1269 Arts and sciences poems

All the roofs sloped at the same angle. The distance between the houses was the same. There were so many feet from each front door to the curb. My father mowed the lawn straight up and down and then diagonally. And then he lined up beer bottles on the kitchen table. We knew them only in summer when the air passed through the screens. The neighbor girls talked to us across the great divide: attic window to attic window. We started with our names. Our whispers wobbled along a tightrope, and below was the rest of our lives.

In speaking of ‘aspiration,’ From the recesses of a pen more dolorous than blackness itself, Were you presenting us with one more form of imperturbable French drollery, Or was it self directed banter? Habitual ennui Took from you, your invisible, hot helmet of anaemia— While you were filling your “little glass” from the decanter Of a transparent-murky, would-be-truthful “hobohemia”— And then facetiously Went off with it? Your soul’s supplanter, The spirit of good narrative, flatters you, convinced that in reporting briefly One choice incident, you have known beauty other than that of stys, on Which to fix your admiration. So far as the future is concerned, “Shall not one say, with the Russian philosopher, ‘How is one to know what one doesn’t know?’” So far as the present is concerned,

At the mention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, my mild-mannered father — tender, abstracted — would exercise the right to revert to type. That is to say: devout; that is, proscriptive. He would rather we did not so bandy the good Jesuit’s name about in talk of “gay this” and “gay that” — just as he would rather my sister did not, from the library, request “sick”Lolita. Like tars on a stage deck, yo ho, we roll our eyes. Somebody snaps on the poisonous gas-fired heater — and I put off a year or two the hypothesis I’ll form, with a wave, to provoke him to these wobblers that all in such matters swing from pole to pole; as Hopkins was wont (his muse being bi[nsey] po[p]lar[s]) to swing from joy’s heights, alas, to the abyss and for whom the mind had “mountains; cliffs of fall.” • “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne’er hung there....    ” Who’s not known the hell that fashions itself from the third night without sleep — the third or the fourth — in whose black margins crawl shrill horrors, and where breathless, poleaxed, pinned — as though in the teeth of an outrageous gale — the mind — sick — preys upon the stricken mind. And “worst, there is none” — no none — than this wild grief: Citalopram-wired. Our sweating selves self-cursed. Oh, “Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?” as Hopkins wrote — but, far gone, at its worst it’s her first form I want. Please stroke my hair. It’s alright now. I’m here, I’m here. There, there.

for Gabriele Mintz As Billy goes higher all the balloons Get marooned on the other side of the Lunar landscape. The module’s broke— It seems like for an eternity, but who’s Counting—and Sally’s joined the Moonies So we don’t see so much of her anyhow. Notorious novelty—I’d settle for a good Cup of Chase & Sand-borne—though when The strings are broken on the guitar You can always use it as a coffee table. Vienna was cold at that time of year. The sachertorte tasted sweet but the memory burned in the colon. Get a grip, get a grip, before The Grippe gets you. Glad to see the picture Of ink—the pitcher that pours before Throwing the Ball, with never a catcher in sight. Never a catcher but sometimes a catch, or A clinch or a clutch or a spoon—never a Catcher but plenty o’flack, ’till we meet On this side of the tune.

Isabella Whitney , The maner of her Wyll, 1573 1 We’re told it was mostly the soul at stake, its formal setting-forth, as over water, where, against all odds, the words-on-paper make a sort of currency, which heaven, against all odds, accepts. So Will, which is to say,May what I purpose, please, this once, and what will happen coincide. To which the worldly dispositions were mere after-thought: your mother’s ring and so forth. What the law considered yours to give. Which in the case of women was restricted—this was long ago, and elsewhere—so that one confessedly “weak of purse” might all the more emphatically be thought of as having little to say. Except about the soul. The late disturbance in religion having done that much, the each for each responsible, even a servant, even the poor. Wild, then—quite beyond the pale—to hustle the soul-part so hastily off the page. And turn, our Isabella Whitney, to the city and its faithlessness. Whose smells and sounds—the hawker’s cry, the drainage ditch in Smithfield—all the thick-laid, lovely, in-your-face-and-nostrils stuff of getting-by no woman of even the slightest affectation would profess to know, much less to know so well. As one would know the special places on his body, were the passion merely personal. 2 Wattle and brickwork. Marble and mud. The city’s vast tautology. No city without people and no people but will long for what the city says they lack: high ceilings, gloves and laces, news, the hearth-lit circle of friendship, space for solitude, enough to eat. And something like a foothold in the whole-of-it, some without-which-not, some little but needful part in all the passing- from-hand-to-hand of it, so every time the bondsman racks his debtor or the shoemaker hammers a nail or one un- practiced girl imagines she has prompted a look of wistfulness, a piece of it is yours because your seeing it has made it that much slower to rejoin the blank oblivion of never-having- been. The year was fifteen hundred seventy- three. The year of our Redeemer, as they used to say. That other circuit of always-in-your- debt. From which she wrested, in her open I-am-writing-not-for-fun-but-for-the-money way of authorship, a world not just of plenty but—and here’s the part of that’s legacy—of love.

