102 Today
i.m. James Schuyler
If Wystan Auden were alive today
he’d be a small tangle of black lines
on a rumpled white bedsheet,
his little eyes looking up at you.
What did you bring?
Some yellow daffodils and green stems.
Or did they bring you?
Auden once said,
“Where the hell is Bobby?”
and we looked around,
but there was no Bobby there.
Ah, Auden, no Bobby for you.
Just these daffodils in a clean white vase.
Excerpt from Freedom:
In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else’s children’s sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it. There were also more contemporary questions, like, what about those cloth diapers? Worth the bother? And was it true that you could still get milk delivered in glass bottles? Were the Boy Scouts OK politically? Was bulgur really necessary? Where to recycle batteries? How to respond when a poor person of color accused you of destroying her neighborhood? Was it true that the glaze of old Fiestaware contained dangerous amounts of lead? How elaborate did a kitchen water filter actually need to be? Did your 240 sometimes not go into overdrive when you pushed the overdrive button? Was it better to offer panhandlers food, or nothing? Was it possible to raise unprecedentedly confident, happy, brilliant kids while working full-time? Could coffee beans be ground the night before you used them, or did this have to be done in the morning? Had anybody in the history of St. Paul ever had a positive experience with a roofer? What about a good Volvo mechanic? Did your 240 have that problem with the sticky parking-brake cable? And that enigmatically labeled dashboard switch that made such a satisfying Swedish click but seemed not to be connected to anything: what was that?
Another Poem on Nudes
What more is there to say about the future
of sea-scapes and lilac, the power of machines
and the omnipresence of noise in the plazas
where once we heard nothing, except the falling
of water in a cistern, the round stone basin
calmly present during the transit of Venus
What more is there to say about tambourines
that mimic the bells on a leather saddle, strapped
to a horse you rode across the Chinese tundra
or rode over a dune into the sand sea below
the line between noise and music is inside you
like a moving shadow on the face of a clock
What more is there to say about metrical forms
the duration of syllables, what is the optimal spacing
between wind and fiddle, or scythe and deliver
what hiatus halts the ictus, what vowel tunes
the tympanum when a pianist conjures elegies
to his mistress, the line between nude and naked
always was mysterious, until I saw the bare bones
reclining on a divan next to the coffee maker
like a futurist in love with modern technology
like Goya’s Origin of the World or like Manet’s
Olympia with a black cat nearby, so frankly
sexual that the Venus of Urbino was offended.
The world was designed and built
to overwhelm and astonish.
Which makes it hard to like.
Like, an American is someone
who thinks Jan Vermeer is from Vermont,
and a woman. I am a woman from Vermont.
Little less surprising than the copiousness
of transpiration, which is so inconsequential
I cannot live without it. Later I will look
for a nail paring on the floor,
as if a maid were coming tomorrow
(one always has to pick up first).
Right now I am writing
on the back of a bank statement.
My happiness is marred only
by my failure to attain it.
Otherwise it would astonish and overwhelm.
Quick, children, put on your robes,
we must all go downstairs to see something.
On this same night was Balthazar
murdered by his servants:
what the Russian soldier, quoting
Heine, scratched on the wall in the room
where the whole royal family was shot,
shot to fleshy pieces with many aims,
at least twenty of which left
explosive stars in the wallpaper.
Their greed and power astonished all.
Their death overwhelms us.
“the mirror says” (a poem)
The mirror says: a chalk house. The mirror says: leather box;
a courtyard with moss. The air frantic with fire and books
so pages fall to the cistern. The mirror’s back has no silver.
The book needs to begin, needs a rose, I said, a place to sit
and study the tea that falls from the tea plant, the light
falls steadily in the book, the leaves of light and of tea
in the mirror that is a book and a girl that reads looks up
a name in the moss, a green name in a red house, looks up
at hawk, at hawk-writing, and sees a girl in a red window
a green finger to her lips. I know her from the photo-
pictorial in the leather box. But the hawk and his name
the girl and the book; so the leaf and silver cloud, so back
and beguile; so sweater with moth-holes and scripts
from the Caliphate of WAS: they went into the book
that went into the flames. The girl and her ashes and hawk
are on a path to the courtyard; say then that the book
was banned and the tea was tea-ish, the mirror a glass.
