536 Philosophy poems

When you think about it, mostly, a cage is air — so what is there to be afraid of? A cage of air. Baudelaire said Poe thought America was one giant cage. To the poet, a nation is one big cage? And isn’t the nation mostly filled with air? Try to put a cage around your dream. The cage escapes the dream. I see it streak and stream.

Nobody was left who’d lastly scuffed first earth’s crust. Boiling sea had thin-sheened each cubit of firmament. Mountains ceased to assert, gave into ground arounding whatever hard rock to then there over and take down. All shapes breaking hysterical particles and subs who settled devoting former whir of shape to Silence, which was enough. It stayed uniform Silent for some many months which strengthened to pull outer space noise in to neutralize but lost its grip. So this Sound hard-pressed in to sink holes and look into original force that was still shut in under black lacquer cabinetry: our future perfect world. It opened the door of dust, the space sound picked up pings distantly. Seeing to sound is what and how Bounceback. Since the dust so still and small the waves skinnied high-pitched to switch on resistance of an average mote. What would stand to receive? What was the point of pointing out resisting decay? What was there to say? Could anything be activated? Much was strained in “done” state and so sought exit through the soft Silence under rather than he stabbed by the point-cornered Silence above. So sound deranged to be needle pierce to dust piece and sunned a word heard first by the bygone (“ouch”). And the Silence startled by the sneaking sound forgot its own high ground and grumbled some rebuke. Underground glad particulates laughed at the gaff and expanded (something among it a voice) to sweep up what had been PART TWO One in Dust begun. One chased out to Perceptivity from mum. This made an in as such that could close over after outreach which comes back with something to say. Stretching comes to the zone where there is shifting from mixing its own x-space with outside sensed data. Each already edgy piece in “earshot” each piece pulled in by dust’s desire to harbor more is similar to dolphin noise. Riffs that began off flats of static, f.p. earth (future perfect), etched by rust-hinged sound. Not all dust took in. Those who did not got ultra dense. If there was a strike to one of this specie sparks would be three feet at least and atoms unleash. To them strikes relieve adhesion. They like hits from nowhere; they won’t admit they are hard in every space. But sparks in dark if an eye sees them a mouth to say how beautiful a light of such blue that lasts and deepens blue. Shaped like a pin, each spark alights to hold itself, elsewhere, down. What it lands on is to remember the spark beautiful. A spark from Hard Silence made mad. The more made makes it harder which gets hit and flies further because it is harder. PART THREE Minute care is taken so that soft expansive dust gets all over the dense. Colors change as comes collision. They want to do all they can now that they can. Hopefully they don’t know about the deep frozen people in orbit. Those on the figurative shelf until there is a proper place. More on that after the fire; for now: the Sound, the Nerve, the Building.

What hand opened the door, I don't know. No one lives there in winter. And I don't know if it was for entrance or for exit that the place opened itself, or was opened, though I do know what boundaries were broken. The lake lay frozen, the sky still as folded wings. And everywhere snow blown into the rooms, strewn across the braided rugs and knotty boards, under chairs, creeping like a slow cold tide, white and silent, out of its element with greed. Then I remembered the photograph, black and white, as old as me or older. What eye watched that scene, taking it in, shameless, I don't know, though I do know that boundaries were broken: A woman, her grey dress blowing toward land, lost on the shore in the dim light of her long day's end, and a man, farther up the beach, alone. The sea— mute, infinite entity—taking in its borders hungrily; and the stolen child it drank up when each entered the other in a moment of dropped vigilance. In this kind of world no blueprint instructs us how to house what we love against the winds of loss. The woman, the man, their child gone—slipped from the safe home of their love, swallowed whole. I am not going to try to feel what that woman felt, or to speak with her voice. I don't know what she did next or how she did what she did next. She is the mother, my fear, all the love ever lost to grief. Her pain is an ocean vaster than planets, a diaspora of longing flung to all four flogging winds. In her life, I am sure that time drifted past her, with her, within her. I know that that summer, like all summers, moved on through the fall into winter, that the shore closed up, abandoned, cold. And that the thing lost still blows through us, the swollen door no longer shuts.

