Poems 1959-2009 (14 page)

In heavy makeup, left, right, male, female,

Kabuki, kooky.

Over the ocean in France, the platinum meter stick

Under a glass bell is rational,

And meaningless,

And dissolving.

But Witten grasps it cheerily in one hand

And the geisha fan in the other,

Like the pots of gold at the ends of the rainbow

In the rain.

 

And they overwhelm you and force

You to stay still till it is over.

Movies do.

I like the speed of light.

I like the speed

And the incomparably blurred

Sensation of being deformed

Into being and about to begin.

The starter is the inexhaustible

Appetite of the non-living

Miracle to grow a universe, so to speak,

So many digits

Every blink,

Tick tick tick tick

From the beginning.

I unlock the steamer trunk

From the days when they used to

Travel with steamer trunks. I lift the lid and inside

Find the original blast of spacetime

Growing outward toward a distant shore.

The stars are singing to the stars

In there, stars to stars.

It isn't over

When the galaxies cluster

And the audience is crying

And you are.

It overwhelms you and forces

You to stay till it is over.

The same poem over and over

You are witnessing, the swelling of the universe

Into the rose

Which it will give.

 

It isn't every day, but most,

That one inflicts this on oneself.

It is intolerable.

Such universality

Means there is no other place

So one must do it here, do

And be, and feel the joy

Most days bring.

We have scars

On our imagination that come from

Joy. I mean, the woman has

A huge star sapphire buried

In the middle of her forehead, yes?

And that is good.

And the universe she sits

On is.

Her third eye is.

However, it bleeds.

The universe is in a skillet

Cooking into something yum.

I say

Cimabue painted her without the sapphire

Holding the infant Jesus.

The dervish dancers swirl

In their white robes which whirl the stars

Into galaxies and the galaxies

Into cheese. The blue shoe is the Earth

Seen from space,

And its blade twirls on the ice of the skating rink

In the dark. There is no point

In trying to think about this

Bliss.

 

The images received are

One light-year old.

That has been confirmed.

On the monitor is

A wide boulevard of black

Lacquer in a capital.

A faint fuzz

Of spring blur coats the trees.

The headlights on in the rain must be

Their eyes.

The trees are the dogs

We know so little about

That they walked.

We have no idea what

Language they used

And did they use their mouths to excrete

What then was

Capitalized

To produce the malt

Which reproduced the songs?

They knew there were

More than three dimensions

To their wives.

Every year they called it spring.

They practiced herd individualism

And ran alone together.

Every headlight drank an evening cocktail

And didn't drive.

They knew there were

Eleven dimensions,

Which they didn't know

Were about to begin.

 

The tiny octopus

Of galaxies and dust is

The universe taking up

Space.

The octopus also is

The black space around itself

Its octopus ink

Clones in clouds.

Its round human eye is looking

Out at nothing.

Its eight tentacles

Are fingering ink-jet spacetime.

It squirts the self

Around itself it floats in.

It opens its eight arms wide.

It opens its eye and mouth and suckers wide.

It is an eight-armed dome and does.

It is the universe and is.

It is the royal palm

Of consciousness slightly swaying above the beach.

Angels are swimming

In the sea.

Manta rays ripple by

Nearby.

The interstellar dust

Keeps incubating life.

The oral

Sharks are always having fun.

One tank at the aquarium

Of nothingness

Contains all this

Zest.

 

I come from

Far away from you

And that is

Far away.

Hundreds of

Millions of stars in a

Galaxy and billions of galaxies and one

Billions of light-years away.

I came from

Far away from you

And that was

Far away.

My news is billions

Of light-years ago. When

I started to come toward

You.

And somewhere

Along the way. I

Forget

What I was going to say.

I came from

Far away from you and

That is far

Away.

The light

That reaches you now

Is I

Began far off.

That touches your eyes.

That enters your thought.

From afar.

From the start.

 

Witten is designing

A baby's bib

With a little red

Sea horse raised

Embroidered emblem. Now

When baby spits out the baby food paste

The universe is spooning into her face

A little red sea horse will catch it.

A little red

Sea horse is eleven-dimensional

Spacetime. It unicycles

Upright in space

In all directions

At once.

A little thread sea horse

Is deaf,

Blind, can't smell,

Has no voice.

The universe

Is also raised

On a background of something else,

And the something else

Is there to catch something

Else.

It will catch hell

For the unfathomable inhuman

Daring of the theory

The heroic Edward Witten

At the Institute for Advanced Study

Has put forward in the Theory of Everything

To the effect

That we spill.

