1269 Arts and sciences poems

Praised be the moon of books! that doth above A world of men, the fallen Past behold, And fill the spaces else so void and cold To make a very heaven again thereof; As when the sun is set behind a grove, And faintly unto nether ether rolled, All night his whiter image and his mould Grows beautiful with looking on her love. Thou therefore, moon of so divine a ray, Lend to our steps both fortitude and light! Feebly along a venerable way They climb the infinite, or perish quite; Nothing are days and deeds to such as they, While in this liberal house thy face is bright.

A tail, a torso, a tiny face. A longing, a journey, a deep belief. A spawning, a fissioning, a bit of tissue anchored to a psyche, stitched to a wish. Watery. Irony. Memory. My mother, my face, and then the last thing she’d ever see, and then the last words I’d hear her say:You’re killing me

It was like soul-kissing, the way the words filled my mouth as Mrs. Purdy read from her desk. All the other kids zoned an hour ahead to 3:15, but Mrs. Purdy and I wandered lonely as clouds borne by a breeze off Mount Parnassus. She must have seen the darkest eyes in the room brim: The next day she gave me a poem she’d chosen especially for me to read to the all except for me white class. She smiled when she told me to read it, smiled harder, said oh yes I could. She smiled harder and harder until I stood and opened my mouth to banjo playing darkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats. When I finished my classmates stared at the floor. We walked silent to the buses, awed by the power of words.

Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood jewels & miracles, I, Maximus a metal hot from boiling water, tell you what is a lance, who obeys the figures of the present dance 1 the thing you’re after may lie around the bend of the nest (second, time slain, the bird! the bird! And there! (strong) thrust, the mast! flight (of the bird o kylix, o Antony of Padua sweep low, o bless the roofs, the old ones, the gentle steep ones on whose ridge-poles the gulls sit, from which they depart, And the flake-racks of my city! 2 love is form, and cannot be without important substance (the weight say, 58 carats each one of us, perforce our goldsmith’s scale feather to feather added (and what is mineral, what is curling hair, the string you carry in your nervous beak, these make bulk, these, in the end, are the sum (o my lady of good voyage in whose arm, whose left arm rests no boy but a carefully carved wood, a painted face, a schooner! a delicate mast, as bow-sprit for forwarding 3 the underpart is, though stemmed, uncertain is, as sex is, as moneys are, facts! facts, to be dealt with, as the sea is, the demand that they be played by, that they only can be, that they must be played by, said he, coldly, the ear! By ear, he sd. But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last, that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned? when even our bird, my roofs, cannot be heard when even you, when sound itself is neoned in? when, on the hill, over the water where she who used to sing, when the water glowed, black, gold, the tide outward, at evening when bells came like boats over the oil-slicks, milkweed hulls And a man slumped, attentionless, against pink shingles o sea city) 4 one loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born born of yourself, born of hay and cotton struts, of street-pickings, wharves, weeds you carry in, my bird of a bone of a fish of a straw, or will of a color, of a bell of yourself, torn 5 love is not easy but how shall you know, New England, now that pejorocracy is here, how that street-cars, o Oregon, twitter in the afternoon offend a black-gold loin? how shall you strike, o swordsman, the blue-red black when, last night, your aim was mu-sick, mu-sick, mu-sick And not the cribbage game? (o Gloucester-man, weave your birds and fingers new, your roof-tops, clean shit upon racks sunned on American braid with others like you, such extricable surface as faun and oral, satyr lesbos vase o kill kill kill kill kill those who advertise you out) 6 in! in! the bow-sprit, bird, the beak in, the bend is, in, goes in, the form that which you make, what holds, which is the law of object, strut after strut, what you are, what you must be, what the force can throw up, can, right now hereinafter erect, the mast, the mast, the tender mast! The nest, I say, to you, I Maximus, say under the hand, as I see it, over the waters from this place where I am, where I hear, can still hear from where I carry you a feather as though, sharp, I picked up in the afternoon delivered you a jewel, it flashing more than a wing, than any old romantic thing, than memory, than place, than anything other than that which you carry than that which is, call it a nest, around the head of, call it the next second than that which you can do!

