1269 Arts and sciences poems

for Tomás Mendoza-Harrell & Lauro Flores I cut / / / / / I multiply everyday images. I apply an aluminum point. To the landscape. To the sentence. To the photo. To the figure. To the word. And suddenly, with a slight tremor of eyes, vertebrae and fingers, I destroy everything that exists. Through the years, I’ve rebuilt the cells, uncovered the signs of the cold, immaculate, academic vestibules and of the dead lips and histories in the metropolitan streets. My surgery is criminal. No one has been able to identify the skeletons, the remains, the thousand scattered nerves of personages I’ve gathered in order to bring this figure back to life. The scars are numberless and invisible. Who would suspect a grafik artist? Who would suspect this gray table as a chamber of murders? Instruments: —The pencil sleeping with its yellow blanket and rubber crown. —A magazine of memories, smiling women, men’s suits and watches like drops, like science. —Tubes of smothered ink sounding like small seas pounding a universe of plastic. —A photo of a Chamula woman looking through these windows toward the Mission. —Watercolors: French Ultramarine, Emerald Green and Windsor Violet. —Matches thin friends identical soldiers with their red helmets thinking. —Dictionaries in Portuguese, Spanish and German, white pages beasts nobody hears moaning. —The priest lantern praying with its head pointing toward the floor in front of a fierce wall. —Solemn archives organized by syllables, breaths, laughs and love with X. —A book about an artist:The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, printed in New York where they listen to the wind falling from the tallest building. And the X-acto knives. Triangular. The beautiful blades / / / / / Every night cars cruise the streets of 24th and Mission. A woman from San José drives a blue Chevy with smoked windows. Estela. She has reddish hair. Tight brows and dark eyes desiring everything but this street that ends in eight blocks: Potrero Avenue. She’ll have to turn. But she won’t. She won’t go back to the home of twenty years and her father who pretends to play Santa by Agustín Lara on his old guitar and the mother organizing a Jehovah’s Witnesses’ meeting. Estela will leave the car parked between Harrison Street and Alabama in San Francisco. She’ll walk aimlessly in the warmth of the produce stores, into St. Peter’s church, by the Galería de la Raza, China Books, the bakery at La Victoria. She’ll walk in the night with her eyes burning, seeing him laughing, the young man in his black box apartment, laughing, laughing, laughing like a little man. The little man laughs. It’s an apartment of marriage and fists. The wife-beater laughs in his easy chair. Next to his bed he sees the anxious note. He focuses on the signature with the E broken in three places. He looks at the stained and unmade sheets, the dull curtains, the crushed cigarettes and the ashes. The black-and-white television announces a sale of living room furniture. With his can of beer he observes. Smokes. Thinks. Within a week or two they’ll take his cousin to San Quentin prison, again. The last time he saw him he was a gardener at a college. He imagines Estela coming home. He imagines and drinks calmly. Makes the bed. Turns off the television and turns on the fm. He amuses himself in that space or cube floating above the city. Estela walks north on the Avenue. P / O / T / R / E / R / O Grafiks require precise knives. On that day When you came to bathe me I sweated that stink That only the anesthetized Can sweat. You sponged my skin Cleaned my hair and Seeming to ignore My stunned and shriveled genitals You nonetheless bathed them . . . — michael ramsey-pérez Randi finds himself in a hospital in Los Angeles or maybe further south, in San Diego. I think his parents are from Arizona. He’s very ill. He’s in a room with a red sign hanging from the doorknob. I / S / O / L / A / T / I / O / N His liver is bloated, skin yellowed, hair long and greasy. Weakness consumes him night after night. He can’t speak, tires easily. But he can hear. He hears the white heels of the doctors and nurses running to the rooms of the dying. He hears footsteps fluttering like doves over the floor or like the leaves of fever falling from the roof of hell. It’s eleven o’clock at night. He hears the abandoned man in room 200 fall out of bed attempting to drink a glass of water. He hears the IV tubes bursting, the sweet plasma spinning between the walls, the bag slipping to the floor and splattering through the night’s open screens. The man screams. Vomits blood and ulcers. Gets tangled up in sheets and transparent plastic veins. After half an hour doves fly in. The leaves fall. Fast. After a few days a black man enters room 199. An orderly. He cleans his body with a warm sponge. His hands run slowly down the yellowed back, the belly and fragile shoulders of Randi. Dark birds fly over a forgotten landscape. Randi looks at his mother rubbing his chest with alcohol to quiet the cough before he sleeps. He turns his face. Imagines his one-room house, a trailer his father made out of an old car. They’re on a little ranch at the outskirts of an unknown town. The mountains reflect the afternoon’s coppery heat. From afar you can see birds crossing above the saguaros and the sky. The last time I saw Randi was at San Francisco City College. He had just turned in all his papers so he could drop out at midterm. He didn’t want to go on with it. It was a farce. Like when he was invited to read poetry near the Galería de La Raza in the Mission District. He never showed up. Took 18th instead of 24th Street. Some Latinos beat him up. They noticed a homosexual air about him. Lies do not exist, only the grafik. This figure has no scars / / / / / When I had you they didn’t give me anything. I grabbed onto the washbasin until I thought I’d die they did that then. They strapped . . . — alma luz villanueva Eva (circa 1946), the doctor says they have to operate. Your pelvis is too narrow. The child can’t be born. It will come out in pieces. Eva. They’ll have to operate. He says he’ll give you morphine for the stitches afterwards. Even if you scream, Eva, it’ll be alright. Even if the nurses ignore you, laugh at you as they see your bluish mouth open, your sleepwalker’s eyes, your hands scratching against the metal bed or the air or memories. For one long second they’ll study your womb in bandages stains clouds raindrops suns and rouge shadows and rage over the coffin hidden by 10 centimeters of vertical stitching. Eva. You’ll hemorrhage 29 days later while washing clothes over a tin basin. Eva. The doctor is smiling. Have faith in him. He says everything is fine. I’ve signed the papers. Everything is arranged, girl. —The pencil wakes —The sheet tightens, the rubber vibrates —The magazine fades —The watch is speechless Someone has erased all the E’s from all the pages; small empty rectangles remain. The ink runs searching for asylum. —Emerald green is the color of jagged grass diluted in great bottles of tears, spit and alcohol. It’s rain for a hell of cells. They burn and burn and burn. S / I / E / B / R / E / N / N / E / N Diego, you touch up a colossal worker with too-sad eyes, wearing a faded blue cotton shirt. His eyes are swollen. The worker wants to see, but his eyes don’t count anymore, just his hands. They fly. They untangle above new machines toward the future. Touching the atmosphere. The fingers touch the 17th of February, 1981. The National Guard enters the province of Las Cabañas in El Salvador. They trap the area, cutting off all the roads out for the campesinos. Bombs fall. The mountains explode rocks, roots and water. An iron shell splinter rips into the throats of grandfathers and little girls. The initials U S A sweat. They sweat through the paint of the Guardia helicopters swooping down over the huts and fields of corn. Seven thousand begin to run toward the Río Lempa. 