from Musaics by Burt Kimmelman


Selections from Musaics by Burt Kimmelman 8.6.86 Tate Gallery / Gaudier-Brzeska's Pound, The Hieratic Head His eyes look at no one, and looking, we turn away from the broken, the human passion, to form in a sublime dream, unreal, apex in some space somewhere. Whoever walks through the gallery's high marble archway sees his head, solitary and solemn, very center of the room and sky through windows; this is Gaudier's cold aspect, folded skull at once homeric rigor though something still undone and possibly dangerous. Is the mountainous forehead proud? Perhaps. Yet in outright and unforgiving denial of tenderness, the imperfect, fallible, to find some remote idea, star, or other imagination: a shape of flesh covers the alien bone and the seeming lower lip disappears, we might think bitten softly in contemplation between invisible teeth, and a hard jaw set thinking the impossible. We are unforgiven and denied, in our absolute terror amazed at what arc crosses the absolute stars. There is a draft of sunlight. A hand passes along and over a heavenly shape, and as it feels carefully this hand finds mute stone. Miró at the Guggenheim 8.13.87 the hair line across the eye, the red sun, these are the creatures of the air who dance and cajole . these things are to be loved, sight to which we cling as precious filaments of the blue enormous sky . The Clocks in the British Museum 8.5.86 We'll probably never know who made that first clock — this is natural and right — nor when, precisely. Likely a German or English exactitude. Huge pendants of a clock hang seemingly still behind and above it in its own huge room, a clock for keeping time, room to keep it, hold it for how long? Weights keep the clock going, their balance — it's the old music of the spheres — as if with a kind of deliberation these cumbersome moments, the pieces of time held by the planet's turning, slowly and heavily, weight on the wheel to feel it. No counting ever until a human's stops and starts. Out of the bitter medieval rood these numbers we agree hold meaning, since Copernicus, earth turning and falling through the dark heaven and yet heaven still there to hang our pendant world on its silver chain. Musée Picasso 7.28.86 Was this his house? There is a broad courtyard full of white sun today, and high stone walls — inside the paintings and sculptures and scribblings must have been once collected quite differently, half women and bulls on canvases stacked one behind the other, perhaps, all eyes and breasts, shoulders, and vaginas: here form is understood in shattered hours, part icons, sculptures gathered in a room, a corner, facing one way or another from each other yet not facing us necessarily. Facing facing. Among them now we read his biography on the walls and the arranged art-historical comments. Anyway, who was this artist? We see his paroxysm of labor — the work is everywhere. When did he ever find the time to fuck all those women? There were of course several wives with whom he must have fashioned a kind of religious love-making, as if his aching took him, without reason, elsewhere, to a woman, and they must have taken each other savagely and with much care. Making the Bed for D. summer country. in the morning the leaves bend to the window & fold the house in . mountains & sun . i fold the blankets, hand smooth. When you're here i know it. The sun crosses the hand's breadth - & in your face the unenterable image. under your eyelids night unfolds. Pull the blanket over you and with it the evening air . Cummington, Massachusetts, August 1988 Doisneau's Ballade pour violoncelle But you —how slight — do: — Louis Zukofsky 1. little hands that hold mine — ten months, now you'll walk. 2. rock together in the rocking chair, cool wind 3 AM 3. — above us the solitary figure, his instrument, traversing Brooklyn Bridge 4. photograph of the real (Doisneau's slight metaphor in the strings) 5. listen. there is the empty street 6. each step you turn. Who's there? Rock to sleep, pat my back, little pats. 7. The wind, the towering pylons and cables engulf the figure — 8. as if we're all alone, each of us. In sleep the clear music persists. — 1991 The End of Nature I tell you death, expect no smile of pride from me. I bring you nothing in my empty hands — William Bronk There are integers, a life's breathing in and out. The lead story in the paper reads: "An End To Nature." Inevitable reports of the known world falling through the window of faith are said to be plausible — sure as our hands or eyes. In the blue clarity of the air Augustine once read the world as if it were a book in hand, at arm's length. This grammar of sinew and bone is still our only language — a celestial bell severing the eternal night. Rodin thought of hands, and shaped them, clasped, ungrasping, one in the other. The day folds into night — and then the unfolding into the bright realm of the day star, who rules mercilessly and forces the marriage of earth and the pale moon. Naked humans, small and frail, reach out to the lighted world from within their single certainty, le main de dieu. This is the sculpted world, held against the sky — the world in hand. There are counter souls we think to call to, beloved, other. Think of Yeats and his Dante. We are our own hic and ille. What can I name, what story tell my opposite — unseen, a hand before my face? In the vast museum I feel for you. Sightless, we'll go the way alone, hand in hand. 1/31 Moravia, New York The lily's charm is not its colors but how it floats, as if free, upon the pond's dark surface. We make our way over his wooden bridge and then pass the shrubs and flowers he planted, arranged just so to paint. How carefully the pigment would be placed, how gradually the world — its daily businesses — would become still and deep. 5.2.87 Waiting for Diane at the Klee Show / Museum of Modern Art If in the space there are 2 lines, let one be the wild happiness the edge measures . And if there are faces, we are their round eyes, or the hat the foot the finger all the lighted extremities there . If in the warm light we must be them, then we must be them. Let the o in oh you mean we are here beyond any form . from Musaics, Spuyten Duyvil Books © 1992 by Burt Kimmelman Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry Return to Burt Kimmelman Survey Return to Light and Dust