1269 Arts and sciences poems

I read the palms of the other kids on the field trip to see which ones would grow up to be astronauts. The lifeline on Betty Lou’s beautiful hand ended the day after tomorrow, so I told her how the rest of our lives is vastly over-rated, even in neighboring galaxies. When she asked me how I knew so much, I said I watched War of the Worlds six times and, if she went with me to the double-feature tomorrow, I’d finish explaining the universe. I smiled winningly. The Halley’s Comet lecture by our teacher whooshed in my one ear and out the other.

(A true incident) ‘Only a local anaesthetic was given because of the blood pressure problem. The patient, thus, was fully awake throughout the operation. But in those days—in 1938, in Cardiff, when I was Lambert Rogers’ dresser—they could not locate a brain tumour with precision. Too much normal brain tissue was destroyed as the surgeon searched for it, before he felt the resistance of it … all somewhat hit and miss. One operation I shall never forget … ’ (Dr Wilfred Abse) Sister saying—‘Soon you’ll be back in the ward,’ sister thinking—‘Only two more on the list,’ the patient saying—‘Thank you, I feel fine’; small voices, small lies, nothing untoward, though, soon, he would blink again and again because of the fingers of Lambert Rogers, rash as a blind man’s, inside his soft brain. If items of horror can make a man laugh then laugh at this: one hour later, the growth still undiscovered, ticking its own wild time; more brain mashed because of the probe’s braille path; Lambert Rogers desperate, fingering still; his dresser thinking, ‘Christ! Two more on the list, a cisternal puncture and a neural cyst.’ Then, suddenly, the cracked record in the brain, a ventriloquist voice that cried, ‘You sod, leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’— the patient’s dummy lips moving to that refrain, the patient’s eyes too wide. And, shocked, Lambert Rogers drawing out the probe with nurses, students, sister, petrified. ‘Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’ that voice so arctic and that cry so odd had nowhere else to go—till the antique gramophone wound down and the words began to blur and slow, ‘ … leave … my … soul … alone … ’ to cease at last when something other died. And silence matched the silence under snow.

Only once did the frog come to mind: when the coroner came to “first-aid training” at the fire station, his slide carousel set up to eliminate the easy pukers. The frog was not dead but its brain had been pithed, which is what happens when you stick a probe into the skull and wiggle. You wind up with something dead enough to let you stretch its tongue as thin and wide as a cellophane sheet, which I did so eagerly, back in the lab. The coroner said: Here is the fat guy whose Chihuahua gnawed through his stomach. Click. Here is the farmer who hanged himself in his silo. (I noted his foreshortened dangling feet.) Click. It had been thrilling to see the frog’s blood cells jerking through the narrow capillaries. Here is the woman who swallowed the bottle of Drano. Click. Here is the man who just Sawzall-ed his neck clean through. Click. Here is the guy who shot off his head, but wait: he’s still living, which is what happens if the brain stem’s left intact. Click. The coroner said we should aim for the base not the top of the skull and remember to turn down the heat. Click. There are many people in this world on whom nobody checks in very often. Click. The warmer the room, the quicker a body will turn black and bloat. Click. If you have a dog it is important to leave out what seems like an inordinate amount of dog food. Click, click, then there was nothing but a slab of light to signal he was through. And it was then that I remembered the frog, not that the coroner had spoken of frogs. What he said was, If we saw the cops outside, smoking cigars, that’s when we’d know we had a stinker.

