536 Philosophy poems

An open door says, “Come in.” A shut door says, “Who are you?” Shadows and ghosts go through shut doors. If a door is shut and you want it shut, why open it? If a door is open and you want it open, why shut it? Doors forget but only doors know what it is doors forget.

I know the planet Earth is ’bout to explode. Kind of hope that no one saves it. We only grow from anguish. — Mac Miller In the likely event of galactic calamity — our sun’s hydrogen reserves fused through, the star-turned-red-giant bloating as do our corpses — you will require flames. Between the solar shockwave and Earth’s rattling — an opaque interval — you must stare, but we people prior will have left no crude fluid for ignition, for light, having tapped this rock to gorge our bellies to petroleum ache. Perhaps you will have evolved — blood supplemented with Edison and Tesla’s currents, half your body fed by generators that slow-cure your biomass or waste. Maybe you will be self-luminous. But if you are still — like we, like me — a mere meat-pod fated to watch Mercury and Venus engulfed, surely you hold designs for an interplanetary ark. Anticipate humanity’s years spent adrift in the dark liquor of space — lost within hibernation and missing mother- planet, further estranged from all revelation of how we came to be. From this unproven vantage point (inside our history with no solid alpha), I claim to pity your inherited task — to catalog the last telluric pulse, close the case of man as now known. But beneath my softened hide, I’m envious. All of our missteps as shepherds, all the graffiti eclipsing our souls, all of it will cinder and you will view this erasure from your Mars-bound barge. You will know the phenomenon that is judgment, see it real-time as prophets allegedly witnessed. Man will never have beheld a clearer beacon to be reborn —

What I’ve come to discuss is mostly about shadows and the airs left behind in caring, discarding, the long inhibitions of whereso and when. Alabaster, a dark quire, in its many pages and premises the maze, from which move tendrilled purples and contusions, magnificent fuchsia receivers of false content, the splayed flower, arterial, like the premise of a door is where it leads to or from. Communication of vessel, vial, capsule, hull, a tiniest nil fires the neurons from their swooning stall, is not a healing but adaptation to same a quickening in deleting of sensation a prior sizing. Stacked leaves (green shadows) are givens in the columned garden, what work is needed to determine that shape? Some hysteric trope of repetition, rage for accretion, dazed by its own mute replication, like the minute lines of a hand. They are its cries (writes Ponge, among others), the tongue inseparable from its utterance (langue). We weep to hear it, a language forgot. I was saying I keep speaking from some chamber sound deleted, which is why I never call or write. In that theatre are many eclipses and moons refracted in pinholes and wheels wherein revolve astonished birds, and the Queen of Night sleeps a rest restorative and profitable, and andante allegro, the dead ships never sail.

Where am I today? The dangers, all, with their appliance, hickishly gamey, pitchfork-high the heavensfallow hoisted, the losses, chalkmouthed—you upright mouths, you tables!— in the disangled town, harnessed to glimmerhackneys, —goldtrace, counterheaved goldtrace!—, the bridges, overjoyed by the stream, love, up there in the branch, niggling at the coming-escaping the Great Light elevated to a spark, on the right of the rings and all gain.

I ran up six flights of stairs to my small furnished room opened the window and began throwing out those things most important in life First to go, Truth, squealing like a fink: “Don’t! I’ll tell awful things about you!” “Oh yeah? Well, I’ve nothing to hide ... OUT!” Then went God, glowering & whimpering in amazement: “It’s not my fault! I’m not the cause of it all!” “OUT!” Then Love, cooing bribes: “You’ll never know impotency! All the girls on Vogue covers, all yours!” I pushed her fat ass out and screamed: “You always end up a bummer!” I picked up Faith Hope Charity all three clinging together: “Without us you’ll surely die!” “With you I’m going nuts! Goodbye!” Then Beauty ... ah, Beauty— As I led her to the window I told her: “You I loved best in life ... but you’re a killer; Beauty kills!” Not really meaning to drop her I immediately ran downstairs getting there just in time to catch her “You saved me!” she cried I put her down and told her: “Move on.” Went back up those six flights went to the money there was no money to throw out. The only thing left in the room was Death hiding beneath the kitchen sink: “I’m not real!” It cried “I’m just a rumor spread by life ... ” Laughing I threw it out, kitchen sink and all and suddenly realized Humor was all that was left— All I could do with Humor was to say: “Out the window with the window!”

