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tragedy rendered absurd by a cloak
of narcissistic mysticism and astrological predestination,
the maraudings of an unencumbered masculine ego
like an ambulatory Ogham stone rampaging across the moors
leaving a trail of crushed geese, mangled hedgehogs
and farmers’ daughters ravished in its wake.
But in those first bitter, frost-glittered weeks of 1963
Sylvia wanders alone the unharvested fields
of her imagination, her mind in the days before death
a small engine jammed open full-throttle,
smell of gas and the smoking volts of the electroshock ward
and the words in their cascade within her, waterfall
of liquid metals, each poem a pail dipped into that flow,
dark maw, paltry and inadequate, it spills
but it holds.
And there, across the elemental river, stands Ted,
predatory, crag-browed, boreal, druidic,
digging with loy and mattock an open grave
beneath the mortuary elm in which to bury himself
on the morning of her suicide and every dawn thereafter
alongside his feral familiars—hawk, stoat, pike.
Ted and Sylvia. Sylvia and Ted.
Let us remember them by their claw marks.
The Coltrane Changes (1964)
John Coltrane is flying
further into the darkness
trying to learn why it sings,
why it sparkles and hearkens
at the plunge of a valve,
at the throb of a string,
Coltrane is trying
to learn everything, to solve
for the enharmonic unknown
within his own heart,
hurtling toward sainthood
scarred and enlightened and bent
at every joint, every staff or bar
he’s ever been wounded by,
called by the dark star
of art to witness, and testify.
The Style for Dylan (1965)
Adorable Bob, deplorable Bob, not yet mascara-and-fedora Bob, lean and hungry, all cheekbones, fawn and leopard skin,
ain’t got nothing to lose Bob, adrenaline and Benzedrine Bob, hungry and frugal, positively 4th and MacDougal Street Bob,
wings of Mercury Bob, hermetic and copacetic Bob, poetic Bob in his pointed shoes and bells, glibly Shakespearean,
high-toned and empyrean, rollicking, frolicsome Bob hitting only high notes, prime-time Bob wraithlike in the limelight,
swanning, sneering, bejeweled in black shades, baby-faced Bob with a headful of snakes, meal-scrounging changeling chasing the dragon,
O precious gifted snarling unrefusable Parnassian haughty habit-forming Bob, masterful and disaster prone, wicked and aquiline,
working-stiff Bob, put you on the day shift Bob, swaggering and stomping in the back alley Bob, folkways Bob, payday Bob, next-in-line-for-the-big-time Bob,
strung-out Bob, everybody-who-was-hanging-out Bob, cast down and resurrected, chooga-looga bluesman manqué,
rock-and-roll Bob lifting the riff from “La Bamba,” stealing a march on Lennon & McCartney, revolutionary youth to the electrified barricades,
plugged-in Bob, Stratocaster Bob kicking out the jams, fortune and fame Bob, bridge and chorus, verse and refrain Bob,
Bob the troubadour caught in a revolving door, crowned with laurels, crowned with thorns, amphetamine Bob cruising the skyline in a Buick 6,
hansom cab and Detroit chariot Bob, Triumph motorcycle and freight train Bob, bootstrap Bob, imposter Bob, Judas Iscariot Bob,
ear to the ground Bob and burn it down Bob, hey you get off of my cloud Bob, whatever you do, play it fuckin’ loud, Bob.
Andy Warhol: Image, Print, Negative (1966)
egg.
imprimatur.
apparent. ego. ink.
message. sphinx. negation.
magus. pun. tint. scrimp. scrimmage.
agate. imprints. pregnant. impish. nascent.
homage. wedge. limn. lint. tent. tenth. tentative.
pruny. impugn. vegetative. inflate. hymn. ant. bridge. runt.
tithe. begat. pejorative. rant. writhed. rental. retail. contrapuntal.
iamb. imbed. nag. got. tiff. obdurate. illustrative. sacrilege.
engage. gouge. magic. pint. punt. maculate. gateaux.
plangent. agency. tango. mandible. unabridged.
skinflint. imago. ergo. prink. squint. trinity.
plumage. damage. slippage. spillage.
ingot. votive. mar. par. prince.
putative. imagist. vista.
emerge. negate.
map.
The Death of Edward Hopper (1967)
1.
Night after night the foghorn
like a great horned owl watching over the harbor,
boats in and out with their trawls and gigs,
rosebushes behind the town museum
with its spoked wheel from the sunken skipjack
whose mast emerges from a sand dune
like an eruptive stork leg,
and the original Fresnel lens from the lighthouse
a lapidary, many-petaled crystal flower,
swollen magnolia blossoms at twilight,
tree like a dewy, perfumed chandelier,
and the hushed grass beneath the cedars
at that hour when the sky eases toward ashes,
then darker, darker, night not a veil descending
but a hand rising up, clenching us in its palm.
