The newspapers blowing over the street
made her cry, all the birds in New York were crying
because they couldn’t speak Greek,
she took nothing with her and went out onto the street.
The day was obscure, one more
lick of the quiet licking at the door,
her soft black magic, swallowing him, the children,
the world: leaving, everyone leaving,
all turning angels or nothing,
nothing or swimming like paradise children.
The leopard is mine, the snow leopard with the face
like a dinner plate, and I am the boy in blue knickers
staring as fiercely as any warrior in any sheepskin
ever stared, but I have no arrows and my leopard will scare
no one. Now, there are only the tulips and the swans unfolding
their soft wings, and the green stream along whose banks
harps are strung in the acacias, over whose waters
the sun passes like a silver hand carrying a cup of wine.
I had not thought enough of death, of entering the black canal,
of rising from the water with my black feathers wet.
and my ears open "like the mouths of babes for milk" to drums
and cymbals, gongs and horns, and that song the stars
sing just before dawn, where there is a night for them
to leave behind and the loss of it growing. Now our hearts
are lions' hearts, golden in our breasts, and if we spit
it is Solomon and the silver of all his temples. Not Solomon
Grundy. Nothing is Grundy here. And though my sandals
do not quite fit, and though the little gray lambs will never
leave me alone, there is only Good morning in all this,
and How do you do? And how do you do again? My mind
is like the harp strings, with a breeze blowing always
and no rest in sight. It is a mind that belongs
to the four winds, and a body that is only the thought of a thought,
a reminder of something the mind tries to gather into a pile
like wheat, but the pile blows away, and I watch gold fragments
turning on the wind. Here the lilies lie down at your feet.
Here everyone wins the prize so you don't know where to look,
whose elbow to softly touch. And there is always
in this liquid air the song my mother sang to me, but now
it is for everyone and my heart, which is a lion's heart,
no longer rolls over and weeps at the sound. What I
wished for is not as I understood it to be, I have still
not seen an angel, unless that red cloud passing beyond the trees
when my leopard went for a walk was one. And though
there are no gates here, no locks or keys, there is also no way
to leave--no way in this lion's heart to desire to do so.
Windfall
There is a wretched pond in the woods. It lies on the north end of a
piece of land owned by a man who was taken to an institution years
ago. He was a strange man. I only spoke to him once. You can still
find statues of women and stone gods he set up in dark corners of the
woods, and sometimes you can find flowers that have survived the
collapse of the hidden gardens he planted. Once I found a flower
that looked like a human brain growing near a fence, and it took my
breath away. And once I found, among some weeds, a lily white as
snow....No one tends the land now. The fences have fallen and the
deer grown thick, and the pond lies black, the water slowly
thickening, the banks tangled with weeds and grasses. But the pond
was very old even when I first came upon it. Through the trees I
saw the dark water steaming, and smelled something sweet rotting,
and then as I got closer, I saw in the dark water shapes, and the
shapes were golden, and I thought, without really thinking, that I
was looking at the reflections of leaves or of fallen fruit, though
there were no fruit trees near the pond and it was not the season for
fruit. And then I saw that the shapes were moving, and I thought
they moved because I was moving, but when I stood still, still they
moved. And still I had trouble seeing. Though the shapes took on
weight and muscle and definite form, it took my mind a long time
to accept what I saw. The pond was full of ornamental carp, and they
were large, larger than the carp I have seen in museum pools, large
as trumpets, and so gold they were almost yellow. In circles, wide
and small, the plated fish moved, and there were so many of them
they could not be counted, though for a long time I tried to count
them. And I thought of the man who owned the land standing where
I stood. I thought of how years ago in a fit of madness or high faith
he must have planted the fish in the pond, and then forgotten them,
or been taken from them, but still the fish had grown and still they
thrived, until they were many, and their bodies were fast and bright
as brass knuckles or cockscombs. I tore pieces of my bread and
threw them at the carp, and the carp leaped, as I have not seen carp
do before, and they fought each other for the bread, and they were
not like fish but like gulls or wolves, biting and leaping. Again and
again, I threw the bread. Again and again, the fish leaped and
wrestled. And below them, below the leaping fish, near the bottom
of the pond, something slowly circled, a giant form that never rose
to the bait and never came fully into view, but moved patiently in
and out of the murky shadows, out and in. I watched that form, and
after the bread was gone and after the golden fish had again grown
quiet, my mind at last constructed a shape for it, and I saw for the
space of one moment or two with perfect clarity, as if I held the
heavy creature in my hands, the tarnished body of an ancient carp.
A thing both fragrant and foul. A lily and a man’s brain bound
together in one body. And then the fish was gone. He turned and
the shadows closed around him. The water grew blacker, and the
steam rose from it, and the golden carp held still, still uncountable.
And softly they burned, themselves like flowers, or like fruit blown
down in an abandoned garden.
