1269 Arts and sciences poems

i. I grew up an anxious painting by my dad’s shaking hand. In the painting of my dad, a quiet hole beats through the dull, black night. I’m heir to an orange heart in the rhythmic black where a man leans quietly and wonders. I wonder about my dad, a hole in my painting. I used to think my dad was dull, but his shaking hand gave rhythm to my body. In my dad’s painting, a hole glows orange in the dull night where I sit beneath the canvas looking up. My dad looks down and laughs. When I went into my dad’s painting and saw a man lean toward a bright, orange hole, night shook through my shirt in an inherited rhythm, duplicating the heart held by his anxious body. My painting a laughing dad. My heart a hole where on a bright, orange night, I dropped a tattered shirt, shaking. ii. My dad said the man was meant to be looking at the painting he’s in, but it didn’t quite work. And so the hole where he’s looking now. The finger-thick lines around him don’t hide a failed painting or reveal any struggle to mean. My dad believes in action and the truth of process: a man looks into a hole and so he is. He looks past the hole to what brought him to it. The tattered painting doesn’t work as finger-thick evidence of his struggle to mean, but the correspondence of his belief shakes through its presence. To believe in holes and men looking into them. To lean toward action and the presence of process where a man looks at the painting he’s in and is. iii. A man looks at the hole he’s in and laughs. He never thought about what the colors mean, the hole bright orange in the black night. Like babies painting a painting of babies, the man laughs at the hole he’s in and looks down to feel his heart beneath a tattered shirt. He’s shaking like an old man’s dad. Is a man the hole he falls into? Colors are the correspondence of babies— they lean and fall into the holes we leave them. A baby looks at the hole he’s in and laughs. He shakes, no colors or dads to hold him still. iv. My dad’s fingers spilled around the surface without distinction, causing the offense we call process. The painting, having the grace of endurance, allows the line its tiny provocation, but lacking the confrontation that would compel the painting into itself—the man looks down, not in; we look at, not through. The painting communicates by presence alone, letting us know that it’s here without a message, or a message embodied in its delivery, a swallowed swallow. The man and the hole he looks into are homage to us. The man doesn’t have a mouth, the hole doesn’t have a shape. Our provocation is presence alone. v. I used to went into my dad’s painting I grew up In When I dull black orange heart wonder about quiet and saw a man      I      my dad      a hole rhythmic wonders the painting through the night I’m heir to anxious painting     my dad’s painting     My painting an inherited rhythm his shaking hand glows in my painting      think my dad’s a hole beats of my dad where I sit In a orange hole black where my night shirt shook a tattered night in the canvas      in the dull shirt        and a man leans by shaking hand       I dropped a laughing dad beneath an orange night     an orange hole quietly my dad in duplicating heart his anxious dull rhythm     My dad held by body was lean down to my body but gave up looks and laughs through a bright My heart      the looking toward a hole shaking on a bright where vi. doesn’t work     where he’s looking now but the painting he's in is presence He looks tattered     The man looking so finger-thick My dad     The finger-thick lines    the correspondence to the painting he’s in     And the hole it didn’t quite mean what brought him to it evidence of his process reveal the man was meant a hole of My action at the dad of any truth To mean in looks      and of looks to be don’t hide my dad at work     toward his past he is the hole the painting believes in but shakes around failed action    struggle to lean through for process where a man and a struggle and a painting as to him     and so To belief      or its presence said to believe in holes and men looking into them vii. the hole looks at A man he’s in and shakes Like A baby looks at the correspondence of babies and laughs     He bright and orange painting never a man he falls into       Colors are of babies the colors mean no colors     they lean night babies painting a black still hole about dads he’s the hole we fall into     the holes in his shaking heart in the thought leave them     and down the what hole He’s like a tattered shirt      the man laughs at the looks he’s an old man’s hole    to feel beneath dad or to hold the laughs He Is in him viii. we call a swallow homage to provocation the hole doesn’t have a message fingers in its delivery lacking grace but the man looks down without endurance confrontation embodied    swallowed causing the process of presence having shape    letting us know that it’s there not in    not without a message     a tiny surface My dad’s distinction allows The painting its mouth spilled The man through The painting the line we look at     the painting into or around      Our man looks into that the offense would he alone have The us and the is are by presence alone the hole communicates itself the provocation doesn’t compel