I want to read at the white house. I want to read poems at the white house. I want to read poems at the white house with all the pomp available. With celebratory music and all my beloveds watching. With Baraka and DiPrima and Roque Dalton behind me I want to read at the white house. I want to read poems at the white house wearing my favorite clothes probably a hoodie or perhaps my Belgian suit. Belgium is a failed state in the heart of Europe which is something to aspire to. I like Belgium and one day I might like to read poems at the palace of the nation but for now I want to read poems at the white house. I want to read poems and sing karaoke and I will probably tell a few nervous jokes. It will be like all the other readings. We will be there together. I want to read poems at the white house and then like any house reading we will all clean up together. We will clean up the mess we have made together. All that rubble and all those ashes. These are my conditions.

He put the spirit essence the light pip not only in each eye’s albumen concentrate of starlight but must have been taught how to do that by first finding it in the pearl he posed then corrected in dusty studio light that pounced on the window behind which sits the cheeky girl pear- and apple-blossom cheeks a fake description naturally of their plain fleshiness drably golden and her lips from Haight Street’s darlings nose studs jacket studs girls with that kind of eye one by the atm machine casual juicy and so fair a Netherlandish type panhandling strangers pomegranate seed ball bearings agleam in her nose pearls not sea-harvested but imagined seen put there by a certain need and fancy because love says it’s so picture that picture this.

We suffer from the repression of the sublime. —Roberto Assagioli This artist’s sculptured, open box of mahogany (ivory white inside) is strung with vertical and horizontal layers of mus- ical wires that sing when struck, and bits of bright garnet rock tremble where they intersect. These gems flash in the candle light, and before me all my beloved childhood looms up in the humming levels, each one deeper than the other. I tip this sculpted box and my child laughs and moves there in his own time. You’ll hear me moan: Oh, you will hear me moan with all the old, sure pleasure of what I’d thought I’d lost come back again. Why, we have never left our home! On the leather lace fixed about my neck, blue, yellow, red and black African trading beads begin to glow: their colors all weave and newly flow together like translucent and angelic worms. And beneath these my neck is as alive with gentle, white bees as is a woman’s breast. Beside and in the light river figures come on stage exactly as they are needed. I tell you, I conduct my own act! A boy poses so youthfully, so beautifully, his slim arms a graceful arrow over his small, brown head, and he dives! Limbs and body push supple as a whole school of fish. And then his vacant place is taken by another— a man dressed in denim and in boots of red rubber. He is wrenched from the shore and pulled through the fresh, bright stream by a kid who tugs on one of his hands and holds a fishing rod. And, too, this man is dragged in the opposite direction by a red dog on a leash shaking his wet great coat into the stippled light. That man just sashayed: he zigzagged this way and that. The man is me! A bluejay does a dance for us! He hops beside a tree that rises inside of me. He half-glides, his iridescent, blue back striking like a brush of Gauguin on the bare canvas of the air and then: he flies! leaving behind him a small, perfect feather, which I find shades from blue to brown— my brother’s color into mine. Now in the space the diver and the booted fellow left, my brother and I are there fishing together, our poles glinting in the water. My mouth moves. My eyes are alive! I cry to my brother with joy. For that bluejay was a messenger of what I want! Gregory my friend and guide on this voyage seems benign. He brushes my chest and my stretched, naked arms open to the sun with a branch of the fragrant pine. “Be healed,” he chants with each glancing stroke. “Be healed.” The needles prick my skin back into life, and I go down to bathe my feet in the stream. The veins form a light, mottled web along my white ankle. I feel my kinship with the pine, the jay, the luminescent stream and with him—or is it with her, the Mother? Gregory, my oracle, my teacher. He leans there in the door of our tent by the river, his face glowing, hair long and shining as a woman’s, his belly fat with life—pregnant with the two of us: my brother and I, unborn twins who lie entangled in each other’s developing limbs. Soon we will be born! He and I will taste of milk for the very first time! And taste of strawberry pop and of bright bananas. And we will eat, my brother and I, a great, shining, autumn-red apple fallen from our father’s tree as if from the long sky, and you too will taste this apple with us, for we all have the same mother, and her name is Grace.

