Expect Delays Read online

  The street has many still lifes.

  “But It Was That Cut of Sky . . .”

  The documentary tells how

  trench warfare

  afforded soldiers

  a deeper appreciation

  of sky views—

  such vistas being

  the only ones they had

  to gaze upon

  beside the horror of

  the immediate pit.

  Egoics

  The family dinner. I try to envision, actualize, the mortality enveloping the room, that is the room—the married couples nitpicking over kitchen details, the little kids pursuing their pleasures, me on the sofa, an “observer.” Can’t. Only Connie, her great combination of steady goodwill and basic dolor, is unmistakably real.

  That old condition, though, for everyone, dead and don’t know it.

  Approaching the Object

  Best hope of heaven, the clinging vine.

  Re “If”

  can’t put a finger on

  the story of, the glory of

  transmigration minus 30

  a workaday mass

  what’s aside from

  stricken by

  solitude

  shades of the wondrous warbler

  Deirdre LaPorte

  Footsteps of the Scorpion

  Add oxygen,

  a thousand bugs drop from the sky

  —soixanitude.

  Mirrors Discovered in Scrovegni Chapel

  “Under the halo of Christ are three small mirrors. On the Festival of the Annunciation, celebrated on March 25, a ray of sunlight passed through the side window of the chapel, striking the mirrors to create a stunning optical effect on the halo. A structural elevation of the bell tower has rendered this effect obsolete. According to historians and scholars this device is unique in Italian painting and suggests a possible Oriental influence.”

  July 12, 1996, Hilo

  Bone dancing—returns of departed, Japanese temple.

  Fresh from Devastation Trail—lava, lava, black and iridescent.

  Pahoa, dopey and benign as Bolinas, as Western as Point Reyes, i.e., well-weathered boardwalk on main thoroughfare, hash pipes, bean sprouts, transcendental videos, as many books, tempeh burgers.

  Mr. Mesmer, Giuletta, and Esther

  Prolonged grasp of the whole picture unfolding—age, youth, grace, klutz—there’s lust, as well—upon this crust—the mantle, drumbeats—the glimpse slips away, hence shock of sense dulled, gravity returns. Whither that exalted, lapsed. Several things dovetailed in mind: Straightbacked Japanese (Nisei, Sensei . . .) women circle dance in unison. “Do you feel like a nation?” asks Pat.

  July 13, Kamuela Museum, Weimea

  Albert and Harriet Solomon, props. Albert, great-grandson of Robert Parker, primordial Hawaii cattle rancher. “I was police chief; before that, a boxer.” Ninety-one years old, a fast one-two punch from his chair, pointing to a row of gold teeth.

  We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;

  But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

  —William Wordsworth

  ’Taint necessarily so.

  —Ira Gershwin

  The entessalated Roman pool at Hearst Castle, San Simeon—

  in death’s solitude

  (solicitude?)

  I’ll take you there.

  Mallarmé, from His Letters

  “Breathe deeply, look around and fill yourself with views of the horizon, which is a preferable spectacle in which to live.”

  [Last letter to Méry Laurent, 24 January, 1898]

  “The Orphic explanation of the Earth is the sole duty of every poet and the literary par excellence: for the very rhythm of the book, impersonal and living, even to its pagination, is juxtaposed with the equations of this dream, or Ode.”

  [To Verlaine, 1885]

  “Poetry is the expression, in human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious meaning of aspects of existence: in this way it confers authenticity on our time on earth and constitutes the only spiritual task there is.”

  [27 June, 1884, to Léo D’Orfer, who asked M to “Define Poetry.”]

  Picture Pennsylvania

  Airs

  Boy socialite

  Episcopalian Jew Buddhist

  An invitee

  Not quite Harvard material

  The Social History of Art

  Pasternak on Mandelstam: “He got into a conversation that started before him.”

  And Mandelstam: “My breath, my warmth has already lain on the panes of eternity.”

  What is it “to work on yourself,” you who keeps the hand?

  Reply to Adorno

  sheet music

  parchment or vellum

  shaped into

  lampshades

  the old way

  before human

  skin became

  available

  After the war and the poetry anthologies had appeared,

  Deafening was the shaft of sunlight’s spruce and snare.

  (Something cornball about those snares, beware!)

  New York School, or Something Like It

  The elders (all born circa 1925) had irony, superseded for those of us born 1940 or so—with higher expectations and more disappointment—by sarcasm.

  Ashbery and Burroughs took the language apart (cutups, pulverized* syntax). In fact, they had no language—all in quotes—but syntax, which was oppressive as logic, syllogism.

  We had language (slang) but no syntax, so began with pulverized wordplay as “nature”—cutups already in the mind.

  *“Pulverized” (JA) not the right word; try shredded.