2.
Not a misanthrope, not a swain of solitude,
not averse to heavy breasts
spilling from a beige silk nightgown,
not afraid of the body but more at home
with sunlight infiltrating empty rooms,
the veneer of bleached calcium on oyster shells,
freight cars, brick walls, seaside hills.
Endurance and austerity.
Ardent restraint.
Brushstrokes aloof as iridescent soap bubbles,
flocked clouds reflected in car windows,
umbrellas on city avenues like algal blooms,
the illusion of riches in a teaspoon of puddle-water
and the domestic suns of dandelions
shining everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.
3.
Carnival attractions at sunset in late summer,
Sea Dragon, Tilt-a-Whirl, The Scrambler,
disorienting blurs of candescent motion
that conclude with a staggering-forth like birth,
a reemergence, shaken and laughing,
into the popcorn-scented dusk.
You would think that was the end of it
but they come again—singly and in pairs,
strapped into little egg- and saucer-shaped cars,
defenseless in the last raw streamers of sunlight,
they wait, all starkness and vulnerability,
for the ride to start.
And the onlookers leaning against a picket fence
behold in those luminous faces
all the loneliness and longing of American life.
Picasso & Jacqueline Roque (1968)
Picasso
A canvas comprises a totality of surface
just as Spain is composed of constituent parts,
Catalunya, Madrid, hills and trees, etc.
Color dyes the fabric clothing form itself,
as wars and anthems unify
the body politic of mass and volume.
Neutral as Switzerland, the palette
confers legitimacy on every pigment it holds,
like a Roman Emperor. Zaragoza,
that dusty, lemon-bitter city of rough stones
with its cathedral of saints’ bones
on a plaza lacking any compensatory grace—
Zaragoza is but the corruption
of its Roman name, Caesaraugusta,
and so a cohort to historical inaccuracy.
This I propose as demonstration
that what matters is not accuracy but acts,
not chronicles but conquests.
The body is everything I have wished
to rid myself of through art
and failed. Yet surrender is impossible.
My hands persevere in the task of painting
as soldiers long after the battle is lost
carry on their raping of women in the streets.
Jacqueline
And I shall salt his palms with my tears.
And I shall seal the tomb of his ears
against trespass and regret.
I am the last, do not forget.
And I shall never rest.
I shall nurse his scepter with my breasts,
bolt the gates of his eyes
against friends and spies.
Pigeons and orphans swirl
in my sable pelt, my tongue of pearl.
And I shall keep the tower fast.
And I shall be the last.
Apollo (1969)
This would be the vessel of our dismantling,
whose flames propose to outshine the divine
as science declares itself nemesis to myth.
What is science but a wondrous supposition
to shield yourselves from chaos, to explain,
as we once did, the order of the universe?
No, Helios’s chariot does not transport the sun—
is that why you came, to steal his horses?
Is that why you voyaged to this negligible rock?
Earth, too, is a stone in a sea of darkness,
and now you are orphaned there, marooned
within your clouded atmosphere of reason.
Destroying us will not reduce your insignificance.
Selene, that beautiful dreamer, will not vanish
because you plant a banner on her orb.
Did you think the moon her residence? Fools.
She lives where all gods do, as everything
you exalt and rage against does: in you.
Jacques Derrida (1970)
The Ticking Clock (1971)
Snoop Dogg is born, Julian Assange is born. Already it is coming,
already the new century—though we have hardly begun
to imagine the death of the old—is taking shape around us.
Babies are crying in nurseries, toddlers are shaking their rattles.
A tennis star is born in Germany, a footballer in Nigeria.
Downhill skiers are born, prime ministers, business tycoons,
pop stars whose images will paper the streets of Tokyo and Bangkok.
Barack Obama is ten years old. Hillary Rodham has just begun
to date her down-home Yale Law classmate, Bill Clinton.
Vladimir Putin is a student at Leningrad State University.
Major General Idi Amin Dada seizes power in Uganda.
Century of integrated circuits & blue plastic radios,
century of self-conscious fabrication, century of human moons.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin will not be born for two more years,
information technology is a euphemism for paper and pencil.
At MIT, Ray Tomlinson decides to employ the @ sign
in the address of the very first email, which he sends
over the ARPANET to another computer in the same room:
“Don’t tell anyone,” he confesses to a friend,
“but this is not what we’re supposed to be working on.”
Uma Thurman is an infant. Princess Diana is a shy girl
in boarding school; she will not survive the century.
Tupac Shakur is born but he will not survive it.
Jim Morrison dies in a bathtub in Paris—no one here gets out alive.
The south tower of the World Trade Center is topped out
at 1,368 feet, officially the tallest building in the world.
In Kafr el-Sheikh, Mohammed Atta is three years old.
Coco Chanel dies. Reinhold Niebuhr, Igor Stravinsky
and Louis Armstrong die. Lance Armstrong is born.