The child I left your class to have Later had a habit of sleeping With her arms around a globe She’d unscrewed, dropped, and dented. I always felt she could possess it, The pink countries and the mauve And the ocean which got to keep its blue. Coming from the Southern Hemisphere to teach, Which you had never had to do, you took A bare-walled room, alone, its northern Windowscapes as gray as walls. To decorate, you’d only brought a black madonna. I thought you must have skipped summer that year, Southern winter, southern spring, then north For winter over again. Still, it pleased you To take credit for introducing us, And later to bring our daughter a small flipbook Of partners dancing, and a ring With a secret whistle. —All are Broken now like her globe, but she remembers Them as I recall the black madonna Facing you across the room so that In a way you had the dark fertile life You were always giving gifts to. Your smaller admirer off to school, I take the globe and roll it away: where On it now is someone like you?

If my own voice falters, tell them hubris was my way of adoring you. The hollow of the hulk of you, so feverish in life, cut open, Reveals ten thousand rags of music in your thoracic cavity. The hands are received bagged and examination reveals no injury. Winter then, the body is cold to the touch, unplunderable, Kept in its drawer of old-world harrowing. Teeth in fair repair. Will you be buried where; nowhere. Your mouth a globe of gauze and glossolalia. And opening, most delft of blue, Your heart was a mess— A mob of hoofprints where the skittish colts first learned to stand, Catching on to their agility, a shock of freedom, wild-maned. The eyes have hazel irides and the conjunctivae are pale, With hemorrhaging. One lung, smaller, congested with rose smoke. The other, filled with a swarm of massive sentimentia. I adore you more. I know The wingspan of your voice, whole gorgeous flock of harriers, Cannot be taken down. You would like it now, this snow, this hour. Your visitation here tonight not altogether unexpected. The night-laborers, immigrants all, assemble here, aching for to speaking, Longing for to work.

One of Halberg’s more whimsical decisions: just when the action is coming to a head, attempt to pull off something formally innovative. “Underwritten? Lithe!” could have been a note to his detractors in this metaphorical on-screen corrections list. Each one of its 23 scenes was followed by a “what really happened” reveal, until the audience ran out even of false hope. “It was a bold decision, and by bold I mean stupid,” says Ingram. “I tried to reason with him: if you go to pull the rug out from under somebody’s feet 23 times they’re just go- and step off the he had that kind trick in mind the table cloth cutlery, crockery, undisturbed. over and over until the very smashes hell.” The whole an unrealized them share a captors and K, and Cain are together as the ing to get bored rug. But I think of conjuring where you pull out and leave the and glassware Only you do it again 22 times last tablecloth everything to episode was sneeze. We see joke with their Adah, Father allowed to stay sun rises. But Erratum: For blubber, read brother. Compassion; shoeshine. Authoritative; whiten. Hard; daft. Veldt; thought. Inertia; in- herit. Mothered; afterthought. Work; ho ho ho. Schoolteacher; orthodontist. Enlightened; muddy. Horny; hyphen- ated. Underwritten; lithe. Theft; fuddle. Honorable; anaesthetist. Handbag; ow. Thud; ahhhhh. Huh?; entertainment. Sainthood; elf. Revolution; neology. Dad; backbencher. Bosom; overstay. Watchmen; wretches. Hydrate; shoot. no, we jump-cut to their separation and Father K weeps hoarsely as their hands are tied behind their backs. After an inappropriate remark about Adah, Cain kicks an AK-47 from the weaker-looking patrolman’s skinny arms and scatters the rest in a hail of bullets. But no, we jump-cut to Cain being repeatedly pistol- whipped by the same patrolman. It seems unnecessary to list the others. This is now a world where honor is an anaesthetic and the saint is as fictional as the elf. They beg for water. Cain takes a bullet to the knee.