 

The perfect petals

Of the rose

Of time, of all three

Angels that prepare for this,

Of everything the blue

Warm water does

To magnify the August hour,

The perfect

Thunder mint

Between the thumb and finger

Makes, or the large smell of rain before it rains,

Grow from several storm cells

Violently,

While the hour

Hand sweeps as if it were barking seconds

And the day stands still,

In perfect bloom,

And so the universe

Was just conceived,

And just arrives,

And jets a rising fountain

Lit with many lights

And colors,

And a rushing sound,

And it is night,

And it is air,

And the ice cream is infinite

Above the cone

The small hand holds

Dripping, holds the torch

Of everything

Is good.

 

To return to the impossible

Is to be happy in the future

With what after all was the start

And continues to produce.

You know what that means?

It means you are in love.

It means to live your life

You have to.

The universe is ourself

Moving in sleep

Very slowly or in sudden

Seizures toward eternal life.

The universe is a single organism

Made of two

Or more individual,

Or many more than two, individual

Moving parts and blitzkrampf,

Explosive but balletic slow-mo

Of vast organs

Of ecstasy making sounds

The radio telescopes will hear

Billions of light-years from now,

The way whales croon

Whalesong through the ocean microphone

To an audience in darkness far away.

To live your life

You have to use it up.

A star performs its nuclear core.

Beautiful Kate Valk of the Wooster Group

Of actors does the male title role in
The Emperor Jones

In blackface till she is so much

Starlight she stops.

 

It is raining on one side

Of the street and

A mother on the other.

Boy, it's hot!

Incandescence not making sense,

The ultimate

The weather will

Allow.

Of the energy

Of a supernova the

Undertow

Collapses to,

It has been said

There is no way to

Express the utterly

Unlighted

Out the other side.

It can appear out of nowhere

Outside your own front door.

Knock, knock.

Come in. It's open.

Delivery!

Come in, it's open.

Fifteen billion light-years is fast food

To the divine quantum equations

It is delivered to—

Which eat the delivery boy,

According to Heisenberg.

They have charm

And quark and spin.

They work both sides of the street.

They give good infinity.

 

It is the morning of the universe:

Black children on their way to school to read.

The storefront metal gates on rollers rise

And all the shops are open now for praise.

It's hard to bear the beauty.

The traffic is sweet this early.

The old are up and listen,

Though the ones who don't get up don't listen.

Even in a universe this young

Things ask why

Enormous stars blow up

And more stars are born.

Born to burn,

They start to cry.

The young stars burn and shine.

That's the law.

As for the mania of being always

On,

It consumes the nuclear core

And beams truth through space

As deeply as a child reads his first real book.

When they assemble the biggest telescope ever

On the far side of the skin,

They will be able to see

A boy not moving his lips

And a book being read,

Free of the wobbles

Of earth atmosphere distortion.

Stars collide and explode

And their young are born.

The children arrive at school.

A billion years go by.

 

The innocence of the tornado

Of the universe torridly

Twists the universe, the way a clay pot turns

On a potter's wheel languidly

Gaining form, the funnel and the rapturous

Waist swaying slowly

Like a belly dancer at ten million

Miles an hour, sways like an elephant's trunk

Of clots of rough and gray indigestible

That will be stars

And galaxies and strum and strums

The invisible cold dark matter,

Earsplitting odorless suction coming

Through time that stands

On its tail and the other force,

And is everything

Filling space,

And is space and everything,

Spacetime, everything.

What are we?

The everything looks

Out without eyes.

What are we?

Between everything and no.

The cobra sways

To the music

The belly dancer sways

To and the urge.

Gravity sings to the other force

And the other force sings back.

The hypnotized body floats in the air.

Love is God.

 

The surge of energy death can't

Protect itself against

Imagines everything

At once.

The surge protector

That a spike of energy

Can't avoid,

And that the spike of energy

Destroyed,

Fires its last distress flare forever,

Which is the aftermath

Till now, and is this place.

There is the tendency

Not to be

Which required

A singularity

To overcome

It, which made a blast which

Imaged everything

Just once,

The flash forever

That the flare flashes

Forever.

One consequence of the disappearance

Of nothingness

Is all the bandages eerily

Unwind and soon

The pharaoh finds the energy inside

The mummy case to lift

The lid. The flash of the universe

Goes out

To the eyes of time.

 

I travel further than

I can to reach the place

I can. I reach

The place.

Stars testify.

The black is

Satisfied with that.

The black of space is old cold.

How cold it feels

When you remember warm.

I swim with winter wings

Beneath the royal palms.

Birth put a message

In a bottle and floated it away.

My DNA washed up on a shore, facelift smiling,

My plump green grape maturity flash-frozen.

I drank so much.