  Dosso Dossi: Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus

  Lucian/Alberti, 1430s

  Virtue comes to Jupiter’s palace to complain of mistreatment at the hands of the gods and men, especially Fortune. She is kept waiting for a month because those inside are busy making cucumbers blossom and painting the wings of butterflies. Mercury finally tells her that Jupiter has no wish to quarrel with Fortune and sends her away.

  Noch Nicht—Not Yet

  “The eye like a strange balloon mounts toward infinity.” —Redon

  The age like a zeppelin . . .

  The Styrofoam plant in Thuringia

  near where Barbarossa sleeps

  The poet’s head rises from the mountain

  One day we must unfold him*

  *Stravinsky on Auden: “One day we must unfold Wystan and see who he is.”

  Auden lyric for the Devil in Man of La Mancha not used in the show—but Auden ended some of his last public readings with:

  Believe while you can that I’m proud of you,

  Enjoy your dream:

  I’m so bored with the whole fucking crowd of you

  I could scream.

  Circus Maximus, Karlsruhe, Kassel

  First the bombs fell, targeting

  The munitions dump at the edge of town.

  Postwar, the annual flower show took over;

  The International Art Fair soon followed.

  Academics call us “meaning makers.” But meanings aren’t made.

  Meaning stirrers is more like it.

  The certainty of ephemera.

  Contra Lenin

  Aesthetics is the ethics of the present.

  Again, for Claude Lorrain

  Something else: finding a new Old Master you can really love.

  The Miniaturist’s Miscellany

  1973—Trilateral Commission

  1974—OPEC “Crisis”

  “Marx uses the language of ghostliness to represent the power of the commodity in the modern world. Under mature capitalism, according to Marx, the rules of exchange and conferring of value happen without full human oversight or control. Things move around and take on life as commodities while people lose their vitality in producing them for market. So, in Capital, seemingly inanimate objects figuratively become human. Like ghosts, they come and go, almost but
not quite graspable.”

  Aha. This is where someone steps up to say, “We have a real problem on our hands.”

  Fortune Cookie

  “You will soon witness a miracle.”

  Word Count

  Word Order

  Word Choice

  “As a poet I may be possibly more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness . . . than I am interested in the presentation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and perception involved in the poems.”

  Where & when did Hart Crane write this?

  DIE WELT IST ALLES

  WAS DER FALL IST

  The World is Everything;

  That is the case.

  As in Shelley, “pinnacled dim in the intense inane.”

  As in, “I’m in a real pickle here.”

  Mozart to His Father, 26 September 1781:

  “For just as a man in such a towering rage oversteps all the bounds of order, moderation, and propriety, and completely forgets himself, so must the music too forget itself. But, as passions, whether violent or not, must never be expressed in such a way as to excite disgust, and as music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear, but must please the hearer, or in other words must never cease to be music, I have gone from F (the key in which the aria is written), not into a remote key, but into a related one, not, however, into its nearest relative D minor, but in the more remote A minor.”

  Amen to that.

  Snippets (Further Songs for Bands)

  for Cedar Sigo

  The Dictionary of As If

  Error in earth . . .

  About supper they were never wrong—or warned?

  The philosopher Hobbes in his eighty-eighth year says he’s looking for a hole through which to crawl out of this universe.

  Exactly factual: Exophotic.

  “The Politeness of Objects”—by which William Kentridge means they both receive and then throw their light our way.

  How do you know you saw? Do you mean what you saw?

  Eugène Delacroix cautions: “If you cannot draw a man who throws himself from the fifth floor before he hits the ground, you will never be an artist.”

  Snippet

  For openers: To be in love with words and hate the use that’s made of them.

  “Philosophy is a peculiar subject. Its apparent irrelevance accounts for both its charm and its dismissal as an idle luxury. It takes generations of an idea to take hold in popular awareness, if they ever do. Yet as John Maynard Keynes said, ‘The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.’”

  Replace “philosophy” in this paragraph with “poetry.”

  Amanda Eicher now applies lipstick in a dark raspberry shade to conduct her Visual Thinking class at UC Berkeley. “It helps the class settle down—there are so many arguments,” she says. “With lipstick you become an authority.” I say, “like—Professor Eicher!”

  December 24

  The world is running out of ice.

  (The Iceman Goeth.)

  Charles Baudelaire—the George Washington of Modernism.

  Art has become a minor art. In recompense, space will make us a garden.

  Why-Not Time

  Say “cosmos” with a lisp.

  Stardust Ballroom

  The modern soul went out

  in search of a self

  to come home to.

  I Say Yes Because I Don’t Know

  Tufts of what you wanted

  because tufts are all you ever want

  and the fruits thereof.

  Is this the same “wild, untamed youth” who, as Balanchine said of Apollo, “learned nobility through art”?

  March 27

  Bonus blast of Frank O’Hara’s birthday celebrated twice—one for the date he and everyone knew, June 27; the other for today, the date of birth officially registered in Baltimore.