15km and then the wide river. 15km and then maybe refuge in the jungles of Honduras. Only 15kms 9kms 7kms 6kms    a pregnant young woman disappears 5kms    the Guardia captured her along with the others 4kms    they rip off her clothes 4kms    soldiers in masculine green stained uniforms circle her 4kms    they tie her arms and legs 3kms    the bayonet penetrates 2kms    it etches an x of red tears over the furious womb 6kms    the proud soldier throws down his weapon 12kms   sinks his right hand 9kms    rips out the fetus with the fingernails of his hot fingers 13kms   lifts it up like a torch 1km      opening his mouth the soldier screams 15kms   One less communist in El Salvador! They reach the river. They jump in the water. Suddenly, from the Honduran side other helicopters and machine guns appear. The wind surrenders. The afternoon weakens. The giant worker’s machinery shrieks on the tiny corner of the page: Plate number 113. It’s your self-portrait that you painted on the wall of the San Francisco Art Institute. Few blades have been needed / / / / / This time. I used a few blades to fill the canvas with its dramatis personae, landscapes and scenes that have been held back and kept secret; a figure dealt out in different boxes toward different destinies. No one has been able to figure out what happened on this table. But it’s time to turn off the black lamp. If the ask me, I’ll do the only thing I can. 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Shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe Let us begin and carry up this corpse, Singing together. Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes Each in its tether Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain, Cared-for till cock-crow: Look out if yonder be not day again Rimming the rock-row! That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought, Rarer, intenser, Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought, Chafes in the censer. Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; Seek we sepulture On a tall mountain, citied to the top, Crowded with culture! All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels; Clouds overcome it; No! yonder sparkle is the citadel's Circling its summit. Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights: Wait ye the warning? Our low life was the level's and the night's; He's for the morning. Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head, 'Ware the beholders! This is our master, famous, calm and dead, Borne on our shoulders. Sleep, crop and herd! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft, Safe from the weather! He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft, Singing together, He was a man born with thy face and throat, Lyric Apollo! Long he lived nameless: how should spring take note Winter would follow? Till lo, the little touch, and youth was gone! Cramped and diminished, Moaned he, "New measures, other feet anon! My dance is finished"? No, that's the world's way: (keep the mountain-side, Make for the city!) He knew the signal, and stepped on with pride Over men's pity; Left play for work, and grappled with the world Bent on escaping: "What's in the scroll," quoth he, "thou keepest furled Show me their shaping, Theirs who most studied man, the bard and sage, Give!" So, he gowned him, Straight got by heart that book to its last page: Learned, we found him. Yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead, Accents uncertain: "Time to taste life," another would have said, "Up with the curtain!" This man said rather, "Actual life comes next? Patience a moment! Grant I have mastered learning's crabbed text, Still there's the comment. Let me know all! Prate not of most or least, Painful or easy! Even to the crumbs I'd fain eat up the feast, Ay, nor feel queasy." Oh, such a life as he resolved to live, When he had learned it, When he had gathered all books had to give! Sooner, he spurned it. Image the whole, then execute the parts Fancy the fabric Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz, Ere mortar dab brick! (Here's the town-gate reached: there's the market-place Gaping before us.) Yea, this in him was the peculiar grace (Hearten our chorus!) That before living he'd learn how to live No end to learning: Earn the means first   God surely will contrive Use for our earning. Others mistrust and say, "But time escapes: Live now or never!" He said, "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes! Man has Forever." Back to his book then: deeper drooped his head: Calculus racked him: Leaden before, his eyes grew dross of lead: Tussis attacked him. "Now, master, take a little rest!" not he! (Caution redoubled Step two abreast, the way winds narrowly!) Not a whit troubled, Back to his studies, fresher than at first, Fierce as a dragon He (soul-hydroptic with a sacred thirst) Sucked at the flagon. Oh, if we draw a circle premature, Heedless of far gain, Greedy for quick returns of profit, sure Bad is our bargain! Was it not great? did not he throw on God, (He loves the burthen) God's task to make the heavenly period Perfect the earthen? Did not he magnify the mind, show clear Just what it all meant? He would not discount life, as fools do here, Paid by instalment. He ventured neck or nothing heaven's success Found, or earth's failure: "Wilt thou trust death or not?" He answered "Yes: Hence with life's pale lure!" That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it: This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. That low man goes on adding one to one, His hundred's soon hit: This high man, aiming at a million, Misses an unit. That, has the world here   should he need the next, Let the world mind him! This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed Seeking shall find him. So, with the throttling hands of death at strife, Ground he at grammar; Still, thro' the rattle, parts of speech were rife: While he could stammer He settled Hoti's business let it be! Properly based Oun Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, Dead from the waist down. Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place: Hail to your purlieus, All ye highfliers of the feathered race, Swallows and curlews! Here's the top-peak; the multitude below Live, for they can, there: This man decided not to Live but Know Bury this man there? Here   here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, Lightnings are loosened, Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm, Peace let the dew send! Lofty designs must close in like effects: Loftily lying, Leave him   still loftier than the world suspects, Living and dying.