The future is being assembled in the expanding neural webs
of six-year-olds, in the atoms of the yet-to-be-incarnated
beings we imagine as holographic ghosts sitting awkwardly
in the waiting room of the future. Adriano Moraes,
the Brazilian rodeo champion, is one; Wyclef Jean is two.
Agnes Martin will not resume painting for three more years.
The twentieth century is vanishing, o radiant century,
century of quarter notes & treble clefs, of chalk on black paper,
century of deliverance & self-deception, expediency & lies.
Duane Allman crashes his Harley, Edie Sedgwick OD’s,
Dean Acheson and Gene Vincent die on the same day.
George Seferis dies. Pablo Neruda wins the Nobel Prize
but has only eighteen months to live. Bertrand Russell,
Yukio Mishima and Jimi Hendrix were buried last year.
Ogden Nash has died; no one lives forever, but he tried.
Lin Biao is dead, his coup against the aging Mao a failure.
Deng Xiaoping has been sent to the provinces for reeducation
at the Xinjian County Tractor Factory: he will reemerge.
China will follow the Capitalist road; to be rich is glorious.
Alan Shepard hits the very first golf ball on the moon.
Daisuke Enomoto, Japan’s first space tourist, is born.
George Lucas directs his first film, Wes Anderson is two,
Kubrick releases A Clockwork Orange, Guillermo del Toro is seven.
Jimmy Wales attends a Montessori school in Alabama:
Wikipedia cannot be found in any glossary or reference text.
Soon there will be no need for glossaries or reference texts.
Bird is dead, Monk is crazy, Miles has turned his back,
Elvis is lost, John Lennon no longer believes in Beatles.
As Disney World opens the Manson Family are on trial
and America’s largest underground nuclear test, Cannikin,
detonates beneath Amchitka in the Aleutian Islands.
Behold, I am alpha and omega. The world is being destroyed,
the world is being created anew; the century is dying,
the century is being born. The clock is ticking.
Mao: On the Future (1972)
Some believe that millions died of starvation
during the Great Leap Forward,
they say the peasants harvesting rice in colorful native outfits
were stage-managed along the tracks of my private train
for the purpose of misleading me.
On behalf of the Party I say they are wrong
and the Party controls the facts
as an officer commands recruits in the ranks.
What I love best are great upheavals.
Revolution begets revolution.
Time alone opposes me now, and so time
must be struggled against, reeducated, rectified.
Only the young are strong enough,
only the Red Guard will show no clemency
against ancestor tablets and ancient texts,
against temple gates, mahjong tiles, Hong Kong dresses.
Even those who keep caged songbirds
shall be denounced as subversives, reactionary agents
of a past seeking always to reestablish its dominion.
The destruction of mankind
would be a small thing in the universe.
Do not imagine that apes are the only animal
capable of advanced evolution—
I can envision a time in which pigs, or horses,
or some forest shrew evolves to occupy our position
and perhaps the world would be better for it.
So I say to our former brothers in the Soviet Union
as I have said to the West
that we would welcome a nuclear attack
for the clarity and resolve it would bestow upon us.
In my lifetime we have advanced
from rickshaws to jet engines, the abacus to electronic computations.
If we sold wheat for money to build atomic bombs
during a time of starvation I do not apologize for it.
If millions died for progress the price was not too high.
We can afford to lose far more.
Tens of millions, hundreds of millions,
such numbers are meaningless abstractions.
The future does not scruple
over census records. Who stops to count
every star in the sky
will never see the Milky Way.
You cannot eat a watermelon
without spitting out some seeds.
Picasso (1973)
1.
You ask what I truly remember of it—everything and nothing.
The cries of peacocks in the Moorish ruins of Málaga,
Ménerbes where the owls swooped down at dusk
to carry off the rib-thin village cats, a night in Naples
when Stravinsky and I were arrested for pissing in the Galleria,
Alfred Jarry’s pistol, the statuettes stolen from the Louvre,
the sea, of course, the Mediterranean shining olive-silver
on a day we sailed out from the white harbor of Cadaqués
and Frika swam after us, so deep we let her clamber aboard,
soaking the skiff as she shook her glittering fur.
And la vie Américaine in the ’20s with Gerald and Sara Murphy
and Scott Fitzgerald pouring their dollars into the sea
off the rocks in Cap d’Antibes like flat champagne,
and I supporting Olga in the style to which she aspired,
a chauffeur to guide our immense Hispano-Suiza
through the village streets of Paris, and servants and maids
and white shoes and dinner jackets and diapers and headaches
and the Dadaists and the balletomanes and the war
between Cocteau and Breton and Satie and Massine
and the dealers and the bankers and at last Marie-Thérèse
to alleviate the weight of all that money upon my soul.
2.
In human affairs everything is craven, tainted, exigent.
