[postlink]http://newbestmotivator.blogspot.com/2009/06/streets-of-pearl-and-gold-by-carolyn.html[/postlink]
Within, walls white as canvas stretched to stain;
A tabula rasa clean as a stripped bed.
The painter's order: jars and brushes neat,
Harmoniously fixed, like palette clots.
Here, perilous in this secret nest, he paces,
Naked and fierce, dressed only in his paint;
His place condemned,pinched nearer by the beast,
The lover streaked with motley, seeing white,
Would cuff the ball and hammer with his fist
But hides instead, frowns, grappling with art:
Waves and flames and clouds and wounds and rags.
While I sit careless on the bed; I float
Posing as Venus in a pearly boat.
How wide we dream! His picturing and mine,
As the light glitters, deepening our breath
Until we sink for pearl through profound seas,
Swimming before the funeral of the earth.
Outside, the buildings kneel as if yielding up
To the levelers their infirm confessions:
No rats or roaches in the wainscot
Nor the old staled odors of man's functioning
But that they were chalice of our history,
And this, a pastoral Dutch village. Here
In a black-shuttered tavern, clarks and squires
In linsey-woolsey, plotted revolution!
Yea, the streets were steep with mud and dung
From which we raised ourselves a dwelling-place,
On sober frames affixed a frontispiece.
Later, these first buildings failed in form
When they admitted to their broken cells
Child-sweat and chilblain, women laboring
Hook-shouldered, early deformed by the machine:
A house of light become a cave of pain.
Now cornice, fretwork, sagging pediment,
Outliving purity and sin, each warrant signed,
Tell more than Bowery faces of our fate.
The stain is mortal on their livid meat,
Emptier than this periled wood and stone.
A lover carved here, priding in his skill,
Above the old eye-levels, garland, gargoyle,
In the time of the artisan, when our land was small.
Sun dust. Noon is noiseless. Stink of fish
From Fulton, all the produce gone by ten
Save for squashed jelly, viscid scales
Rusting and iridescent. Seasoning sprinkled
On the cooked street.
A wino crawls onto a briny tray,
Lies down in inches of left-over sea.
Curling, crustacean-red, he dozes
his non-death away.
Nearby, the pier where we watch trawlers:
Mending their nets, men sweat,look up, scowl, smile;
Held still a moment, beetles caught in crystal.
The Rivers is brown jelly in the sun.
Between the air and water flies the Bridge:
The twang of her long azure strings.....
Below us, grass grows over boards and water;
AMERICA, THE DEAD IN CHRIST RISE FIRST
On bulkheads scrawled unevenly, fuzzing chalk
Xs in rows, the childlike mark of love.
Retreat to darkness, two dark flights away!
Tin ceilings, thinly blue: pale rippling.
All afternoon the water undulates..............
The sky is silent. For the wino in the tray.
He has not moved, or died.
We rouse in the opal twilight, open eyes:
Dust, a marble crust ground underfoot;
Splintering sills crumble, frame the street
Laid like a whip across the backs of blasted lots
Near rubble mountains raised by dying men.
Bits of the old town lean on the August air,
Wait blindly for the X of the builder-killers,
Their multitudinous eyes taped out.
Racks of white crosses fenestrate the night,
Before the two hairs cross in the last bomb-sight.
And who are we, for whom our country cares?
America makes crosses of us all.
Each artist in his fortress: boiling oil
A weapon still. Seething across his canvases, a fury
Flung over white, ripped out: the X in paint.
Art is this marveling fury of spurned love.
Caughr in this present, impatient of histories,
Even your own, while you mourn what vanishes.
Who endures, rootless? But our roots are strewn
On every pavement, smashed or drowned in brine.
Observe the world with desperate affection;
Snatch up your brush to catch it, fix it all
On canvases which, stacked against a wall,
Dozen on dozen, are crumbling unseen.
Paint out the day and you will keep the time:
Exhaust fumes, and a building's trembling dist,
Fish entrails, wine-reek, attic waste,
The shapes below the names on billboard signs,
And-what the bums find early-paint the dirt
Which we all come to: paint the old dirt sleep.
So stamp your canvas with the X of loss,
Art mutilated, stained with abuse and rage.
