week three

Wind bringing rain in. I forget about wind in this place. Second-floor apartment. All night the storm windows rattling in the walls, bits of tree blowing on the roof, in the yard and street, the chimes on the porch--this is no time for chimes--in a frenzy. Every bit wind-hindrance in a season where wind is frothing at the mouth.

So the sound of it woke me all night in the middle of things. I dreamt Karl moved his art into my river house. I dreamt of running up and down hills in new shoes, pain free. That ten guests arrive in October, every room in town booked. That I find a review of Keepsake by someone I don't know but respect, saying: "... as we have said, that Franco, under the mentorship of women who wish to remain beneath themselves in the safety of the master's house, writes in the Name-of-the-Father as if in the pathetic, near-solipsistic hope of entering the Father's Kingdom."

I don't read and recall text in my dreams, ah Firsts. The truth in it stings this morning where Blake is also at work in my head conflating his prophet and poet. Of course I don't know what a river house is, not really. Something to do with sand and flood.

***

from Marriage of Heaven and Hell

... in it were a [Plate 20] number of monkeys, baboons, & all of that species, chain'd by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but witheld by the shortness of their chains; however I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with & then devour'd, by plucking off first one limb and then another till the body was left a helpless trunk; this after grinning & kissing it with seeming fondness they devour'd too; and here & there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off of his own tail; as the stench terribly annoy'd us both we went into the mill, & I in my hand brought the skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotles Analytics.

So the Angel said: thy phantasy has imposed upon me & thou oughtest to be ashamed.

***

Something to do with the fantasy being hungry enough to rape and devour anything standing by. And because we're in a printing house, the inscription is a fantasy, the engraver's symbols, all fantasy. Words, characters, corpus, all fantasy. The prophets and the fathers, all monkey skulls, small caves. Poor evidence of any body, the corpse. Sense, for Blake, is with the senses. I hardly remember my father.

***

bard=barred

***

There was a camera spell, a Nikon slung on his shoulder or niched on the dash of the truck, though not casually. I held it once holding my breath with my brother in the viewfinder pitching ball and my father's finger over my finger. I remember. The dust of the tailings fields collected on the lens, my eyelashes and hands, most photos a melt of pee wee yellow shirts in the chainlink dugout, the only monuments in the fields the high black backdrops. I don't know what it cost him to buy the used camera from a man he envied, I don't know why he taught me how to keep score, fastidiously. Fondly. What a view, the tailings dams. The page of diamonds, my father's house, the photos, the fields. I remember. Nothing stood out but my father standing by.

***

"Oh, get off it, people." Thank you. Am delighted also.

***

Because one can say mother Bishop against father Blake when there are so few mothers to claim? And even then the precarious scrutiny your mother's art is asked to endure in reticence, as mothers tend to their inscrutable houses?

***

My mother in a house of diamonds, all day testing diamonds. Gold, silver chains, other gems in the pawn shop where she works. This is no prison house, be not deceived.

***

And yet. Today in the poetry class: "At length the sucking jewels freeze."

***

The Octopus

There are many monsters that a glassen surface
Restrains. And none more sinister
Than vision asleep in the eye's tight translucence.
Rarely it seeks now to unloose
It's diamonds. Having divined how drab a prison
The purest mortal tissue is,
Rarely it wakes. Unless, coaxed out by lusters
Extraordinary, like the octopus
From the gloom of its tank half-swimming half-drifting
Toward anything fair, a handkerchief
Or child's face dreaming near the glass, the writher
Advances in a godlike wreath
Of its own wrath. Chilled by such fragile reeling
A hundred blows of a boot-heel
Shall not quell, the dreamer wakes and hungers.
Percussive pulses, drum or gong,
Build in his skull their loud entrancement,
Volutions of a Hindu dance.
His hands move clumsily in the first conventional
Gestures of assent.
He is willing to undergo the volition and fervor
Of many fleshlike arms, observe
These in their holiness of indirection
Destroy, adore, evolve, reject--
Till on glass rigid with his own seizure
At length the sucking jewels freeze.

--James Merrill

***