What girl could read such a fire, what leaf would light
begin to write upon blue, or on moss, at stroke of noon?
[Letters to Michael: Dear Michael (1)]
I thought to write an elegy
as reply to your questions
to pitch the word as far forward
like a dolphin out of the sea
over a threshold, to behold
the land as practical and green
as this table, a space to write
and walk into like a kitchen
hearing the conjuct vowels
what does a reader suppose
if not the promise of a text
the ultimate form at the end
of a chain of forms infinite
summed to a singular value
the elegy as a place to begin.
Vow of Extinction
From this day forward all plants
except the lemon tree
will be banished from my poems
From this day forward I am wedded to the sky
All clouds shall be banished
and my memory of them vanish
like memory itself
Not even a lime shall sneak in
Animals shall exit my poems
including those that cross the sky
in herds or as stragglers
Without plants, without animals
people cannot survive in my poems
so they too shall be sent,
those with shoes and those without
in a long line leaving
Leaving myself under the lemon tree
wedded to the sky
that is light then dark then light
Candles are forbidden
I will feel the terrible weight of twilight
as it falls over the land like a despondent minx,
words I might formerly have used for a squirrel
From this cretinous proposition
I shall write my poems
and try to reach those
who no longer exist
They are not in this poem or any other
From this day forward
I eat lemons in my park
Their complete similarity to me
can now be distinguished
To speak of my promise,
my offering to the sky,
puts a sprig in my mouth
Would this not then be my entry into society?
Four Anecdotes From the Life of Dang Yo-une
I
You grow old.
You love everybody.
You forgive everyone.
You think: we are all leaves
dragged along by the wind.
Then comes a splendid spotted
yellow one—ah, distinction!
And in that moment
you are dragged under.
Dearest Reader
He painted the mountain over and over again
from his place in the cave, agape
at the light, its absence, the mantled
skull with blue-tinted hollows, wren-
like bird plucking berries from the fire
her hair alight and so on
lemon grass in cafe in clear glass.
Dearest reader there were trees
formed of wire, broad entryways
beneath balconies beneath spires
youthful head come to rest in meadow
beside bend in gravel road, still
body of milky liquid
her hair alight and so on
successive halls, flowered carpets and doors
or the photograph of nothing but pigeons
and grackles by the shadow of a fountain.
SEPARATION
Well my Cadillac now that the hog herding has begun
big ones spray-gunned
is this the permission we long for
not in prose or stone but in action?
electric-prodded out of the pen backed into the bloody aisle
pigs chew pigs' tails
whack the metal feeders charge the gate
so it's beauty in the end we were after or serenity?
slapped on the rump shoved at the truck
who shall not ever again find anchorage
never feared July never feared June
every one with an inconsolable mother. . .
My ballast
I've scratched a key along the side of a white Camaro
in hog heaven the place one finds
community possible desirable
.
my legendary embankment
I will never get over you
Jade River
I can walk to it from this rented house.
I have swum across it.
Anyone can borrow a boat and fish there.
Just today, a pudgy old man fell in.
Broke the surface with his backside, trolling for carp. A bare ass like a bald head
disappeared out of its floating shorts.
His rolling belly below a shrunk shirt,
how cool it must have felt,
after the shock. Nearly naked like Buddha and absent awhile. He surfaced and did not look around,
except for his skiff. Still there,
lucky for him. He spoke to himself while he rubbed his face like a little boy. From this I infer everything about life because of course
life is a simple matter of failure.