If we meet each other in Hell it’s not Hell. — Geoffrey Hill i How is it I can never find Or call to mind One image of Christ walking slowly in the rain, In a steady, gentle rain, The kind that shapes an afterimage Just for a moment of the man Like a cloak of shadow following Or like a blank page After it’s been turned? The dead are concealed from us But not distorted by the rain. They remember our having remembered. A woman curls up on the sofa. Years before the fact she sleeps Her death and drapes it Even now, exactly as she must. Just after dawn, In the wren’s eye There are no blossoms left in the trees, And yet the sunlight blazons white New flowers onto every leaf. The wren’s eye gorges itself, Bursting the new life. The memory of a tree is the tree. Christ could fly. Impale upon him certain words Good as Greek For the impulse of the earth is to seek A language of flowers That do not die, turning A hair’s breadth toward us Even now, exactly as they must. If it was justice I saw Fall from the sun Onto boys ruining the one Flower shared between them, So be it. The woman on the sofa wears a little wing In her sleep. When she awakes, Its twin will be the wren in the dream Nearly there, nearly all the way There into the human day. Rain falls out of brilliant sunshine. For a moment, her window Fills with catastrophe, boys Torn apart and scattered, white petals Blackening the glass, Exacting recent justice. So strange that the recent past, As chaste As antiquity, as the orangery Of a blind eye, should at once appear Preposterous Yet achingly tender. Modern times are too cautious. The boyish, florid love of catastrophe Has thrust a fist into the dawn, And the scent of that fist, Whose citron betters daylight, Is wasted on modern times. Not long ago, you and I Nearly captured a wren. Christ lifted His face then, And rain fell all day until evening. ii In a corner of my garden, there is a spider’s web Entirely armored in rose petals broken off by rain. The spider will learn to eat roses, or he will starve to death. This is political economy for modern times. The planet dies. The planet starves its cruel interiors First, with a blazon of colors and soft poetry. Next, It apportions one small bird to every tree and sets fire To the trees. The rest is the cold business of the oceans Who have never forgiven us for breathing air. Homer was tempted. Loose thighs of oblivion Welcomed humanity away from itself and from life, And only one of the Bronze-Age host refused that welcome. He was the father of starvation, entirely armored In the disguise of a real man, destroyer of oceans. We have made ugly war upon distinctions. Canon bleeds a wedding into the gigue, and “when I try to imagine a faultless love or” the seedtime Of my deepest convictions — that the soul is immortal, That a woman couched upon a fragile little wing Created the creator of the universe — thought, Or rather the entire machinery of truth and terror Usurps a newborn king, i.e. imagination. Phaedrus, step down. There is a little wing wearing sunshine Like wind in the white hair of the bee you never imagined. An infinitesimal distance goes on forever. At the moment of death, the light hand of Attic stele Softly lights upon the shoulder of eternity, And thought yields to flesh and flesh yields to imagination, Sexing this or that unimaginable creation With new hair. It makes a difference. We are bound to one another And to God by harrowing, albeit helpless distinctions, Impossible to bridge, imperative to love well. We are free, but briefly. The pattern of a leaf branches Out from human hearts, and the blood spills Into the pattern a stone makes crashing into windshields. God follows. The wrist and wing of the beloved follow Close behind, and not even Hell prevails against This new extinction. Slow time is the beginning Of no time at all. The light hand of Attic stele Wrests me from the sleep I’d imagined life to be — The walking stone, the irreparable Gethsemane — And I am awake, wearing a green flesh newly fashioned From my heart. coda Should the bird outlast the blossom in the tree? Keep faith, but keep it silently, Starveling. I keenly remember there were two of us, And a stand of poplars like a kiss Quavering Upon the shade of the earth where no earth was Ready to bear the weight of us Relinquishing Soul for substance, pistil of white campion For color, continuance and one Unbelieving Substance of perfect memory. There were no trees. The sun was shining.

In the dark we disappear, pure being. Our mirror images, impure being. Being and becoming (Heidegger), being and nothingness (Sartre)—which is purer being? Being alone is no way to be: thus loneliness is the test of pure being. Nights in love I fell too far or not quite far enough—one pure, one impure being. Clouds, snow, mist, the dragon's breath on water, smoke from fire—a metaphor's pure being. Stillness and more stillness and the light locked deep inside—both pure and impure being. Is is the verb of being, I the noun— or pronoun for the purists of being. I was, I am, I looked within and saw nothing very clearly: purest being.