Granite Weaving, 1988, by Jesús Moroles To climb, in this instance, upon a horizon Shadow-shadow. Lip-to-lip rock. Ziggurat. Ah, from the base to the top. Sideways. Upwards. Again, in succession. Sprung and sprung Frozen idiom. Barre. Pietrasanta. Mouth and mouth. Sung. Granite. Stitching The way fabric gathers — pinch, scrunch. Not in dreams alone. Not the knot. Step, step, step, step, step. 35 up. As if into clouds Ur, Aqar Quf, Chogha Zanbil, Tikal. Kin. Plank upon plank upon plank upon Little Blocks:ahem. don’t you forget us. a, of, or, but, if, la, and Close and closer to flattened. Rock, Water, Bone: Noisy Pilgrim.

A film is always like a book and not like a conversation. — Christian Metz As I saw your face nearing my face, snow fell through a keyhole and opened the door. We went inside and watched windows wax green and gold. Spring, we decided, was more oppressive than winter with its alyssum and clover and the sheer weight of life crowding us off the page. We stayed in bed for years and took our cures patiently from each other’s cups. We read Bleak House and stored our money in socks. Nothing opened as we did.

Grayscale breath on a fluid field, with lo-fi rainpatter—petrol blue—, a 60-watt sun uns -crewed from the woebegone sky: rip- rap & coal slurries, dragline & loess, what phosphor -us is a semaphore for, silklike in its acoustic shadows louver away, or stay when I move: figures astray from the mercury dark—shatterproofless, shutterproofless, image noise stressing each contour to strass— as if the margins were swarming with centers, or cinders —"Ecchoes to the Eye" — or Cinderella's slipper blown of poly- vinyl butyral & laminated glass

Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.