Simply part of a flow,
I know now. Until it happens to me. Then I forget, thinking it important. Attracted by a fleeting glance of a fairy in a chandelier the size of France,
no, of China, one is not really sure existed. But for a minute.
Then I am bereft again.
As to the river, I understand
jade is a famous Feng Shui mineral. Confucius wrote that it is like virtue
and its brightness represents heaven.
You see the mass-produced gem shaped
into turtles, dragons and fish too,
when you are in your home country.
Because you are loud and young
in a lithe body with a splashing energy
of a puppy, a stray,
I never thought I could love you.
I sought peace at seventy.
A jade river inside me. Green. Slow.
Long life, I said to friends,
and inside said, Poetry, over.
Money, spent. Parents, buried. Brother,
lost. Childless. And my beloved disappears
inventing day and night in her studio.
As busy as a bee, as the fake poets used to say.
Now they say, busy as a walrus hanging
upside down in the stately tree of death, to be creative and funny, because of the tragic world.
Must you stand on a bare branch, and why
should I care? None of it matters
a hoot, as is said in imitation
of the great owl, rarely seen
but more important than ever.
More important, rarely seen, great owl,
some things I would never say
before, because they sound
imitative, common. Except now
I get perfectly what is “important.”
What is “bare” and “more.”
One never knows which words
get one imprisoned
tortured and murdered
so every one is exemplary
and depends on whomever designates their meaning.
The words skinned alive.
The words sexual freedom.
It’s the same in America and China, the world over. I wake
with a dread of you in a jail
for ten subversions or a hundred
against an emperor or mother.
I blow by every somnambulist
in the dream and fly to you.
Why can’t you simply
fear and admire,
rather than wander as smoke,
smoking, rolling bourbon around
your mouth, sucking men’s nipples
and more in the ether streets
of your country, only recently a child.
As Rimbaud would say, so much the worse for the wood that discovers it’s a violin. One of your many instruments,
no doubt, another gift I don’t know about. If your poems survive the age,
if the earth survives us,
may mercy find you
in the mouth of a river
in the lap of an emperor
made of palladium leaf,
steel pins, walnut ink,
and thousands of green glass marbles.
You were born to mutilate the old rules. The rest is heroic and belongs to you.
excerpt from Four Lectures
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.
from For More Lectures
Farewell to Innsbruck I say. I say leave me loathesome night and I
might lay down awhile beside the babbling brook. Death is the absence
of cloud on glass. Breath is the original dope. Then it all starts to complicate
with the introduction of the breast. It was something. Mother’s milk was addictive.
The things she had. It killed the pain. I felt home. It was the land of the bull.
I wish I hadn’t travelled that canal. I didn’t want to leave there. Now look where I am,
worn, marred, unmarried and still warm. And warned continually of the peril of still
drinking born spirits that make the number days to count their milky calendar.
Develop some indifference to pain. Better self love than neglect. And we should fear
the native might in art’s bosom, while not forgetting dear Falstaff died for Agincourt.
Me, I’m from Overlook Court, Bellaire Ohio. You can still write me there while I
court the A before the B before the C before the D. And A is an arduous angel
in the Shakespearean morn, through which I walk enveloped in this cloak to ruminate
the coming siege and try the spirits of my jannisaries. Camped with nervous dread we become as though jealous of contesseration, then make a little touch/to harry in the night.
Unmatchable mastiffs the color of nutmeg inkly thought as hot as ginger berries.
Happier men than she hold their manhood cheap. Sadder women than he value honest sex.
Vivienne Walker takes a fellow where he lives, Earnest Hare for instance.
Cramps. Generation. A county with a migraine problem, unemployed, editing the sciatica.
Put some water on. Listen to the noise. Who could know what was in the crates
Brahms just chucked in the Rhine? Well, you could always guess like a scholar,
preparing for his autopsy. Publish and Perish, in the magazine Reputations.
Or better exercise. Cut some kindling, make some kin and put the author thing down
to authorship. The authorities are at the door, we’ve got the context turned up too loud.