-from The Orchard
Image Nation 19 (Wand
so, to have forgotten, from the inimitable there we have headed for frying pans, the infinite who belongs to this race 2. Where is the object? It too must 3. Where is the source of light? most beautiful stars, balls, |
An excerpt:
My program is simple: to surrender to the city and survive its inundation. To read it and in reading, order it to read itself. Not a doctrine, but a public notice.
The city, which even before Baudelaire had been a ready-made collage or cutup of history, constantly remaking itself-a work of art, founded on an anthill. And every art grows out of the same collective desire which informs and compels the idea and reality of a city (Latin colligere, to tie together.) A district, or a ghetto, is a segmentation, an alternative version which both resists and embodies in a different fashion, that is with an opposing ideology, the original model. Hence, dialect and civil strife are alternating codes of the same phenomenon: the city does not hold together. Language, which also binds together and extends, including as it isolates, is a city also.
In such a metropolitan of history, in which the city is literally the mother, the greatest art is painting, if only by the sheer weight of the temporal. Without a city and its structures there would be no painting. The only thing precedent to painting is caves-the Gilgamesh is not as old as Lascaux.
The Greeks had painted sculpture and from the start all cultures have painted their deities. Today we have painted cities, painted conveyances, painted apartments, painted roads, painted people, even painted food. Is it not time for painted poetry as well?
A poetry painted with every jarring color and juxtaposition, every simultaneous order and disorder, every deliberate working, every movement toward one thing deformed into another. Painted with every erosion and scraping away, every blurring, every showing through, every wiping out and every replacement, with every dismemberment of the figure and assault on creation, every menace and response, every transformation of the color and reforming of the parts, necessary to express the world.
Even the words and way of language itself will suffer the consequent deformity and reformation. The color beneath, which has been covered over, will begin to show through later, when what overcame it is questioned and scraped on, if not away.
Federico Garcia Lorca
used to uncork a
"Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his draft card"
and Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself.
You, Robert McNamara, burned what you said was a concentration
of the Enemy Aggressor.
No news medium troubled to put it in quotes.
And Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself.
He said it with simple materials such as would be found in your kitchen.
In your office you were informed.
Reporters got cracking frantically on the mental disturbance angle.
So far nothing turns up.
Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned, and while burning, screamed.
No tip-off. No release.
Nothing to quote, to manage to put in quotes.
Pity the unaccustomed hesitance of the newspaper editorialists.
Pity the press photographers, not called.
Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned and was burned and said
all that there is to say in that language.
Twice what is said in yours.
It is a strange sect, Mr. McNamara, under advice to try
the whole of a thought in silence, and to oneself.
.jpg "From 17 Drawings by Thoreau, 1978 - John Cage")
From 17 Drawings by Thoreau, 1978
God, say your prayers.
Riot Act, April 29, 1992
I'm going out and get something.
I don't know what.
I don't care.
Whatever's out there, I'm going to get it.
Look in those shop windows at boxes
and boxes of Reeboks and Nikes
to make me fly through the air
like Michael Jordan
like Magic.
While I'm up there, I see Spike Lee.
Looks like he's flying too
straight through the glass
that separates me
from the virtual reality
I watch everyday on TV.
I know the difference between
what it is and what it isn't.
Just because I can't touch it
doesn't mean it isn't real.
All I have to do is smash the screen,
reach in and take what I want.
Break out of prison.
South Central homey's newly risen
from the night of living dead,
but this time he lives,
he gets to give the zombies
a taste of their own medicine.
Open wide and let me in,
or else I'll set your world on fire,
but you pretend that you don't hear.
You haven't heard the word is coming down
like the hammer of the gun
of this black son, locked out of this big house,
while massa looks out the window and sees only smoke.
Massa doesn't see anything else,
not because he can't,
but because he won't.
He'd rather hear me talking about mo' money,
mo' honeys and gold chains
and see me carrying my favorite things
from looted stores
than admit that underneath my Raider's cap,
the aftermath is staring back
unblinking through the camera's lens,
courtesy of CNN,
my arms loaded with boxes of shoes
that I will sell at the swap meet
to make a few cents on the declining dollar.
And if I destroy myself
and my neighborhood
"ain't nobody's business, if I do,"
but the police are knocking hard
at my door
and before I can open it,
they break it down
and drag me in the yard.
They take me in to be processed and charged,
to await trial,
while Americans forget
the day the wealth finally trickled down
to the rest of us.
What is today’s date?
Who is the President?
How great a danger do you pose, on a scale of one to ten?
What does “people who live in glass houses” mean?
Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false?
Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche?
Name five rivers.
What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes?
How about some lovely soft Thorazine music?
If you could have half an hour with your father, what would you say to him?
What should you do if I fall asleep?
Are you still following in his mastodon footsteps?
What is the moral of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”?
What about his Everest shadow?
Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination of indigenous populations?
Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence?
Should an odd number be sacrificed to the gods of the sky, and an even to those of the underworld, or vice versa?
Would you visit a country where nobody talks?
What would you have done differently?
Why are you here?
Entry in an Unknown Hand
Santa Fe Trail I go separately The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands it is th...