Apply for the position (I've forgotten now for what) I had to marry the Second Mayor's daughter by twelve noon. The order arrived three minutes of. I already had a wife; the Second Mayor was childless: but I did it. Next they told me to shave off my father's beard. All right. No matter that he'd been a eunuch, and had succumbed in early childhood: I did it, I shaved him. Then they told me to burn a village; next, a fair-sized town; then, a city; a bigger city; a small, down-at-heels country; then one of "the great powers"; then another (another, an- other)—In fact, they went right on until they'd told me to burn up every man-made thing on the face of the earth! And I did it, I burned away every last trace, I left nothing, nothing of any kind whatever. Then they told me to blow it all to hell and gone! And I blew it all to hell and gone (oh, didn't I). . . Now, they said, put it back together again; put it all back the way it was when you started. Well. . . it was my turn then to tell them something! Shucks, I didn't want any job that bad.

I felt suddenly convinced that I had feelings for the wallpaper. I was especially captivated by its blonde hair and bad dreams. I had the impression the wallpaper needed longer to properly 
respond. By the time I left, my affections had produced this abrasion on my cheek. People looked on the abrasion as unquestionable proof of my sincerity. The abrasion was produced by rubbing my face on the paper’s smooth surface. It only occurred to me later that it might have found this sensation disagreeable. But by then I had become known for my abrasion, and I seldom thought of, discussed, or in any way depended upon the wallpaper for anything. My affections, though, had produced upon the paper their own mark. To my irritation and gradual dismay, interest in the paper’s abrasion began to outweigh interest in my own; indeed, mine was starting to fade while the mark upon the paper had deepened with the passing of time. People liked to visit the paper in its room and probe their fingers into the widening tear, by now a gruesome black-edged wound. The silence of the paper during these incursions suggested to some condemnation of their curiosity, but to others implied approval. Some even speculated that the paper “enjoyed” the infringement of its surfaces, while most agreed it was a question of the paper enduring this indignity, having little or no opportunity to protest. Some visitors could not contain their enthusiasm, and over time other recesses were opened in the paper without its consent. The earliest admirers of the paper’s abrasion were heard lamenting the gulf between the paper’s current state and its previous appearance. They opined that to experience the abrasion now was to encounter a kind of mockery of the gentle and informal gesture it had once been. Others contended that while the paper’s condition was certainly different, it couldn’t be in any way “better” or “worse” than it had been 
originally; on the contrary, the paper, exhibiting as it did the marks of the affections spent upon it, was in every way a true record of the destruction this attention had wrought, and had become if anything a more moving testament, charting as it did the changing and accelerated passions of the times. In later phases of the paper’s deterioration some expressed admiration for the stoical indifference with which the paper withstood its abusers and wondered if such an attitude might not improve the willing and reciprocal style with which they and their contemporaries were accustomed to receiving each other’s gazes and caresses. Against the odds, this view seemed timely and took root in the populace, and to this day in all the estimations of historians and critics of culture it is widely held accountable for the period of dormancy and inertia among the youngest of our people, whose silence and repose has replaced the humors and rages of those whose desires had flown unchecked, who had coupled for so long with such energy and frequency.

In their excess, their blowsy dreaming and King Solomon-like tempers, the clouds possess the grandeur of eighteenth-century oils, when a painter earned his profession as an anatomist. Those artists of verdigris and gamboge, too gorged on joy, perhaps, treated that blank pasture of the “heavens” like something that had lived. Their crawly undoings remind us of the mean curiosities of sheep, the sea’s half-remembered boil, or a few twisted bolls of cotton—the morning phosphorescent or sunset a dull, worn-out gilt. The nights there were scumbled with light. How could we ever have taken them for the abstinence of art?

They have shown her facing, from a range of barley at times and from the patio. She wrings a sprig of mint in a walled garden; behold, the dimple that none reckoned on, careless burdens of plums, of parsley. I thank those gentlemen: many an old master is needed if there shall be love. I thank Velasquez more: for a woman turned away may be imposed without disparagement in a prospect of grandeur. Where this high cliff joins the deep sunlight I see you beside me spread aside in the buoyant deer-moss; I sit cross-legged nibbling juniper berries and I call you my Louella now, now Ella Lou. Far down from one rim is the bay with flocks of teal, and we might look down shafts of cedar the other way; I feel a privileged one who waits, remembering the special pleasure of youth is of self-denial. Since Velasquez and the masters have hexed my eyes I see you now even in this northern grandeur; following the hip I watch the flank’s retirement and watch the nape declining from the crescent shoulder. But where your shoulder ripples back to fill the arm is a slight plump area, probably nameless: in all but rarest postures that form vanishes into wherever you withdraw inopportune breaths. You might not wonder it is there I, stretching forward, beseeching you be motionless, hold the wide kiss; I wonder mightily for my part for what purpose have I stretched a thousand miles between the two of us.