Basilica of San Zeno Maggiore, Verona A chubby fist and wing float free, severed from the landscape of human affairs. Below, a barefoot saint seems to straddle acres, beaming casual self-possession, the divine right to stake eternal claim—but in the space between both legs, a third intrudes, last remnant of a man fading to white dust. Nine hundred years ago this wall was his. Reduced to a toehold, he now spites the fourteenth-century arriviste, holding his ground with the ghost of what he was. The saint remains oblivious. Centuries sweep around him like planets' rings; the church's wheel-of-fortune spins rose light through plague and war. Yet so vivid are his blue and russet robes, he glistens—a refugee from a sun shower who's arrived dripping wet, an idea fresh from the brush of his maker.

Lit from within is the sole secure way to traverse dark matter. Some life forms — certain mushrooms, snails, jellyfish, worms — glow bioluminescent, and people as well; we emit infrared light from our most lucent selves. Our tragedy is we can’t see it. We see by reflection. We need biofluorescence to show our true colors. External illumination can distort, though. When gravity bends light, huge galaxy clusters can act as telescopes, elongating background images of star systems to faint arcs — a lensing effect like viewing distant street lamps through a glass of wine. A glass of wine or two now makes me weave as if acting a drunkard’s part; as if, besotted with unrequited love for the dynamic Turner canvases spied out by the Hubble, I could lurch down a city street set without provoking every pedestrian walk-on stare. Stare as long as you need to. If you think about it, walking, even standing, is illogical — such tiny things, feet! — especially when one’s body is not al dente anymore. Besides, creature of extremes and excess, I’ve always thought Apollo beautiful but boring, a bit of a dumb blonde. Dionysians don’t do balance. Balance, in other words, has never been my strong point. But I digress. More and more these days, digression seems the most direct route through from where I’ve lost or found myself out of place, mind, turn, time. Place your foot just so, mind how you turn: too swift a swivel can bring you down. Take your time ushering the audience out, saying goodbye to the actors. The ghost light is what they call the single bulb hanging above the bare stage in an empty theater. In the empty theater of such a night, waking to meet no external radiance, this is the final struggle left to win, this the sole beacon to beckon the darkness in and let the rest begin, this the lens through which at last to see both Self and Other arrayed with the bright stain of original sin: lit from within.

“Come, surly fellow, come! A song! “What, madmen? Sing to you? Choose from the clouded tales of wrong And terror I bring to you. Of a night so torn with cries, Honest men sleeping Start awake with glaring eyes, Bone chilled, flesh creeping. Of spirits in the web-hung room Up above the stable, Groans, knocking in the gloom The dancing table. Of demons in the dry well That cheep and mutter, Clanging of an unseen bell, Blood, choking the gutter. Of lust, frightful, past belief, Lurking unforgotten, Unrestrainable, endless grief From breasts long rotten. A song? What laughter or what song Can this house remember? Do flowers and butterflies belong To a blind December?”

1. The Winter: 1748 —Erasmus Darwin, 1731-1802

''At one time, I dreaded everything I was making.' Yayoi Kusama (Winter 1999) First it is just a measling of the tablecloth but soon it spills in all colours, all gaiety: desk        floor        lamp        flowers tatami, my underwear then dares to paw across Mother’s face, so smilingdelirious. Twenty years in a twelve square metre room with the thuds of tennis balls the only music tells me that suffering is necessary and more powerful than healing and I wish to cover all territory for once—hospital beds, chinaware, bed linen, your bland skin with the pattern and fear of all my dots— by the old wharf on Naoshima I make my yellow wartime pumpkins. I know my home is not a country anymore, just a festering colony of the mind: these shuddering trees that come and talk to me each night, the whispers of the white nurses and the star-dances of my Japanese kaleidoscope. Come haunt me still. Do what you may. I won’t return. I’m not afraid.