Leader of Legions of Literary Lunatics by Mike Davis
“Radio”
by
Tom Clark
Don’t hurt the radio for
Against all
Solid testimony machines
Have feelings
Too
Brush past it lightly
With a fine regard
For allowing its molecules
To remain 100% intact
Machines can think like Wittgenstein
And the radio’s a machine
Thinking softly to itself
Of the Midnight Flower
As her tawny parts unfold
In slow motion the boat
Rocks on the ocean
As her tawny parts unfold
The radio does something mental
To itself singingly
As her tawny parts unfold
Inside its wires
And steal away its heart
Two minutes after eleven
The color dream communicates itself
The ink falls on the paper as if magically
The scalp falls away
A pain is felt
Deep in the radio
I take out my larynx and put it on the blue chair
And do my dance for the radio
It’s my dance in which I kneel in front of the radio
And while remaining motionless elsewise
Force my eyeballs to come as close together as possible
While uttering a horrible and foreign word
Which I cannot repeat to you without now removing my larynx
And placing it on the blue chair
The blue chair isn’t here
So I can’t do that trick at the present time
The radio is thinking a few licks of its own
Pianistic thoughts attuned to tomorrow’s grammar
Beautiful spas of seltzery coition
Plucked notes like sandpaper attacked by Woody Woodpecker
The radio says Edwardian farmers from Minnesota march on the Mafia
Armed with millions of radioactive poker chips
The radio fears foul play
It turns impersonal
A piggy bank was smashed
A victim was found naked
Radio how can you tell me this
In such a chipper tone
Your structure of voices is a friend
The best kind
The kind one can turn on or off
Whenever one wants to
But that is wrong I know
For you will intensely to continue
And in a deeper way
You do
Hours go by
And I watch you
As you diligently apply
A series of audible frequencies
To tiny receptors
Located inside my cranium
Resulting in much pleasure for someone
Who looks like me
Although he is seated about two inches to my left
And the both of us
Are listening to your every word
With a weird misapprehension
It’s the last of the tenth
And Harmon Killebrew is up
With a man aboard
He blasts a game-winning home run
The 559th of his career
But no one cares
Because the broadcast is studio-monitored for taping
To be replayed in 212 years
Heaven must be like this, radio
To not care about anything
Because it’s all being taped for replay much later
Heaven must be like this
For as her tawny parts unfold
The small lights swim roseate
As if of sepals were the tarp made
As it is invisibly unrolled
And sundown gasps its old Ray Charles 45 of Georgia
Only through your voice
Last Look Mirror, 2017 by Eric Fischl (b. 1948)
Drawing by Father Christmas of the Aurora Borealis, 1926 by J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973).
From The Morgan Library & Museum’s exhibition “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth.”
Mistletoe, 1930 by Gertrude Hermes (1901–1983)
Woman Reading with Peaches, 1923 by– Henri Matisse (1869–1954)
Untitled by Francine van Hove (b. 1942)
Skeleton Party, 1954 by Edward Burra (1905–1976)
Courtesan, 1945 by Leslie Hurry (1909–1978)
Jonathan Buckley’s novel The Great Concert of the Night is forthcoming from NYRB early next year (like, in a few weeks). NYRB’s blurb:
David has just spent New Year’s Eve alone, watching Le Grand Concert de la Nuit, a film in which his former lover Imogen starred. In the early hours of the new year, consoled and tormented by her ethereal presence, he begins to write. What follows is a brilliantly various journal, chronicling a year in the life of a thinking man. David works as a curator at the ailing Sanderson-Perceval Museum in southern England, whose small collection of porcelain, musical instruments, crystals, velvet mushrooms, and glass jellyfish is as eccentric and idiosyncratic as the long-dead collectors’ tastes. David himself is a connoisseur of the derelict and nonutilitarian, of objects removed from the flow of time. Refusing the imposed order of a straightforward chronology, his journal moves fluidly back and forth in time, filled with fragments of life remembered, imagined, and recorded, from memories of his past life with Imogen or with his ex-wife, Samantha, to reflections on the lives and relics of female saints or the history of medicine. There are quotations from Seneca, Meister Eckhart, and the Goncourt brothers mixed in with the equally compelling imagined words of fictional film directors, actors, and, always, the fascinating Imogen, who is alive now only “in the perpetual present of the sentence.” In The Great Concert of the Night, Jonathan Buckley expertly interweaves sexual despair, cultural critique, the plot lines of one man’s quietly brilliant life, and the problems and paradoxes of writing, especially writing about and to the dead.
A Jan Steen Kitchen, 1996 by Jonathan Leaman (b. 1954)
Reclining Man, 2017 by Mitchell Villa
Blue Bird, 1918 by Konstantin Somov
“The Yellow Rose”
by
Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Andrew Hurley
It was neither that afternoon nor the next that Giambattista Marino died— that illustrious man proclaimed by the unanimous mouths of Fame (to use an image that was dear to him) as the new Homer or the new Dante—and yet the motionless and silent act that took place that afternoon was, in fact, the last thing that happened in his life. His brow laureled with years and glory, the man died in a vast Spanish bed with carven pillars. It costs us nothing to picture a serene balcony a few steps away, looking out toward the west, and, below, marbles and laurels and a garden whose terraced steps are mirrored in a rectangular pool. In a goblet, a woman has set a yellow rose; the man murmurs the inevitable lines of poetry that even he, to tell the truth, is a bit tired of by now:
Porpora de’giardin, pompa de’prato,
Gemmadi primavera, occhio d’aprile…
Then the revelation occurred. Marino saw the rose, as Adam had seen it in Paradise, and he realized that it lay within its own eternity, not within his words, and that we might speakabout the rose, allude to it, but never truly express it, and that the tall, haughty volumes that made a golden dimness in the corner of his room were not (as his vanity had dreamed them) a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world’s contents.
Marino achieved that epiphany on the eve of his death, and Homer and Dante may have achieved it as well.
Coffee, 2006 by Christian Brandl (b. 1970)
Biblioklept 