In the house of the voice of Maria Callas We hear the baby’s cries, and the after-supper Rattle of silverware, and three clocks ticking To different tunes, and ripe plums Sleeping in their chipped bowl, and traffic sounds Dissecting the avenues outside.   We hear, like water Pouring over time itself, the pure distillate arias Of the numerous pampered queens who have reigned, And the working girls who have suffered The envious knives, and the breathless brides With their horned helmets who have fallen in love And gone crazy or fallen in love and died On the grand stage at their appointed moments— Who will sing of them now?   Maria Callas is dead, Although the full lips and the slanting eyes And flared nostrils of her voice resurrect Dramas we are able to imagine in this parlor On evenings like this one, adding some color, Adding some order.   Of whom it was said: She could imagine almost anything and give voice to it.

Beginning to dangle beneath The wind that blows from the undermined wood, I feel the great pulley grind, The thread I cling to lengthen And let me soaring and spinning down into marble, Hooked and weightlessly happy Where the squared sun shines Back equally from all four sides, out of stone And years of dazzling labor, To land at last among men Who cut with power saws a Parian whiteness And, chewing slow tobacco, Their eyebrows like frost, Shunt house-sized blocks and lash them to cables And send them heavenward Into small-town banks, Into the columns and statues of government buildings, But mostly graves. I mount my monument and rise Slowly and spinningly from the white-gloved men Toward the hewn sky Out of the basement of light, Sadly, lifted through time’s blinding layers On perhaps my tombstone In which the original shape Michelangelo believed was in every rock upon earth Is heavily stirring, Surprised to be an angel, To be waked in North Georgia by the ponderous play Of men with ten-ton blocks But no more surprised than I To feel sadness fall off as though I myself Were rising from stone Held by a thread in midair, Badly cut, local-looking, and totally uninspired, Not a masterwork Or even worth seeing at all But the spirit of this place just the same, Felt here as joy.

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee; What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage. Ezra Pound You’ll find labels describing what is gone: an empress’s bones, a stolen painting of a man in a feathered helmet holding a flag-draped spear. A vellum gospel, hidden somewhere long ago forgotten, would have sat on that pedestal; this glass cabinet could have kept the first salts carried back from the Levant. To help us comprehend the magnitude of absence, huge rooms lie empty of their wonders—the Colossus, Babylon’s Hanging Gardens and in this gallery, empty shelves enough to hold all the scrolls of Alexandria. My love, I’ve petitioned the curator who has acquired an empty chest representing all the poems you will now never write. It will be kept with others in the poet’s gallery. Next door, a vacant room echoes with the spill of jewels buried by a pirate who died before disclosing their whereabouts. I hope you don’t mind, but I have kept a few of your pieces for my private collection. I think you know the ones I mean.

In the naked bed, in Plato’s cave, Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall, Carpenters hammered under the shaded window, Wind troubled the window curtains all night long, A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding, Their freights covered, as usual. The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram Slid slowly forth. Hearing the milkman’s chop, His striving up the stair, the bottle’s chink, I rose from bed, lit a cigarette, And walked to the window. The stony street Displayed the stillness in which buildings stand, The street-lamp’s vigil and the horse’s patience. The winter sky’s pure capital Turned me back to bed with exhausted eyes. Strangeness grew in the motionless air. The loose Film grayed. Shaking wagons, hooves’ waterfalls, Sounded far off, increasing, louder and nearer. A car coughed, starting. Morning, softly Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair From underseas, kindled the looking-glass, Distinguished the dresser and the white wall. The bird called tentatively, whistled, called, Bubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so, O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail Of early morning, the mystery of beginning Again and again, while History is unforgiven.

He described her mouth as full of ashes. So when he kissed her finally he was thinking about ashes and the blacker rim just below the edge of the ashtray, and the faint dark rim that outlined her lips, and the lips themselves, at the limit of another darkness, farther and far more interior. Then the way the red, paling, just outside those lines caught fire and the pages caught soon after that. Slowly at first, but then all at once at the scalloped brown corners of each; like the ruff of an offended and darkening bird, extended, then folded in on itself; multiple, stiffening, gone.