Not magnitude, not lavishness, But Form—the Site; Not innovating wilfulness, But reverence for the Archetype.

Dr. L. H. Pammel Hybridization, cross-breeding, evolution: He takes to new theories like a puppy takes to ice cream. We whisper that our Green-Thumb Boy is the black Mendel, that Darwin would have made good use of Carver's eyes. So clear his gift for observation: the best collector I've ever known. I think we have an entirely new species of Pseudocercospora. And always in his threadbare lapel a flower. Even in January. I've never asked how. We had doubts about giving him a class to teach, but he's done a bang-up job with the greenhouse. His students see the light of genius through the dusky window of his skin. Just yesterday, that new boy, what's-his-name, from Arkansas, tried to raise a ruckus when Carver put his dinner tray down. He cleared his throat, stared, rattled his own tray, scraped his chair legs in a rush to move away. Carver ate on in silence. Then the boys at the table the new boy had moved to cleared their throats, rattled their trays and scraped their chair legs as they got up and moved to Carver's table. Something about the man does that, raises the best in you. I've never asked what. I guess I'll put his name next to mine on that article I'm sending out.

my swing is more mellow these days: not the hardbop drive i used to roll but more of a cool foxtrot. my eyes still close when the rhythm locks; i’ve learned to boogie with my feet on the floor i’m still movin’, still groovin’ still fallin’ in love i bop to the bass line now. the trap set paradiddles ratamacues & flams that used to spin me in place still set me off, but i bop to the bass line now i enter the tune from the bottom up & let trumpet & sax wheel above me so don’t look for me in the treble don’t look for me in the fly staccato splatter of the hot young horn no, you’ll find me in the nuance hanging out in inflection & slur i’m the one executing the half-bent dip in the slow slowdrag with the smug little smile & the really cool shades

I have a sister who takes care of animals, whose artistry is flesh and blood mixed in with a dream or more she tries to give her son. He cuts school and drinks with his friends in the scrub woods behind the school. He thinks he wants to be an architect; he thinks the poems he writes are portions of his unmixed spirit. His habits of mind aren’t settled, ossifying so slowly for many of us, we can’t know, and no one can tell him anything about cigarettes, bad drugs, his fragile mortal spiral. He can’t cry anymore—it’s the wrong style of feeling—, and he only half knows that like his mother he will have to descend before he can break into nakedness, as if from the warmed surface of loam, from slug-soft matter that breathes or suppurates. My nephew Samuel has the same name as the son of the famous surgeon Dr. Gross, painted by the American realist Thomas Eakins. Samuel chugs gin, takes his tokes, and helps his mother with preps— a Betadine swabbing, “like a ritual,” out from the site of the incision. He confuses his mother. In this poem I want to try to stand at their shoulders in the clinic. I think I could come near to swooning from the obscene odor in the air, but I can try to imagine something beyond the surgery, the fur and the glistening blood, and I wouldn’t leave them. — The flight of gray gulls over the bay accompanied my early wrestling with flesh, “Blue Suede Shoes” playing on the radio in my parents’ house. The fluency, then, of hands and lips threw seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant fluency when I was thirty. Then I believed in the beauty of Helen and sometimes, as the fullest truth, in the colored clouds above apple trees full of blossoms and the reddened fruit afterwards. In the end, of course, the fruit turns to mash, and wasps burrow drunkenly in the meat no longer crisp. — There is a terrible beauty in the speeches of Nestor after Agamemnon has called out the spirit of his army by inviting them to go home. Imagine the sober tones of the generals and the old king, his face a lifelong gallery of portraits, grizzled hair an aura, as he faces them with his counsel. From his lips a kind of honey mixing with the bitterness of those two quarreling. He asks them for their mettle, earth born, and leans, foreshortened, his robe exposing a scarred and whitened chest. A vignette of what we cannot learn, or outlast. — One who loves earth and the sun and animals stands over the necrotic thigh of a wolfhound with scapel and rongeur, a patina of antiseptic reddening the bare skin around the wound. The odors are a mixture of rotted flowers and fruit and the beautiful blood oozing from an incision above a honeycomb of maggots, swollen, moving. If you can bear to stand close and look closely at the dissection, you will feel your own stomach turn and your nerves grow a little cleaner, and you may feel puzzled how a person would want to know that much anatomy. Wasn’t it like this for Michelangelo? This lesson of body? And the artist’s revulsion, someone trying to look beyond heroic contours of ruined flesh— softness of hip and buttocks—into the serum of spirit? To live while another no longer can live. This flesh and that muscle, and tinted spring forests, and mausoleums.