Amazing to believe that nothingness Surrounds us with delight and lets us be, And that the meekness of nonentity, Despite the friction of the world of sense, Despite the leveling of violence, Is all that matters. All the energy We force into the matchhead and the city Explodes inside a loving emptiness. Not Dante’s rings, not the Zen zero’s mouth, Out of which comes and into which light goes, This God recedes from every metaphor, Turns the hardest data into untruth, And fills all blanks with blankness. This love shows Itself in absence, which the stars adore.

One of us is a faucet reconciling to the temperature of indifference. This is the world: the drawer assembled by you pinches a finger before yielding. There are so many foreigners here, I said, when I first stepped onto a beach in Virginia. I had an idea of the ocean, and of who I was. I am in water now, attempting to see the ocean. We lick our wounds with the same tongue. Long accustomed to carrying a gauze for shield, the heart wraps bruises like dumplings. I see the sun through my neighbour's window, whelked in lace. Is this what we mean when we use the word "virtual"? Tulips grow even after they're cut. The ones I loved, having died without returning, crowd the heart's waiting room. To start all over again is to imagine the world is, as it is. I give up; I thought this was a poem about nation, the one she began at nineteen. The one she waits to return to: her eyes never adjusting to the colors of exile. This antechamber; this long incision called hope. Last night I crossed to the other side, unwelcome territory. I might have been sad. My broke heart. I'd been observing then, the sun's influence, subjugated by streetlights imitating moonlight. Even the sun softens, (I had thought to myself) to bring every image in view as a memory of some other place, some other text. Last night, I slept in a borrowed bed for guests I anticipated, as host to self's solitary marriage. I examined the world, thus altered. Later, standing at the precipice, I awoke. Even sleep did not take me back. And the signal—being green—I walked.

i

Though there's no such thing as a "self," I missed it— the fiction of it and how I felt believing in it mildly like a book an old love sent with an inscription in his hand, whatever it meant, After such knowledge, what forgiveness . . . —the script of it like the way my self felt learning German words by chance— Mitgefühl, Unheimlichkeit —and the trailing off that happened because I knew only the feelings, abstract and international, like ghosts or connotations lacking a grammar, a place to go: this was the way my self felt when it started falling apart: each piece of it clipped from a garden vaguely remembered by somebody unrecognizable— such a strange bouquet that somebody sent to nobody else, a syntax of blossoms.

To begin with, I am faced with mountains to circumambulate, since I can't cut through them I enter the folds of a human adventure On every door there hangs a figurehead and this one comes to face me as the door swings shut I will proceed with good will—the best of wills—anxiously Bird of daughters, bird flying from the forks, the blurbs, the serials, the time I saw a golden tadpole, eating apple jam; I saw a sudden whirlpool, sucking down a ham The boughs groan with fruit, an apple falls—false alarm It’s a non-sequitur—that Sense data sinks The muscles give out mid-word and a thief stutters while accusing me (his uncle) of theft Lune comes along mounted on a beast called That who is neither more nor less than a horse as obedient to Lune as the tides are to the moon Shot of men hurrying toward each other at an intersection with open umbrellas none willing to give way to the others, shot of placid camels kneeling near a chained dog, shot of sugar maples temporarily obscured by falling snow Tomorrow morning, unless things vastly improve, I’ll go in person to the front of the caravan and take it over the mountain I thought I saw an earthworm, stirring in the dirt, then I saw it was a sadist, wielding a quirt