Bodies, The. Christopher Sindt

To Partake of the Body

       Form of

       Supply

       Song

       Lesson in the Scientific Method

       The Circle

       Experiments in Respiration

       Some Naturalists

       What Use

       Mighty Activities

      

       Beginning with a Line by Ezra Pound

       Beginning with a Sentence by C.P. Dadant, First Lessons in Beekeeping

       Beginning with a Line by Jackson Mac Low

       Dispersing Surface

       Beneath the bridge: duckweed

      

       Ending with a Passage from Exodus

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       Free Verse Editions

      All things that are found on the earth go by the names of elements of natural [bodies].

      —Carl Linnaeus

      Each art must use its tools; each soul its body.

      —Aristotle

      Beginning with a Line from Exodus

      And daubed it with slime

      and pitch, and put the child therein.

      A particular pitch, a daring

      daub, he floated

      among the cradles,

      he floated to. Remember

      the bodies

      and a bauble, selved

      with slime and pitch.

      The child floated to.

      Sinecured

      to false heavenly, a birth

      mark. To be a

      possibility therein, pirated

      pitch, a version.

      Locusts come later; now,

      he looks like someone’s

      child there among

      the rushes. To be

      daubed, appear as

      what he’s done.

      Coast Live Oak

      The oak has a language in it.

      A buzz, a veiling buzz

      insists on the I wish.

      If you wish, the oak is buzzing, not

      from swarming, simply alarming,

      the dogs inflecting

      inside their boxes and chains.

      Listen, listen through.

      I have lost the I have.

      I carry a card to unlock forbiddens,

      a silent card that screams.

      In the true heart of Sunday

      the grass reforms its composite

      self, screaming menace,

      claimed in substrate,

      the step-

      child of the Chronicler.

      It won’t speak grammatically.

      It will impose green throughout

      and lie down for the mower again.

      (She is remembered

      only in daydreams, never

      in speech, never around the students,

      never at the ballpark while the players

      trot the bases before the game.)

      These flat recollections of events

      rarely feel like living.

      And these children

      bombing and standing beneath bombs.

      This secretary,

      these defenses

      and this televised citizenry.

      This oak and its technicolor translation.

      Hayward Marshlands

      Star was darting, prying specs of light along levees. Hear me here tomorrow and the next day, get the body in place. And everything that follows: calf, nape, and small. Let the bodies be assembled along levees, let them make salt.

      Past the recycling plant, past the blasted shoreline. In the broken made world, words fall between us.

      Airplanes on their southern approach to Oakland, concrete wind, a grey sheet. Shy and pneumatic, the distance between shore and shore. The glance can’t fix underwater, even in the shallows. When I knew you best, you were crying straight, but usually you were darting and masking. Hear me tomorrow in the red marsh grass. We will agree, and the water will be different, slightly on the surface and slightly underneath, driftwood.

      Beginning with a Line by Rilke

      Just once; no more

      The ash

      And its competent leaves

      Just once

      Above the wetland

      Once the ridge

      Laden, no more

      Fog as flower

      No more

      The baying Holsteins

      How the sun

      Closes, happy

      The ash, happy

      The holsteins no more

      Heron are you happy

      Heron