1269 Arts and sciences poems

1 Reverse the book in duration. What does that mean? I am writing to you. These notes now when it’s too late. 2 If the cyborg you read about in bookstores is an immigrant from Mexico crossing into the U.S. beneath a floodlit court, then mine is a Punjabi-British hitchhiker on a JI visa. This is tunneling as seen from a satellite—sort of concave warp in the dirt of the line. 3 She lives in a house with others, including animals, creating individual spaces of companionship and ardor. What happens when this domestic life grows suspect? When the grass reverts in its granular drag to the subject of architecture: the failure of a house to believe in its occupants? 4 Mate with surfaces. Okay. Hitchhike. Okay. Make a cup of Darjeeling tea and start walking down a sidewalk in America. I saw this in a film starring George Clooney; no, Natalie Wood. The last scene is her, the gamine self, kicking off her shoes as the house explodes behind her. Perpetrating, she doesn’t flinch. Sips tea. Keeps walking. I wanted to write that. Continuance. As it related to loss. The secret pleasure of refusing to live like a normal person in a dress/with a sex drive and fingers/dreamy yet stabilized in the café of languages. 5 I want to have sex with what I want to become. This is a statement related to women arriving in a country it would be regressive to leave. Then, writing, I was filled with a longing for—for what? George-in-the-flesh? George Clooney in Idaho, pretending to pick up hitchhikers as research for his next movie in which he plays a mild-mannered serial killer? No. A different series of acts. Tricky. For example, I’m embarrassed by this book. It makes my blood roar to think of you reading it. So intimate. A text. Then it is a document related to shame flooding the body to make it red. Who doesn’t want to heal a human body? Who doesn’t want a perfect human body? The body of my hitchhiker is, thus, inevitably female or Punjabi, fused to the production of secrets. There are no e-mails home from the e-mail café. Nothing. Phone calls, bullshitting. Sickening. I mean, what is this girl/my girl doing, there in a foreign heartland like a dog with a thumb? My Laloo, about to do it. Don’t do it, little one. Red dress. Don’t get into the car. 6 But then, lit up, a red wife, kind of, not really, she sets out to see things as they are. Describes a virtual countryside. Jumps a box car. Drinks domestic beer. Okay. She does it and I write it down: a damaged eye with votive filaments. (I am writing to you.) “No point in writing home.” Then what?

“In warm sunlight jade engenders smoke”; poetry, like indigo mountain, keeps its distance; the light plays words and figures, stone’s edge edged with air, green haze growing. Amused by butterflies, Chuang Tsu dreaming, the emperor’s heart in spring, thoroughly transformed. Still, in pieces, the words rest so much apart. Risking my life I lean on dangerous railings. When the dream wakes to its own particulars, the strands scattered, loose hair on muslin, broken characters the reeds make, unmake— vague    no reason bright    again    dark—

MORNING Reading the bones, wetting a fingertip to trace archaic characters, I feel a breeze of silence flow up past my wrist, icy. Can I speak here? The bones say I must. As the first light strikes across the lake, magpies scream, and the cast bones say the work must come true, it’s been true all along, we are what we do out on our digs. Dictor and looker, all eyes, with spade and a jeweler’s loupe I sift mud & dust for bone, for shellcast. Spy, archeologist of freshness, I expect sight-made-sound to reveal fear cold at the throat of change, and loosen its grip so that mind, riding the bloodwarm stream, wells up as the speech that bears it and is telling. EVENING Magpies scream. Though the tongues of birds say Now and warn forward, free of a live past, we seek back and forth for change, the ghostly sparkling of our watertable under everywhere. If I don’t speak to tap & ease it out, I go dry & dumb & will die wicked. On the lake of the poets a stone lamp flickers. It casts eight moons dancing, casting doubt on the moon that rides above the winter air. Ice thaws in a poet’s throat; the springing truth is fresh. It wakes taste. The taste lasts. Language floods the mud; mind makes a cast of words; it precipitates, mercurial, like T’ang discourse riding the tidal constant of its source.

saw the magnet grow electric and the fixed points become a field in rural Denmark as the needle moved through various materials all the while remaining parallel: the usual: silver, zinc, lead, etc. and then tried needles of glass needles of shellac with all the west above while below, the east in winding spirals traveling three years across Europe, a good friend of Hans Christian Andersen and of aluminum, whose name points to its invisible lights within whose forces crossed and became his galvanic opus,The Soulin Nature, as well as various Italian newspapers — to eventually end up as a park in Copenhagen dominated by green, a lake, and shade in which a woman dressed in green sits reading to this day.

I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheelto a kitchen stool and watch it turn.—DUCHAMP I had the happy idea to suspend some blue globes in the air and watch them pop. I had the happy idea to put my little copper horse on the shelf so we could stare at each other all evening. I had the happy idea to create a void in myself. Then to call it natural. Then to call it supernatural. I had the happy idea to wrap a blue scarf around my head and spin. I had the happy idea that somewhere a child was being born who was nothing like Helen or Jesus except in the sense of changing everything. I had the happy idea that someday I would find both pleasure and punishment, that I would know them and feel them, and that, until I did, it would be almost as good to pretend. I had the happy idea to call myself happy. I had the happy idea that the dog digging a hole in the yard in the twilight had his nose deep in mold-life. I had the happy idea that what I do not understand is more real than what I do, and then the happier idea to buckle myself into two blue velvet shoes. I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say hello to my own blue soul.Hello, blue soul. Hello. It was my happiest idea.

