Josephine Miles

All our stones like as much sun as possible. Along their joints run both solar access and decline In equal splendor, like a mica chipping At every beat, being sun responsible. How much sun then do you think is due them? Or should say, how much sun do you think they are apt to have? It has misted at their roots for some days now, The gray glamour addressing itself to them. I should think possible that it go on misting likewise A good way into next year, or time as they have it, A regular cool season every day for our stones. Not a streak that low of any sun or longed surprise.

When the lights come on at five o'clock on street corners That is Evolution by the bureau of power, That is a fine mechanic dealing in futures: For the sky is wide and warm upon that hour.

A poem I keep forgetting to write Is about the stars, How I see them in their order Even without the chair and bear and the sisters, In their astronomic presence of great space, And how beyond and behind my eyes they are moving, Exploding to spirals under extremest pressure. Having not mathematics, my head Bursts with anguish of not understanding. The poem I forget to write is bursting fragments Of a tortured victim, far from me In his galaxy of minds bent upon him, In the oblivion of his headline status Crumpled and exploding as incomparable As a star, yet present in its light. I forget to write.

When we go out into the fields of learning We go by a rough route Marked by colossal statues, Frankenstein's Monsters, AMPAC and the 704, AARDVARK, and deoxyribonucleic acid. They guard the way. Headless they nod, wink eyeless, Thoughtless compute, not heartless, For they figure us, they figure Our next turning. They are reading the book to be written. As we start out At first daylight into the fields, they are saying, Starting out. In every sage leaf is contained a toad Infinitely small. Carbonized grains of wheat unearthed From the seventh millennium B.C. town of Jarmo In the Tigris-Euphrates basin Match the grains of three kinds of wheat still extant, Two wild, one found only in cultivation. The separate grains Were parched and eaten, Or soaked into gruel, yeasted, fermented. Took to the idea of bread, Ceres, while you were gone. Wind whistles in the smokey thatch, Oven browns its lifted loaf, And in the spring the nourished seeds, Hybrid with wild grass, Easily open in a hundred days, And seeded fruits, compact and dry, Store well together. They make the straw for beds, They ask the caring hand to sow, the resting foot To stay, to court the seasons. Basil: hatred: king over pain. What did you do on the last day of day camp? First we did games, running around and playing. Then we did crafts, making things. Then we did nature, what goes on and on. Eventually a number Of boys have got big enough Through all the hazards of drag-racing, theft, and probation, To start for junior college, two transfers away, Mysterious as Loch Ness. While of grandmothers a number Have stooping arrived to seventy or eighty And wave the boys on, shaking With more absentminded merriment than they have mustered In half a century. King Henry the Eighth consumed many daisies In an attempt to rid himself of ulcers. Algebra written across a blackboard hurts As a tight shoe hurts; it can't be walked in. Music, a song score, hurts, How far lies one note from another? Graft hurts, its systems of exploitation In cold continuance. Argosies of design, fashions to which the keys Rest restlessly in an Egyptian tomb. In every sage leaf is contained a toad Infinitely small.

When you swim in the surf off Seal Rocks, and your family Sits in the sand Eating potato salad, and the undertow Comes which takes you out away down To loss of breath loss of play and the power of play Holler, say Help, help, help. Hello, they will say, Come back here for some potato salad. It is then that a seventeen-year-old cub Cruising in a helicopter from Antigua, A jackstraw expert speaking only Swedish And remote from this area as a camel, says Look down there, there is somebody drowning. And it is you. You say, yes, yes, And he throws you a line. This is what is called the brotherhood of man.

for Henry Adams Effort for distraction grew Ferocious, grew Ferocious and paced, that was its exercise. Effort for distraction strained, Legged in the hour-like single stretch Its heels and sight to feel, so slit its eyes. Effort without effort or with Greatest possible effort always centered Back in the concentrated trough where lies The magnet to the filings, The saw tooth to the tongue, The turn of life to a returning life. By all the traction of mind and spin of spirit Having gained grasp gasped to bear it, Having got ground groaned, furious title holder. Paced and cried, so sore for a different direction, grew Ferocious, grew Unkind to strength that gave it strength to grow.

Down from another planet they have settled to mend The Hampton Institute banisters. They wear bow ties and braces. The flutings they polish with a polished hand. Wingless, they build and repair The mansions of what we have thought to be our inheritance. Caution and candor they labor to maintain. They are out of phase. I prepare To burn all gentle structures, greek or thatch, Under the masterful torch of my president here and abroad, Till stubble outsmolders, and muslim and buddhist crack In the orbit of kiln. A smoke To some calm Christian plant will drift, To where they are mending their mansions, beside of whose doors They are standing at ease, they are lifting the fans Of unburdenable wings.