  Wild radish white with purplish markings—Joe Brainard said, “Don’t get rid of them,” standing in the backyard, Fern Road, Bolinas, some 37 years ago. Big clumps of them, and hemlock too, alongside the walk I now take down Clipper from Market to Grand View.

  Paris, April 2–13

  The fallen star clears a corridor

  another opening

  totaling the whole.

  Come back now.

  It won’t come back from where it went, went nowhere really, just stayed as it was: time, event, sense of all this together

  become that.

  That was what won’t now come.

  Call it the Outcome.

  April 24

  Tonight I read at Meridian Gallery. Sorting through recent poems, I find so many dedicated to and/or about artists and their art. What does this make me, the Art Poet? And at the reading proper, I find myself saying that some of the new poems make me nervous with their intentions and meaningfulness. As Frank said about Motherwell, “The Elegies mean something and you can’t beat that.” But one doesn’t want to get too beaten up by meanings, either.

  I guess the big question is how “mediated” life can get in poems that see life through art. The antidote would be something like what came up in a seminar at the Art Institute: “Why should I look at this [art] instead of out the window?”

  “Indeed the word conversation became synonymous with company, as in ‘He read his new poem before the entire conversation’”—apropos the salons of the 1600s, Mme. de Rambouillet, Mme. de Sablé, featuring the likes of Pascal, La Rochefoucauld.

  October 10

  Last night with Mac saw Propeller Theater’s production of The Winter’s Tale at Zellerbach. The “rough” magic. “Time is the mother of truth” not quite the same as “Time will tell.” A play of phrases, not speeches: “Heavy matters, heavy matters.”

  December 1

  QUAND MÊME!—Sarah Bernhardt’s motto—also mine, along with “Ça va sans dire” for negotiating any situation in Paris, Summer 2005—though I never put it fully into practice.

  December 10

  America suffering from collective solipsism, an ethos of personal salvation that does without ethics “because Jesus tells me so.” In Trinity School morning chapel, during the post-WWII years, we sang, “Stand up, stand up for Jesus / Ye soldiers of the Cross!” Today the little man at the back of the head suspects that “Jesus” is a code name for Art.

  The Turn of the Screw

  Mixed Chimera

  Spring plowing patterns

  Straw-red coins

  Ritz Tower lights (red & blue)

  Once There

  Overly Advantageous

  Thoreau at Walgreens

  North of Kissinger

  Separate the point

  Take this down

  Missing a beaver

  In your songtrack

  Room Tone

  Seven Agnes Martins around a room do no one any good; art is best seen in specificity, alone in someone else’s bathroom, for example.

  Bulb

  Hypostatize a civilization only decoratively modified by regional concerns and you approximate the romance of modern art. Not at all what either Jean-Luc Godard or Norman Lear means by culture.

  Remarkable Occurrences aboard Numerous Vessels

  You can grow pineapples in the English climate with manure heated between bricks in a pit.

  Catching my breath, repentantly.

  Despair follows elation as merchandizing savvy follows lighthearted amusement while malfeasance burbles onward, all taffeta and trope. (Enough trope to thwang yourself.)

  Despite “biodiversity” will I never comprehend the volume of foodstuff served up to the plundering economy?

  What if you had to be known as the Brown Bomber?

  Exiting the tiny bathroom at the rear of the airplane cabin, the stewardess smiled at me, “Chivalry is not de
ad.”

  Casey Crime Photographer has a pencil behind his ear.

  Standing in like Stu Erwin in his face—only trying to help—oh yeah.

  The constant misprint, beyond similarity.

  Presentation at the Temple by George Gershwin.

  Case of the sniffles—fixing the stoop, dismantling an old tin can.

  Your eye, my eyes—“one to fetch, two to carry”—trade sockets.

  Philip Whalen here again, a midge alit upon the toilet bowl. Oh Lord, what now? Think “sieve.”

  Philip exits, huffing: “I didn’t mean to intrude. I can’t look.”

  Think through it.

  Raspberry Brittle

  She was born and used from the get-go as a kind of emotional solvent, her forebears having gone to the ends of the earth, the maternal instinct screeching and summoning the vampire threads.

  Incurring turbulence, the brown cup falleth from sight.

  There was no throwing stones in the mountains, so you thought heaving a boulder would go unpunished.

  Titters over the yellow mug.

  Tall girl, motherly, and agonizing in her calm.

  “Do interruptions.” (Her interruptions.)

  He was regrettable, if ever uneven.

  Hell’s Bells

  Those who publicize how awestruck they are by the beauty of it all.

  The things (in meds) that are keeping me alive are also killing me—just like life.

  People don’t change, but they will listen to advice.

  The fondness New York socialites bear for gangsters.

  Truth value.

  Truth effect.