Fleeing his clubs, dull honors, wives, the ageing Hardy hunches down in his potting-shed with his thumbtip-fumbled, fine- printed seed catalogue’s inflorescences— peripherally glimpsing the oxygenless blue line of the fleur-de-lys scaling his inner wrist; his chalky knuckles, his forearm’s crisp,lisse, pleated wrinkles; softly brown-spotted as a fox terrier’s belly. Yet this pleases, only this— age-speckled surfaces, sun-galls rose-speckled; puckering petals rugosely leaf-veined: the saturate, flooded stemlines’ mauves and verdures on the backlit catalogue’s tissuelike (nearly self-composting) pages—like his skin, all milliner-ribboned; yet with, barely hooded, things as they are and will be visible beneath it.

Each morning, downward, Maria Stella Maris Church glows out the passenger-side window. Further, the corner where the Salvation Army stood and Hart Crane spent the night. At a shore-edge bar, where they'd finally met up, they shared bottles, walked out toward being together, a hotel, and then got rolled. Crane spent the night in the shelter. E., bruised, shipped out the next morning. The hungover poet took the train back toward Altadena. From my car, not much has changed; I see young stevedores shrug off last night's drunk. Past New Dock Street, a cigarette splits, balloons into orange under my wheels. Hot ash. My unkindness is thrown over and over. Door to door, a ride is for what I've squirreled away, not riches but a pile: the ways no thing mattered, how a kiss didn't count, how a friendship could be severed by a coyote walking between us or a dream. My windshield is a tracery. Long ago, down Gaffey, we raced in my hairdresser's sports car. She drove with her knees. Her perfume, the want, filled the heated car. We drove once to her husband's parking lot, switched cars—he'd shipped out for days—and toured in his jeep. But in this home I've chosen, there's a church on every corner and mourners in between. Boys pair up and nothing happens. Girls hold hands. We get rolled. They ship out. Liquor is drained. The train returns to Altadena. Mary, star of the sea, watches over the gem of a filthy port like the hawk, diamond-shaped ahead. She lets me pass five days a week. On my way uphill there are ovals of golden light, then no one home. Shoeless child, chimes, and stevedore off work. Burnt lawn. Hellhole. Haven. Next stop, my house.

For Michael Coyle and Donna Frieze 1 You said anyone could walk in with a pack of explosives as we passed through the crowds of tourists and school kids — under the glass-grid ceiling lit with sun. I was saying:She’s our earth, our body, our sex, as we drifted down the halls of statues and colonnades and hunks of facades of Greek temples until we found room 22, “The Hellenistic World,” where a bronze face in a glass box on the wall stared back at us. Head from a bronze cult statue of Anahita, a local goddess in the guise of Aphrodite (

Soul and race are private dominions, memories and modal songs, a tenor blossoming, which would paint suffering a clear color but is not in this Victorian house without oil in zero degree weather and a forty-mile-an-hour wind; it is all a well-knit family: a love supreme. Oak leaves pile up on walkway and steps, catholic as apples in a special mist of clear white children who love my children. I play “Alabama” on a warped record player skipping the scratches on your faces over the fibrous conical hairs of plastic under the wooden floors. Dreaming on a train from New York to Philly, you hand out six notes which become an anthem to our memories of you: oak, birch, maple, apple, cocoa, rubber. For this reason Martin is dead; for this reason Malcolm is dead; for this reason Coltrane is dead; in the eyes of my first son are the browns of these men and their music.

When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai in the gray rain, in the Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty, he fell straight as a pine, he fell as Ajax fell in Homer in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge the woodsman returned for two days to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing and on the third day he brought his uncle. They stacked logs in the resinous air, hacking the small limbs off, tying those bundles separately. The slabs near the root were quartered and still they were awkwardly large; the logs from the midtree they halved: ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood, moons and quarter moons and half moons ridged by the saw’s tooth. The woodsman and the old man his uncle are standing in midforest on a floor of pine silt and spring mud. They have stopped working because they are tired and because I have imagined no pack animal or primitive wagon. They are too canny to call in neighbors and come home with a few logs after three days’ work. They are waiting for me to do something or for the overseer of the Great Lord to come and arrest them. How patient they are! The old man smokes a pipe and spits. The young man is thinking he would be rich if he were already rich and had a mule. Ten days of hauling and on the seventh day they’ll probably be caught, go home empty-handed or worse. I don’t know whether they’re Japanese or Mycenaean and there’s nothing I can do. The path from here to that village is not translated. A hero, dying, gives off stillness to the air. A man and a woman walk from the movies to the house in the silence of separate fidelities. There are limits to imagination.