But mark it also as the cross of love
Who hold this woman-flesh, touch it alive,
As I try to keep us, here upon the page.
Within, walls white as canvas stretched to stain;
A tabula rasa clean as a stripped bed.
The painter's order: jars and brushes neat,
Harmoniously fixed, like palette clots.
Here, perilous in this secret nest, he paces,
Naked and fierce, dressed only in his paint;
His place condemned,pinched nearer by the beast,
The lover streaked with motley, seeing white,
Would cuff the ball and hammer with his fist
But hides instead, frowns, grappling with art:
Waves and flames and clouds and wounds and rags.
While I sit careless on the bed; I float
Posing as Venus in a pearly boat.
How wide we dream! His picturing and mine,
As the light glitters, deepening our breath
Until we sink for pearl through profound seas,
Swimming before the funeral of the earth.
Outside, the buildings kneel as if yielding up
To the levelers their infirm confessions:
No rats or roaches in the wainscot
Nor the old staled odors of man's functioning
But that they were chalice of our history,
And this, a pastoral Dutch village. Here
In a black-shuttered tavern, clarks and squires
In linsey-woolsey, plotted revolution!
Yea, the streets were steep with mud and dung
From which we raised ourselves a dwelling-place,
On sober frames affixed a frontispiece.
Later, these first buildings failed in form
When they admitted to their broken cells
Child-sweat and chilblain, women laboring
Hook-shouldered, early deformed by the machine:
A house of light become a cave of pain.
Now cornice, fretwork, sagging pediment,
Outliving purity and sin, each warrant signed,
Tell more than Bowery faces of our fate.
The stain is mortal on their livid meat,
Emptier than this periled wood and stone.
A lover carved here, priding in his skill,
Above the old eye-levels, garland, gargoyle,
In the time of the artisan, when our land was small.
Sun dust. Noon is noiseless. Stink of fish
From Fulton, all the produce gone by ten
Save for squashed jelly, viscid scales
Rusting and iridescent. Seasoning sprinkled
On the cooked street.
A wino crawls onto a briny tray,
Lies down in inches of left-over sea.
Curling, crustacean-red, he dozes
his non-death away.
Nearby, the pier where we watch trawlers:
Mending their nets, men sweat,look up, scowl, smile;
Held still a moment, beetles caught in crystal.
The Rivers is brown jelly in the sun.
Between the air and water flies the Bridge:
The twang of her long azure strings.....
Below us, grass grows over boards and water;
AMERICA, THE DEAD IN CHRIST RISE FIRST
On bulkheads scrawled unevenly, fuzzing chalk
Xs in rows, the childlike mark of love.
Retreat to darkness, two dark flights away!
Tin ceilings, thinly blue: pale rippling.
All afternoon the water undulates..............
The sky is silent. For the wino in the tray.
He has not moved, or died.
We rouse in the opal twilight, open eyes:
Dust, a marble crust ground underfoot;
Splintering sills crumble, frame the street
Laid like a whip across the backs of blasted lots
Near rubble mountains raised by dying men.
Bits of the old town lean on the August air,
Wait blindly for the X of the builder-killers,
Their multitudinous eyes taped out.
Racks of white crosses fenestrate the night,
Before the two hairs cross in the last bomb-sight.
And who are we, for whom our country cares?
America makes crosses of us all.
Each artist in his fortress: boiling oil
A weapon still. Seething across his canvases, a fury
Flung over white, ripped out: the X in paint.
Art is this marveling fury of spurned love.
Caughr in this present, impatient of histories,
Even your own, while you mourn what vanishes.
Who endures, rootless? But our roots are strewn
On every pavement, smashed or drowned in brine.
Observe the world with desperate affection;
Snatch up your brush to catch it, fix it all
On canvases which, stacked against a wall,
Dozen on dozen, are crumbling unseen.
Paint out the day and you will keep the time:
Exhaust fumes, and a building's trembling dist,
Fish entrails, wine-reek, attic waste,
The shapes below the names on billboard signs,
And-what the bums find early-paint the dirt
Which we all come to: paint the old dirt sleep.
So stamp your canvas with the X of loss,
Art mutilated, stained with abuse and rage.
But mark it also as the cross of love
Who hold this woman-flesh, touch it alive,
As I try to keep us, here upon the page.