Our readers are the plaintiffs. Accomodation for a night. A person united will never be divided,
until they meet their autopsy. Self consciousness is always one of parts as well.
The jaw bone is the first to leave the skeleton. Libido leaves the veldt.
A word is the last thing any woman can say to a particular other. Rife gate
to the ruin run by the sun. Slow chapters. Sweet ball. My hat in your pocket.
Blind surrealist love is windowdust/ but do not change too fast the registration of the pelt nor of the pelting.
SR 10/22/90
from For More Lectures
Dilatory hair, sweetest flesh, dilapidated rose, another recherche mystagogue intent on silks and socks. Money talks, love walks, children long to go out
and play. It is necessary to remain able, to distinguish the difference between prolific and verbose. Verbs serve humans. Step into her bed and demand an index of last lines, or you won’t sign. Sweet tulips odorless, wild civility,
snow white hairs on me. As a child Picabia replaced the old masters in his house
with copies of his own, and sold the “originals” to finance his stamp collection.
Unadorned by a hardon, spindrift is all. Nice nieces, Writhing writing. Sick glory.
Rabid transit. We arrive in several canoes and have nothing but scorn for those
who do not allow things to be as complicated as they are. She looked gorgeous
in the latest synecdoche, but I was Helen’s man. The suicides will be he’s and she’s
who cannot love life doubtfully. Beards and sleeves, cows and poppies, my mind
is one with Caesar V, not to stray a meter from my poem. But I was kind of humping
that you would lie in these sheets. If I had not been born, another could be drinking this cup. On the hem of the lawn the babies are weaving their clearest saliva on looms of ivy and scum.
In the Alameda a woman walks over to a rose bush and picks a thorn. On her stone bench, sitting on an arm, she proceeds to clean her teeth. Dilapidated pose.
The Picts depicted themselves blue. Smart move. I will break your waves if you will watch my night. The night Kid Ory kicked the bucket, they wailed. I need a protege. Adorable whore, can you butle? I want my responsibility. I miss cacoons and gingermen, and when I handle them elsewhere, it is not the same. It’s a different kettle now of screams, drinking powder, slipping pants, mouthing off. But I see similarities I throw myself into an image. Art links letters. The pile-up figures. Conception
is not as wide as the world, nor deep as well, but Twill suffices. You fill it out.
Mens agitation. Used up preludes. Anemic double bills. Cat shit and dog puke.
God knows we love, but who? Before the stand-in is finished with one thing, you’re asking for another. Be your wax. His weltanschauung was beatup, but his syntax
was in intacking. Who is interested in the eventuality that little J A would come
to dominate the century the way big Ten did last. Now that the new B C was (a) P G. The general were fond of eating women. But that which exists through itself calls M E.
for James Schuyler
Pink dandruff of some tree
afloat on the swimming pool.
What’s that bird?
I’m not from around here.
My mail will probably be forwarded
as quietly as this pink fluff
or a question or morphine
or impatience or a mistake
or the infinite method
established by experience
but never in this world.
I’ve always wanted to use
malarkey and henna in a poem
and now I have.
Oh Jimmy, all you ever wanted
was to see the new century
but no such luck.
You never saw a century plant
either, or you would have
taken another drink.
They grow for one hundred years,
bloom in their centenary spring
then die forevermore.
The stalk is ten feet tall
(you’d be jealous) rising
out of a clump of cactus leaves
(think yucca) then busting into
creamy ovoids flaming
on the candelabrum.
I was in an air-conditioned car
when I saw it but still felt
the heat of its beauty,
I wanted to stop and talk to it
but we sped on, so tonight
I’ll xanax myself to sleep
with the sweet thought that
today and every day is a
century plant of its own
seeded awful long beginning
blooming in drive-by yelps
of love and helplessness
and you saw plenty of them,
spectacular and sad as
a head of hennaed hair,
a lot of malarkey
if you ask anybody
other than us.
