Such animals as
All over word
wish
if
after
It alters
or: its afters’ only altar with such minute meanders
we know it changed her, that she left altered
that she lived altered and left here
is all there is of the animal. It’s almost locked in place, a pacing and a perpendicular heaven that hasn’t, that has not, that does not have
fish chameleon wasp weather must
winter the horse, the housing of the carp, carapace of concern concerning her concentric love for vermin, the ermine, the asp. Wasp won’t thee but will will:
forgetting that there is in woman
a quality of mind
which as an instinctive manifestation
is unsafe,
and wonders just for whom, what him, and how soon
but that it would
soon
turn.
I think we love people for what they love. Ms. M. and her pocket zoo, heart made of zippers, opening out like one of those makeup cases women take travelling that expand in all directions at once. Consider the opossum. I can’t picture Marianne Moore wearing makeup. Ms. Moore did not wear makeup. Consider the horse, the mouse, the house that gets contorted into a heart. Ms. Moore did not go in much for travel. A few times to Europe, a few times west and her hat there at the end of her hand and her hand, all hasp
to so many perhaps you know first
what the creature’s named and then you hold—how many of them had she held. Not the giraffe, the elephant, the bat in broad daylight, the bat, all mouse with its own elaborated house and its own horse and out there in the sun.
1.: Early on, invented forms. Take, for instance, the fish.: wade/ through black jade/an/injured fan.
Precise, planned to step like a spine, so rigorous and diligence never counts but exactly knows. To be read whole or first “lines” only or the first two. At times caving/curving in, symmetrically, like the spine of a well-read book seen end-on: “Injudicious Gardening,” “To a Chameleon” or steadily, unpredictably laddering, “Critics and Connoisseurs,” “To the Peacock of France.” Let it precise, pare off any end and in it nip.
“I was trying to be honorable and not steal things.”
(is governed by gravity)
“Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.”
(like symmetry)
if honor be
exactitude, an implication of biology and warily, a splice of light that spares the selves, the pares the rest to emergent else. Where then find strife? And what then bind through stealth?
2.: Rhyme, wound tight; spring in the step, fight in the clock and often off: “craven/frighten/certain”; “waist/crest”; they tighten: “star/ hair”; “enough/proof”; “faith/death.” Again, whose and yes, we get it but whom? (the proof was partial and the faith given conquered:
God be praised for conquering faith … 2.5: “I like Gilbert & Sullivan.” Inseparable directions
with unequal determinance and inclinations that will not rest innumerous. Will conquer us. G. M. Hopkins brings in tea. How often do you think she had tea? I’ve always thought frequently, but now feel I may be or at least must have been entirely mistrued. She could have done anything with the butt ends of her afternoons.
She haunted the Brooklyn Zoo. This we know. But we don’t know what she thought. How much was shock. It should have been all and it was, if nothing else, not.
Octopus.
Snail.
Eight-fold
Owl.
Mouse-skin bellows.
Ostrich.
Ghost.
Cast an own. Come an ox. Add a wild (a feral) truce, a Persian thought, an undefined Bordeaux.
Holding equal court with Ben Jonson, Jackie Robinson, Captain John Smith and Melchior Vulpius.
She was angrier than you would have thought from the pictures. Some spare feminist constructions and “To Military Progress” and perfectly happy in New York.
we’ve grown all apart
though half the word is after
when asked at the age of 20
what she’d like to be, answered
a painter.
gold thread from straw and have heard men say:
“There is a feminine temperament in direct contrast to ours,
which makes her do these things. shift of chin, the eye
slips on. someone enters the library in a wedge of light,
a shower of dust [If I, like Solomon, …
could have my wish—
“What I write, as I have said before, could only be called poetry because there is no other category in which to put it.”
I was recently reading an essay in which the author went to great length to establish Marianne Moore as an “American poet”—or rather was using her particularities, her eccentricities really (which should have defeated his point right there), to sketch a floorplan of “American-ness.” I wonder if she would have noticed, thought it mattered, thought it existed. Liked England, it’s said. Oh yes. (My brother, the doctor … ) (My mother, the dead.) It’s its hardness, all that solid ground, the concrete both and not metaphorical that’s supposed to be so American, the quick twist, brisk thrust, trust. She moved through her world on trust. Who would ever know if this (what am I saying) is truth or just, or if the air in Sweden is sweeter as she says or if the ermine really would rather be dead
than spotted.
Chameleon.
Fire laid upon
She’s walking across a room.
an emerald as long as an ire.
She’s walking across a room with an inverted glass in her hand and in the glass, a spider, escorting it “home,” sealed at the bottom, of course, with a postcard.
From whom. A three-cornered hat. A hat with three corners that, in my mind
she is always connected with Joseph Cornell. It’s the love of things that’s common. Or the love of the loss of as well as the loss of and the sense of love as an intransitive verb. Collect cows, dolls, matchbooks, matches, spiders, crows, I think she had a “thing” about “home.”
She’s walking across a room. It’s dinnertime. Who are the logical (the inevitable) guests? Table for four. She says she said: Joseph Cornell, Emily Dickinson, Gerard de Nerval and Marianne Moore. But Marianne is late tonight, more spiders than usual or the elephants uncommonly insistent. Natural habitat: botanical gardens, dimestores (Joe at elbow, suggesting this or that). Definitely the type to poise rubber snakes in cupboards, laundry baskets. Tried it on E. Dickinson, who cried when she touched it and found it wasn’t real.
But sound curved
a hand
holding a hand that’s holding a hand. What do you call them?
“Experiments in rhythm, exercises in composition.”
and what do you mean by enough.
Let us.
3.: for love that will gaze an eagle blind. If blindness be fusion, there and only there was decision. Note in the above quotation the invention of the verb. Animals with moving fur. The blur of animals in motion. Blinding. If sight incites distinction, discretion, dissection. (Gerard is shaking his head, saying, “no, this is not a pet,” and “I think you understand.”)
what we have here built
(in which there are hounds with waists
I must not wish
it comes to this
lit
with piercing glances into the life of things
“My interest in La Fontaine originated entirely independent of content.”
I have always wanted to enter
a room and find the animals
already there and staring
out the windows.
(Every mind is a house.
(Who did you let
did you
answer the
in/door we invent new animals in our
most desperate moments that dissolve on solid ground
one found
one had fed
and had therefore led the life of
(anything you feed you will come to love) giraffe, antelope,
egret, absent,
pear
where
are you going my going what are you doing to the door?
What snow? No, let us.