Ink-black, but moving independently across the black and white parquet of print, the ant cancels the author out. The page, translated to itself, bears hair-like legs disturbing the fine hairs of its fiber. These are the feet of summer, pillaging meaning, destroying Alexandria. Sunlight is silence laying waste all languages, until, thinly,
We visit by phone as the morphine haze retreats, late afternoon, most days. Our mingled past is set against the pin- hole lights of cars cruising the blacked-out streets:
we four in the college smoker popping No-Doz, honors students carrying heavy course loads tipped sideways by sex, one by one discarding our virginities on the altar of inverse pride,
ironing our blouses with Peter Pan collars to wear on dates with those 90-day Wonders, ensigns in training for the Second World War in the Business School across the Charles River.
I had eight birds hatcht in one nest, Four Cocks were there, and Hens the rest. I nurst them up with pain and care, No cost nor labour did I spare Till at the last they felt their wing, Mounted the Trees and learned to sing. Chief of the Brood then took his flight To Regions far and left me quite. My mournful chirps I after send Till he return, or I do end. Leave not thy nest, thy Dame and Sire, Fly back and sing amidst this Quire. My second bird did take her flight And with her mate flew out of sight. Southward they both their course did bend,
I’d dislocated my life, so I went to the zoo. It was December but it wasn’t December. Pansies just planted were blooming in well-groomed beds. Lovers embraced under the sky’s Sunday blue. Children rode around and around on pastel trains. I read the labels stuck on every cage the way people at museums do, art being less interesting than information. Each fenced-in plot had a map,
From the dull confines of the drooping west To see the day spring from the pregnant east, Ravish'd in spirit, I come, nay more, I fly To thee, blest place of my nativity! Thus, thus with hallow'd foot I touch the ground, With thousand blessings by thy fortune crown'd. O fruitful genius! that bestowest here An everlasting plenty, year by year.
That day I hired a private detective to follow me, and could not read his notes. In a tangled grove, I hid behind white pines, compressed my body, then watched him write, left-handed and myopic, under an Irish cap, when I asked for help from strangers who spoke Slavic languages. Wary, moving ahead, I found a depot, watched an immense train churn, haloed in steam,
Rhyme, the rack of finest wits, That expresseth but by fits True conceit, Spoiling senses of their treasure, Cozening judgment with a measure, But false weight; Wresting words from their true calling, Propping verse for fear of falling
I When Bishop Berkeley said "there was no matter," And proved it—'twas no matter what he said: They say his system 'tis in vain to batter, Too subtle for the airiest human head; And yet who can believe it! I would shatter Gladly all matters down to stone or lead, Or adamant, to find the World a spirit, And wear my head, denying that I wear it.
II What a sublime discovery 'twas to make the Universe universal egotism, That all's ideal—all ourselves: I'll stake the World (be it what you will) that that's no schism.
There we go in cars, did you guess we wore sandals? Carrying the till, memorizing its numbers, apt at the essential such as rearranging languages. They occur from route to route like savages who wear shells.
“I cannot place him.” Yet I do. He must ascend indefinitely as airs he must regard his image as plastic,
On the beach at night alone, As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song, As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.
A vast similitude interlocks all, All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, All distances of place however wide, All distances of time, all inanimate forms, All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds, All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes, All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe, All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future, This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d, And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
The angel — three years we waited for him, attention riveted, closely scanning the pines the shore the stars. One with the blade of the plough or the ship’s keel we were searching to find once more the first seed so that the age-old drama could begin again.
he lives in a house with a swimming pool and says the job is killing him. he is 27. I am 44. I can’t seem to get rid of him. his novels keep coming back. “what do you expect me to do?” he screams “go to New York and pump the hands of the
Good morning, electorate. We are on good speaking terms but do not speak, which means we must be self-reliant, there are many matters at hand. We’re not close enough to know each other’s good news, bad news, private matters.
let elizur rejoice with the partridge Let Elizur rejoice with the Partridge, who is a prisoner of state and is proud of his keepers. For I am not without authority in my jeopardy, which I derive inevitably from the glory of the name of the Lord.
I know I’ll lose her. One of us will decide. Linda will say she can’t do this anymore or I’ll say I can’t. Confused only about how long to stay, we’ll meet and close it up. She won’t let me hold her. I won’t care that my eyes still work, that I can lift myself past staring. Nothing from her will reach me after that. I’ll drive back to them, their low white T-shaped house
the absence was there before the meeting the radical of presence and absence does not return with death’s chance- encounter, as in the old duality, life or death, wherein the transcendence of the one translates the other into an everness we do not meet in heaven, that outward of hell and death’s beauty it is a bright and terrible disk where Jack is, where Charles is, where James is, where Berg is is here in the continuous
The abracadabra boys—have they been in the stacks and cloisters? Have they picked up languages for throwing into chow mein poems? Have they been to a sea of jargons and brought back jargons? Their salutations go: Who cometh? and, It ith I cometh. They know postures from impostures, pistils from pustules, to hear them tell it. They foregather and make pitty pat with each other in Latin and in their private pig Latin, very ofay. They give with passwords. “Who cometh?” “A kumquat cometh.” “And how cometh the kumquat?” “On an abbadabba, ancient and honorable sire, ever and ever on an abbadabba.” Do they have fun? Sure—their fun is being what they are, like our fun is being what we are—only they are more sorry for us being what we are than we are for them being what they are. Pointing at you, at us, at the rabble, they sigh and say, these abracadabra boys, “They lack jargons. They fail to distinguish between pustules and pistils. They knoweth not how the kumquat cometh.”
At hawthorn-time in Wiltshire travelling In search of something chance would never bring, An old man’s face, by life and weather cut And coloured,—rough, brown, sweet as any nut,— A land face, sea-blue-eyed,—hung in my mind When I had left him many a mile behind. All he said was: “Nobody can’t stop ’ee. It’s A footpath, right enough. You see those bits Of mounds—that’s where they opened up the barrows Sixty years since, while I was scaring sparrows. They thought as there was something to find there, But couldn’t find it, by digging, anywhere.”
To turn back then and seek him, where was the use? There were three Manningfords,—Abbots, Bohun, and Bruce:
October–November 1975 Autobus on Paseo de la Reforma with destination signs: bellas artes insurgentes. Exactamente. Just what’s needed: Insurgent Arts. Poesía Insurgente. This is not it ...
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