the Platonic idea is “not only beauty, truth, and goodness,” but “the heavenly bed, created by God … a heavenly man, a heavenly dog, a heavenly cat, and so on …” Bertrand Russell We’re not all lesbians at this bar and grill (not yet? not practicing? only in heart?),chiaroscuro as the room is with expensive ambiance and dear cuts of meat and fish overlaid with nouveau fruit sauce, it’s clear that the most manly woman among us, older, wearing cowboy boots and a turquoise bolo, is probably neither entirely straight nor wholly queer. When she begins to confess her ‘secret’— it’s her holding of a piece of land, acres of sweet desert; its muddy roads, its remote sublime have four-wheeled deep into her being. She’s probably someone’s heavenly grandmother, as I’m still someone’s heavenly wife, despite the separation.Appearance does not really appear, but it appears to appear, yet, for a moment, it seems our conversation may open up unexpectedly or shatter into awkwardness over the word girlfriends: who in the rainy summers of our youths, we all played with our girlfriends, (what do I mean by ‘girlfriend?’ what do you mean by yours?) It’s only then, as one of the younger women (the most lovely, so silver with bracelets and earrings and a noticeable ring) laughs that I begin to guess her inclination,Does it really appear to appear, or only apparently appear to appear? It’s a long way from Plato’s symposium to this bar and grill in Arizona. At that ancient feast— whenever a number of individuals have a common name, they have also a common ‘idea’ or ‘form’— only men reclined upon the couches, and the only the love of man for man was love’s ideal, the impulse toward some boyish form becoming the ascension of being to some ever truer realm, as the souls of men became pregnant and gave birth to “not only beauty, truth, and goodness,” but “the heavenly bed, created by God… a heavenly man, a heavenly dog, a heavenly cat, and so on through a whole Noah’s ark,” but no heavenly woman, much less a heavenly lesbian, for since Aristotle, “Lesbian rule” has meant that measure made of lead so it could be bent to a curved or crooked wall. Because we are all women, how can we speak of love? In the beginning, banished from the realm of discourse, assigned to love’s servitude not its speech, to be love’s body not its tongue, so no one here speaks of her feeling, much less thinks to make it another’s measure. In our mouths, the tongue’s a knife, each word a wild edge, where we stammer only our own wound, a drop of blood sensual on the tongue, a distinctive taste of salt, more mollusk perhaps—wrapped around an I of sand— than pearl, a syllable of milk or nipple, some private body within the body, the you behind your eyes, as if being itself were poetry—passionate with nascent and protean neologism, full of the gaps of being, the oblique richness of a depth in which we begin to glimpse each other, mysterious and solo as we are, black stubborn pearls of being. If we spoke of Plato, and we don’t; each of us was banished from the womb by virtue of having a womb, to this unpredictable realm where each of us would have to discover her self, that wild tongue—never delineated, even in shadow, upon the philosopher’s cave wall.

"light which is not sum" —Norma Cole, Mars The workaround or aura Not like repetition When we get to the final sun The maps are water the water gold He would not honor me You explain then against The disbelief displayed by the character I couldn’t know him But knew love and Know it through knowledge “Love never falls off whether prophecies will be abolished whether tongues stopped” Announced as the fact Redolent of what was The defining addition More than the parts Unprecedented Ardor also not Adding up to Sun or son to sum The outcome Unknowable Perfect and Unavowed The same sound Unknown sum

We say lightning has no wings when it slides down our houses We say loss is just a condition we acquire to bury our pity further We say the bleeding hands on the table filled with red wine imported products and passports are just reminders of who we have become We have no titles no birthright no groves or Shakespeare to return to We apologize for the fear growing out of our ribs Apologize for the numbers still etched on our tongues

Speciously individual like a solid piece of spit floating in a cuspidor I dream of free bravery but am a social being. I should do something to get out of here but float around in the culture wondering what it will grow.

Nothing! thou elder brother even to Shade: That hadst a being ere the world was made, And well fixed, art alone of ending not afraid. Ere Time and Place were, Time and Place were not, When primitive Nothing Something straight begot; Then all proceeded from the great united What. Something, the general attribute of all, Severed from thee, its sole original, Into thy boundless self must undistinguished fall; Yet Something did thy mighty power command, And from fruitful Emptiness’s hand Snatched men, beasts, birds, fire, air, and land. Matter the wicked’st offspring of thy race, By Form assisted, flew from thy embrace, And rebel Light obscured thy reverend dusky face. With Form and Matter, Time and Place did join; Body, thy foe, with these did leagues combine To spoil thy peaceful realm, and ruin all thy line; But turncoat Time assists the foe in vain, And bribed by thee, destroys their short-lived reign, And to thy hungry womb drives back thy slaves again. Though mysteries are barred from laic eyes, And the divine alone with warrant pries Into thy bosom, where truth in private lies, Yet this of thee the wise may truly say, Thou from the virtuous nothing dost delay, And to be part with thee the wicked wisely pray. Great Negative, how vainly would the wise Inquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise, Didst thou not stand to point their blind philosophies! Is, or Is Not, the two great ends of Fate, And True or False, the subject of debate, That perfect or destroy the vast designs of state— When they have racked the politician’s breast, Within thy Bosom most securely rest, And when reduced to thee, are least unsafe and best. But Nothing, why does Something still permit That sacred monarchs should at council sit With persons highly thought at best for nothing fit, While weighty Something modestly abstains From princes’ coffers, and from statemen’s brains, And Nothing there like stately Nothing reigns? Nothing! who dwell’st with fools in grave disguise For whom they reverend shapes and forms devise, Lawn sleeves, and furs, and gowns, when they like thee look wise: French truth, Dutch prowess, British policy, Hibernian learning, Scotch civility, Spaniards’ dispatch, Danes’ wit are mainly seen in thee. The great man’s gratitude to his best friend, Kings’ promises, whores’ vows—towards thee may bend, Flow swiftly into thee, and in thee ever end.