1269 Arts and sciences poems

When I love a thing I want it and I try to get it. Abstraction of the particular from the universal is the entrance into evil. Love, a binding force, is both envy and emulation. HE (the Puritan God) is a realm of mystery and will always remain unknowable, authoritarian, unpredictable. Between revealed will and secret will Love has been torn in two. DUALISM: Pythagoras said that all things were divisible into two genera, good and evil; in the genus of good things he classified all perfect things such as light, males, repose, and so forth, whereas in the genus of evil he classified darkness, females, and so forth. (Thomas Aquinas, “On the Power of God,” p. 84) Promethean aspiration: To be a woman and a Pythagorean. What is the communal vision of poetry if you are curved, odd, indefinite, irregular, feminine. I go in disguise. Soul under stress, thread of connection broken, fusion of love and knowledge broken, visionary energy lost, Dickinson means this to be an ugly verse. First I find myself a Slave, next I understand my slavery, finally I re-discover myself at liberty inside the confines of known necessity. Gun goes on thinking of the violence done to meaning. Gun watches herself watching.

xxiv What is far hence led to the den of making: Moves unlike wildfire | not so simple-happy Ploughman hammers ploughshare his durum dentem

Joel Lipman has worked for years with rubber stamps, creating poems on yellowing acidic pages torn out of old books. This technique produces a frisson between the apparently unrelated base text and Lipman's overtext. As evidenced by the meter and movement of the words on the page above, it is clear that Lipman is writing real poetry, but it is poetry enhanced by the distinctive appearance of the words.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>

Whoever kisses time’s ancient nodding head will remember later, like a loving son, how the old man lay down to sleep in the drift of wheat outside the window. He who has opened the eyes of the age, two large sleepy apples with inflamed lids, hears forever after the roar of rivers swollen with the wasted, lying times. The age is a despot with two sleepy apples to see with, and a splendid mouth of earth. When he dies he’ll sink onto the numb arm of his son, who’s already senile. I know the breath growing weaker by the day Not long not till the simple song of the wrongs of earth is cut off, and a tin seal put on the lips. O life of earth! O dying age! I’m afraid no one will understand you but the man with the helpless smile of one who has lost himself. O the pain of peeling back the raw eyelids to look for a lost word, and with lime slaking in the veins, to hunt for night herbs for a tribe of strangers! The age. In the sick son’s blood the deposit of lime is hardening. Moscow’s sleeping like a wooden coffin. There’s no escaping the tyrant century. After all these years the snow still smells of apples. I want to run away from my own doorstep, but where? Out in the street it’s dark, and my conscience glitters ahead of me like salt strewn on the pavement. Somehow I’ve got myself set for a short journey through the back lanes, past thatched eaves, starling houses, an everyday passer-by, in a flimsy coat, forever trying to button the lap-robe. Street after street flashes past, the frozen runners crunch like apples ; can’t get the button through the button-hole, it keeps slipping out of my fingers. The winter night thunders like iron hardware through the Moscow streets. Knocks like a frozen fish, or billows in steam, flashing like a carp in a rosy tea-room. Moscow is Moscow again. I say hello to her. ‘Don’t be stern with me; never mind. I still respect the brotherhood of the deep frost, and the pike’s justice.’ The pharmacy’s raspberry globe shines onto the snow. Somewhere an Underwood typewriter’s rattled. The sleigh-driver’s back, the snow knee-deep, what more do you want? They won't touch you, won’t kill you. Beautiful winter, and the goat sky has crumbled into stars and is burning with milk. And the lap-robe flaps and rings like horse-hair against the frozen runners. And the lanes smoked like kerosene stoves, swallowed snow, raspberry, ice, endlessly peeling, like a Soviet sonatina, recalling nineteen-twenty. The frost is smelling of apples again. Could I ever betray to gossip-mongers the great vow to the Fourth Estate and oaths solemn enough for tears? Who else will you kill? Who else will you worship? What other lie will you dream up? There’s the Underwood’s cartilage. Hurry, rip out a key, you’ll find a little bone of a pike. And in the sick son’s blood the deposit of lime will melt, and there’ll be sudden blessèd laughter. But the simple sonatina of typewriters is only a faint shade of those great sonatas.