When with the skin you do acknowledge drought, The dry in the voice, the lightness of feet, the fine Flake of the heat at every level line; When with the hand you learn to touch without Surprise the spine for the leaf, the prickled petal, The stone scorched in the shine, and the wood brittle; Then where the pipe drips and the fronds sprout And the foot-square forest of clover blooms in sand, You will lean and watch, but never touch with your hand. September 1934

As George Washington hacked at his cherry tree, Joseph said to him This is the tree that fed Mary When she lingered by the way. As George Washington polished his bright blade, Joseph told him This cherry tree Bent down and nourished the mother and her babe. As George Washington felled the cherry tree, Voices of root and stem Cried out to him In heavenly accents, but he heard not what they had to say. Rather, he was making A clearing in the wilderness, A subtle discrimination Of church and state, By which his little hatchet Harvested a continental Bumper crop for Mary Of natural corn.

How did you come How did I come here Now it is ours, how did it come to be In so many presences? Some I know swept from the sea, wind and sea, Took up the right wave in their fins and seal suits, Rode up over the town to this shore Shining and sleek To be caught by a tide As of music, or color, or shape in the heart of the sea. Was it you? Was it you who came out from the sea-floor as lab into lab Weightless, each breath Bubbling to surface, swaying in currents of kelp plants, Came in your cars Freewayed in valleys millions of miles from the shore To converge where the highways converge saying welcome to here, And to where? To tape and percussion, raga computers, Rare texts and components of clay, With the sea down away past the freeways and out of the town To the blockbusting towers of learning and quiet Shades of administering redwood, Azure dome over all like a bellflower And star above star. Did you come Out of borderlands dear to the south Speaking a language Riveran, Nerudan, and saying Aqui estáun hombre; my first lesson? And come as Quixote, the man of romance In its new century, tilting At windmill giants of concrete, Slim lance at the ready? Woe unto them That join house to house, that lay field to field Till there be no place that they may be alone In the midst of the earth. Did you come With a handful of questions Leaping like jewels To shock answers, to start Sparks of inquiry into the evening air? I came as a kid From the Midwest all recognize As part of home, To this another Which the salt sea answered in its time And Viscaino mapped his ports upon. You came As concertmaster of hte Philharmonic As mayor of Del Mar As reader of magnetic messages in DNA As archivist for the time’s poetry, or PTA, As land-grant scholar Holding his gray moon rocks. What is this that we come to, Its walls and corridors Gaping in space, its north lights Seeking the north, its substance Concrete brushed by the grains of its boards, Its boards reaching extension in all of their lenghts In architectural solidity? It is A break in the galaxies of our imagination. It needs our lives To make it live. A building, a dark hole in space, Compact of matter, Draws into it buzzing disinterests, Idelologies. Incomplete being Enters into the dense room, emerges Another, further, Compact of matter, this is the place that we enter, It paints pictures here and plays drums. It turns us around and we emerge Out of old space into the universe. This building Between buildings as between galaxies, Between fields as between flights of fancy, Will reshape our ears and turn us, Our work of art Beating in the breast like a heart. What are we here for? To err, To fail and attempt as terribly as possible, to try Stunts of such magnitude they will lead To disasters of such magnitude they will lead To learnings of such magnitude they will lend Back in enterprise to substance and grace. What learning allows for is the making of error Without fatality. The wandering off, the aberration, Distortion and deviation By which to find again the steady center And moving center. What art allows for is the provisional Enactments of such learning In their forms Of color and line, of mass and energy, of sound And sense Which bulk disaster large, create evil To look it in the eye. To forge Villainies of the wars, to indispose Villainies of petty establishment To make them lead their lives in sound and sense To no good end, that we may see them so. To make mistakes All of our own mistakes Out of the huddle of possibilities Into a color and form which will upbraid them Beyond their being. Give us to err Grandly as possible in this complete Complex of structure, risk a soul Nobly in north light, in cello tone, In action of drastic abandonment, That we return to what we have abandoned And make it whole. Domesticate the brushed Cement and wood marquee, Fracture the corridors, Soften the lights of observation and renew Structural kindness into its gentler shapes. Out of the sea The kelp tangles, out of the south The cities crowd, out of the sky The galaxies emerge in isolation One from another, and the faces here Look one to antoher in surprise At what has been made. Look at the actual Cliffs and canyons of this place, People and programs, mass and energy Of fact, Look at the possibilities. Irradiating all these possibilities. Praise then The arts of law and science as of life The arts of sound and substance as of faith Which claim us here To take, as a building, as a fiction, takes us, Into another frame of space Where we can ponder, celebrate, and reshape Not only what we are, where we are from, But what in the risk and moment of our day We may become.