Happy Birthday Kenneth Koch/Feb 27 We went to all those places where they restore sadness and joy and call it art. We were piloted by Auden who became Unbearably acrimonious when we dropped off Senghor into the steamy skies of his beloved West Africa. The termites and ants were waiting for him to unearth the sun in Elissa. The clouds were as cool as a dog’s nose pressed against our cheeks. I notice your eggshell skin is as creamy as a lion’s armpit as we cross the horizon on strands of Yeats’ silver hair. There is a light coffee flame in his eyes guiding us like an old Irish house cleaner holding a candle in a black and white English movie. Yeats’ lips look like an angry Rimbaud illuminating poetry with his youth and vigorous sunlight. He knew eternity would vanish the sun at dusk. He caught it with a rainbow tied to his finger. There was nothing left after that. We cross the equator heading north following Emily Dickinson’s black bag containing stems of her longer poems preserved in darkness and memory like wild pearls thrown overboard to avoid capture by Spanish pirates. The islands below float by like water hearts in a child’s aquarium. We are candy wrappers being blown across the waxed floors of poetry. We land on the Brooklyn Bridge. Whitman’s past-port face is grinning at the nineteenth century in the thorny arms of Gerard Manley Hopkins whose head was set on fire by God’s little hands. The hands that circumcised the world. Gertrude Stein is a match flaring on a young woman’s pillow whose birthmarks have been stolen. We cross the green Atlantic into World War One. We are met by Rilke dressed in his Orpheus uniform wearing white sonnet gloves that once belonged to a stone angel. Rilke offers us a glass of amontillado made from Lorca’s private stock of gypsy tears. The sherry is not quite as dry as Wallace Stevens’ lush mango metaphors of familiar objects. Although Stevens’ poems are fragrant, there is a lingering afterthought of Pound on the tongue. Pound collected his misty feelings to make raindrops into European and American poetry. Vagueness became as sharp as a pencil. Our blue box is not allowed to attend Apollinaire’s birthday party held by the august Académie française

I turn over A new museum leaf The light is new And right on the spot I was just thinking about A fleet is about to set out On the ocean light Water turns to sky And makes the eye Blend ingredients in a bend Shaped like an ear A new speaker is speaking I hear the words They sound along The halls of the balls I turn to find them As if I knew where to turn Isn't that the sound That's present Isn't that the sound That's gifted Isn't that something I'd like to put upon The walls And take down Take apart And put in a mood The instructions to which I say aloud

How much chemical disorder can be survived depends                on medical technology. A hundred years ago, cardiac arrest was irreversible. People were called dead when their heart                  stopped beating. Today death is                                  believed to occur 4 to 6 minutes after                                      the heart stops beating because after                                     several minutes it is difficult to resuscitate the brain. However, with new experimental treatments, more than         10 minutes of warm cardiac arrest can       now be survived without brain injury.     Future technologies for molecular repair may extend the frontiers of resuscitation beyond 60 minutes or more, making today’s             beliefs about when death                             occurs obsolete merely transitory evidence          a stray boundary between a much longer-lasting            (invisible opposite polarities feature                                                             the fields annihilate the field tries to                        one another repel the intruder                        rapidly velocities     directly                    shine in emission visible                                                              shortly in terms of                  before brightness                              totality

(to remind myself) i Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity. Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgment. ii Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. iii Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