Mortal oddment, there’s no wish in the blood But beat, but stay gift-strong, but make demands To keep within veins this ore’s diffuse gold, These voices that know without being known — These voices that riddle thought with herself, Ridicule thought in her flimsy eternal Gowns a child can tear in half   with a breath — That chorus arterial, unbribable, Blowing song through self as a child blows A dandelion apart — All those weeds? — Thistle’s down and thistle’s thorn, dumb yellow Globes below that bind grass to their hollow creed, Wind’s meager flute, sere song, the whole field’s late Doom? Heart-blood? Voices, you? That’s my portrait? — I kept repeating, repeating, kept re — To repair, to repair my, or not my —the Mind’s bower, but whose — who mines urgency — Or whose mind regrets all those violets rooted In violence — or I only mean thought, in thought, Not violence, thinking, and the stupid leaf Unfolding, mine, mine, mind. Here’s the plot All untended: Psyche and, and — some thief Unnamed — no, some unnamed leaf, and the sun, Yes, only the sun that through open eyes Turns the livid leaf green. Not leaf. Meant wound — Or is it wind, is it wind that split in half   by A gnat, by a blade of grass, always heals its gale — What is the wound that is being healed, healed —

I. Ille Ego Oh! list to me: for I’m about To catch the fire of Chaucer, And spin in doleful measure out The tale of Johnny Raw, sir; Who, bent upon a desperate plan To make the people stare, Set off full speed for Hindoostan Upon Old Poulter’s mare. Tramp! tramp! across the land he went; Splash! splash! across the sea; And then he gave his bragging vent— “Pray who can ride like me? “For I’m the man, who sallied forth To rout the classic forces, And swore this mare was far more worth Than both fierce Hector’s horses. “Old Homer from his throne I struck, To Virgil gave a punch, And in the place of both I stuck The doughty Mother Bunch, “To France I galloped on my roan, Whose mettle nought can quail; There squatted on the tomb of Joan, And piped a dismal tale. “A wild and wondrous stave I sung, To make my hearers weep: But when I looked, and held my tongue, I found them fast asleep! “Oh! then, a furious oath I swore, Some dire revenge to seek; And conjured up, to make them roar, Stout Taffy and his leek. “To Heaven and Hell I rode away, In spite of wind and weather: Trumped up a diabolic lay; And cursed them all together. “Now, Proteus! rise, thou changeful seer! To spirit up my mare: In every shape but those appear, Which Taste and Nature wear.”

iridescence as old story, that brought cold from deep a chord moves into an upper chamber among rival unknowns declension toward one end—the merest light-sensitive dot a perfect world the strokes same light value runny, evened illuminations came from the plant the signal blinked search for asylum carried on in an inner distortion

a perfect world living manifests of nipple and tip worked back into the locus one had thought delivered rectangles seep with the slight growing, to walk out onto them a perfect world the identities traced above a ground print as enlarged location, geographies of the whorl the smile that held no life but an erect ransom-shadow

Perfectly round. Perfectly black. No. . . not entirely black. He has that bluish-white at the edge of his eyes And his beautiful lips Open upon a smile of expensive pearls. *       *       * Round and dusky-headed, Round bellied Black baby, fearlessly Offer your unpristine hand to the daylight, Say hello, fearlessly, to your life.

The body, bearing something ordinary as light                           Opens as in a room somewhere the friend opens in poppy, in flame, burns & bears the child — out. When I did it was the hours & hours of breaking. The bucking of it all, the push & head not moving, not an inch until, when he flew from me, it was the night who came flying through me with all its hair, the immense terror of his face & noise. I heard the stranger & my brain, without looking, vowed a love-him vow. His struggling, merely, to be split me down, with the axe, to two. How true, the thinness of our hovering between the realms of Here, Not Here. The fight, first, to open, then to breathe, & then to close. Each of us entering the world & entering the world like this. Soft. Unlikely.      Then — the idiosyncratic minds & verbs. Beloveds, making your ways to & away from us, always, across the centuries, inside the vastness of the galaxy, how improbable it is that this 
iteration of you or you or me might come to be at all — Body of fear, Body of laughing — & even last a second. This fact should make us fall all to our knees with awe, the beauty of it against these odds, the stacks & stacks of near misses & slimmest chances that birthed one ancestor into the next & next. Profound, unspeakable cruelty who counters this, who does not see. & so to tenderness I add my action.