a rattlesnake it’s a fair warning years ago I accepted this madness and called it not my own it’s better that he be drunk on Christ, said my mother than on what he used to drink we all agreed

The cause of death seems to have been starvation—his throat closed & so he was no longer able to swallow. On his deathbed he was editing The Hunger Artist,

1 Held between wars my lifetime among wars, the big hands of the world of death my lifetime listens to yours. The faces of the sufferers in the street, in dailiness, their lives showing through their bodies a look as of music the revolutionary look that says    I am in the world to change the world my lifetime is to love to endure to suffer the music to set its portrait up as a sheet of the world the most moving the most alive Easter and bone and Faust walking among flowers of the world and the child alive within the living woman, music of man, and death holding my lifetime between great hands the hands of enduring life that suffers the gifts and madness of full life, on earth, in our time, and through my life, through my eyes, through my arms and hands may give the face of this music in portrait waiting for the unknown person held in the two hands, you. 2 Woman as gates, saying: "The process is after all like music, like the development of a piece of music. The fugues come back and again and again interweave. A theme may seem to have been put aside, but it keeps returning— the same thing modulated, somewhat changed in form. Usually richer. And it is very good that this is so." A woman pouring her opposites. "After all there are happy things in life too. Why do you show only the dark side?" "I could not answer this. But I know— in the beginning my impulse to know the working life had little to do with pity or sympathy. I simply felt that the life of the workers was beautiful." She said, "I am groping in the dark." She said, "When the door opens, of sensuality, then you will understand it too. The struggle begins. Never again to be free of it, often you will feel it to be your enemy. Sometimes you will almost suffocate, such joy it brings." Saying of her husband: "My wish is to die after Karl. I know no person who can love as he can, with his whole soul. But often too it has made me so terribly happy." She said: "We rowed over to Carrara at dawn, climbed up to the marble quarries and rowed back at night. The drops of water fell like guttering stars from our oars." She said: "As a matter of fact, I believe that bisexuality is almost    a necessary factor in artistic production; at any rate, the tinge of masculinity within me helped me in my work." She said: "The only technique I can still manage. It's hardly a technique at all, lithography. In it only the essentials count." A tight-lipped man in a restaurant last night saying to me: "Kollwitz?     She's too black-and-white." 3 Held among wars, watching all of them all these people weavers, Carmagnole Looking at all of them death, the children patients in waiting-rooms famine the street A woman seeing the violent, inexorable movement of nakedness and the confession of No the confession of great weakness, war, all streaming to one son killed, Peter; even the son left living; repeated, the father, the mother; the grandson another Peter killed in another war; firestorm; dark, light, as two hands, this pole and that pole as the gates. What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open 4Song : The Calling-Up Rumor, stir of ripeness rising within this girl sensual blossoming of meaning, its light and form. The birth-cry summoning out of the male, the father from the warm woman a mother in response. The word of death calls up the fight with stone wrestle with grief with time from the material make an art harder than bronze. 5 Self-Portrait Mouth looking directly at you eyes in their inwardness looking directly at you half light    half darkness woman, strong, German, young artist flows into wide sensual mouth meditating looking right at you eyes shadowed with brave hand looking deep at you flows into wounded brave mouth grieving and hooded eyes alive, German, in her first War flows into strength of the worn face a skein of lines broods, flows into mothers among the war graves bent over death facing the father stubborn upon the field flows into the marks of her knowing— Nie Wieder Krieg repeated in the eyes flows into "Seedcorn must not be ground" and the grooved cheek lips drawn fine the down-drawn grief face of our age flows into Pieta, mother and between her knees life as her son in death pouring from the sky of one more war flows into face almost obliterated hand over the mouth forever hand over one eye now the other great eye closed

The young Endymion sleeps Endymion's sleep; The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told! The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold To the red rising moon, and loud and deep The nightingale is singing from the steep; It is midsummer, but the air is cold; Can it be death? Alas, beside the fold A shepherd's pipe lies shattered near his sheep. Lo! in the moonlight gleams a marble white, On which I read: "Here lieth one whose name Was writ in water." And was this the meed Of his sweet singing? Rather let me write: "The smoking flax before it burst to flame Was quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed."

My father’s been dead for thirty years but when he appears behind my shoulder offering advice, or condemnation, or a quiet pride in something I’ve done that isn’t even thistledown or tiny shavings of balsa wood in the eyes of the world —“Albie, grip in the middle and turn with a steady pressure”—it’s measurable, if not the way the wind is in a sock, or ohms, or net-and-gross, it registers the way an absence sometimes does, and I listen to him with a care I never exhibited when he was a presence, alive, in his undershirt, chewing his tiny licorice pellets and radiating a rough-hewn love. “Negative capability”—the phrase of course is Keats’s, from his letters, but we make it ours a hundred times a day. A hundred times we do our own pedestrian version of early maritime cartography: the known world stops, and over its edge the fuddled mapmaker writes Here There Be Monsters and then illustrates their non-existing coiled lengths and hell-breath with a color-splotched vivacity he wouldn’t waste on inhabited shores. Or: “Don’t think of a polar bear!”...the game one plays with a child. But I say with adult certainty that when Eddie’s wife Fiona went back to stripping he couldn’t stand to be at the club and see, and yet those empty hours in his mind were populated just as unbearably—and indeed, yes, there were monsters in that void, and the vigilant bears of insecurity and jealousy padded hungrily behind his eyes each night until her return. For Keats, however, the force that emptiness makes kinetic is a positive one, the way that the invisible, unknowable “dark energy” is seminal, a kind of funding agency or sugar daddy powering the universe in all its spangled beauty and veiled mystery from behind the scenes. Last night, a woozy few of us were mourning the demise of The Dusty Bookshelf. “Well I tried to support it,” I said, “by stopping in from time to time.” And B, the king of local kleptobibliomania, with his nimble touch and expando-capacious overalls, said “I tried to support it by not going in.”

Take up the blood from the grass, sun. Take it up. These people do not thirst for it. Take up the insect children that play in the grass, sun. Take them away. These people are sick of them. Take down the long slender reeds, sun. Cut them down. These people cannot make flutes any longer. Now sun, come closer to the earth! Even closer than that. Closer. Now, sun. Take away the shape from the metal, sun. They are like stone, these people. Now make them lava.

First there was the earth in my mouth. It was there like a running stream, the July fever sweating the delirium of August, and the green buckling under the sun. The taste of sick dust ran in the currents of saliva which I heaved up and tried to picture when all the people would curse their own stinking guts and die. No. I am not wishing that everyone should die. Nor am I wishing that everyone should be still. Only I am squeezing out the steam in me.

lay sixteen bales down in front on the plank let me set and bay at the houndog moon lay sixteen bales down of the cotton flank pray with me brothers that the pink boss dont sweat me too soon beat my leg in a round nigger peg lord have mercy on my black pole lay sixteen bales in the even row let me sweat and cuss my roustabout tune lord have mercy on my shrinkin back let me go with the jesus mule lay sixteen bales for the warp and loom beat a nigger down and bury his soul boss dont sweat me too soon pray with me brothers that I hold my cool lord have mercy on this long black leg let me ride on the jesus mule lay sixteen bales of white fuzz down lay sixteen tales of how I got around lord have mercy on this sweat and stink lord have mercy lay sixteen bales pray brothers beat down lord have let me lord lord brothers the houndog moon howl jesus, howl!