I can imitate the spheres of the model’s body, her head, Her mouth, the chin she rests at the bend of her elbow But nothing tells me how to make the pupils spiral From her gaze. Everything the eye sees enters a circle, The world is connected to a circle: breath spools from the nostrils And any love to be open becomes an O. The shape inside the circle Is a circle, the egg fallen outside the nest the serpent circles Rests in the serpent’s gaze the way my gaze rests on the model. In a blind contour drawing the eye tracks the subject Without observing what the hand is doing. Everything is connected By a line curling and canceling itself like the shape of a snake Swallowing its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself, A man circling a railway underpass before attacking a policeman. To draw the model’s nipples I have to let myself be carried away. I love all the parts of the body. There are as many curves As there are jewels of matrimony, as many whirls as there are teeth In the mouth of the future: the mute pearls a bride wears to her 
wedding, The sleeping ovaries like the heads of riders bunched in a tunnel. The doors of the subway car imitate an O opening and closing, In the blood the O spirals its helix of defects, genetic shadows, But there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy. When one morning a black man stabs a black transit cop in the face And the cop, bleeding from his eye, kills the assailant, no one traveling To the subway sees it quickly enough to make a camera phone 
witness. The scene must be carried on the tongue, it must be carried On the news into the future where it will distract the eyes working Lines into paper. This is what blind contour drawing conjures in me. At the center of God looms an O, the devil believes justice is shaped Like a zero, a militant helmet or war drum, a fist or gun barrel, A barrel of ruined eggs or skulls. To lift anything from a field The lifter bends like a broken O. The weight of the body Lowered into a hole can make anyone say Oh: the onlookers, The mother, the brothers and sisters. Omen begins with an O. When I looked into my past I saw the boy I had not seen in years Do a standing backflip so daring the onlookers called him crazy. I did not see a moon as white as an onion but I saw a paper plate Upon which the boy held a plastic knife and sopping meat. An assailant is a man with history. His mother struggles To cut an onion preparing a meal to be served after the funeral. The onion is the best symbol of the O. Sliced, a volatile gas stings The slicer’s eyes like a punishment clouding them until they see What someone trapped beneath a lid of water sees: A soft-edged world, a blur of blooms holding a coffin afloat. The onion is pungent, its scent infects the air with sadness, All the pallbearers smell it. The mourners watch each other, They watch the pastor’s ambivalence, they wait for the doors to open, They wait for the appearance of the wounded one-eyed victim And his advocates, strangers who do not consider the assailant’s funeral Appeasement. Before that day the officer had never fired his gun In the line of duty. He was chatting with a cabdriver Beneath the tracks when my cousin circled him holding a knife. The wound caused no brain damage though his eyeball was severed. I am not sure how a man with no eye weeps. In the Odyssey Pink water descends the Cyclops’s cratered face after Odysseus Drives a burning log into it. Anyone could do it. Anyone could Begin the day with his eyes and end it blind or deceased, Anyone could lose his mind or his vision. When I go crazy I am afraid I will walk the streets naked, I am afraid I will shout Every fucked up thing that troubles or enchants me, I will try to murder Or make love to everybody before the police handcuff or murder me. Though the bullet exits a perfect hole it does not leave perfect holes In the body. A wound is a cell and portal. Without it the blood runs With no outlet. It is possible to draw handcuffs using loops Shaped like the symbol for infinity, from the Latin infinitas Meaning unboundedness. The way you get to anything Is context. In a blind contour it is not possible to give your subject A disconnected gaze. Separated from the hand the artist’s eye Begins its own journey. It could have been the same for the Cyclops, A giant whose gouged eye socket was so large a whole onion Could fit into it. Separated from the body the eye begins Its own journey. The world comes full circle: the hours, the harvests, When the part of the body that holds the soul is finally decomposed It becomes a circle, a hole that holds everything: blemish, cell, Womb, parts of the body no one can see. I watched the model Pull a button loose on her jeans and step out of them As one might out of a hole in a blue valley, a sea. I found myself In the dark, I found myself entering her body like a delicate shell Or soft pill, like this curved thumb of mine against her lips. You must look without looking to make the perfect circle. The line, the mind must be a blind continuous liquid Until the drawing is complete.

for those of us who can’t quite quit her when the poem flirts similes hugging her thighs like a tight skirt: consider the possibilities. if the poem follows you home, whiskey pickling her tongue: make her coffee, black. if the poem arrives dressed as metaphor, begging for candy: trick or retreat till the mask falls. should the poem slink outta panties, stand naked demanding touch: finger her lines till her stanzas beg for an encore: come again, explore, imagine odd positions of sweet revision. and whenever she whispers, stop: listen and leave her be.

Everyone in the room is cheering. This is what you do for a painting you love! We climb up on one another’s shoulders, wave pom-poms that match the palette. We want to buy the season tickets to the train that huffs through this landscape. We want to climb the towers of this steely sculpture and hang the flag. Victory is ours! We have seen something to love here. Outside the gallery, there is an alley full of garbage. Beauty stops at the door. A scraggly tree is coming out of the pavement where the people are lined up, cigarettes and cell phones, waiting for a chance to look. They keep their giant fingers in their bags. Wear T-shirts of their favorite teams of artist assistants. On the alley wall, someone has drawn a hillside and a horse. A young man sits on a crate and peels the glue from under his nails. He nods. And looks. And soon, pulls out the chalk and adds a saddle and a man, who looks back and shouts as if he has found his enemy again.