536 Philosophy poems

The laughing gull that flew behind the fencepost and never came out was the beginning and then a hand smaller than my hand covered Wisconsin with a gesture for explanation. In the afternoon there are pauses between the words through which commas can grow like daisy fleabane. A fish with an osprey in its back emerges from the Sound and nothing can be learned by more analysis. The book of her hair opens to its binding and I leaf through the glorious pages of appreciation and that’s not all. We could not have turned fast enough to catch light and leftovers from so much of what happened: the swift figures behind you like a planet’s dark companion, ships entering and leaving the hall closet the real and imagined between which is no difference.

And if every step taken is a step well-lived but a foot towards death, every pilgrimage a circle, every flight-path the tracing of a sphere: I will give myself over and over. I have migrated through Carpathians of sorrow to myself heaped happy in the corner there. Nothing seemed strange in the world, you’ll understand— nothing ever more would. Monkey Boy came to me saying Look—the moon of the moon. The little one circled the big one. He crouched in the palm of my hand, tiny, sincere, pointing at the sky. There was something sad about him. The python was nothing, nothing at all, nothing but strength shed to suppleness, nothing but will encased in itself. The python was a muscle of thought. Coiled and mute, in a place where nothing but rain fell, the python thought: this is the beginning or end of the world. The python was everywhere, everywhere at once, aware only too much of that ageless agony: its existence. I am tired, it said; and the stream burbled by. I am waiting for the recoil, the uncoil, coil of night, coil of stars, coil of the coldness of the water. The python said Who are these people? The whole city sweated, moved like a limb. The air fitted like a glove two sizes too small and too many singers sang the banal. The bars roared all night. The kite hawks grew ashamed. All nature squirmed. In the yellow time of pollen there’s a certain slant of light that devours the afternoon, and you would wait forever at the Gare de l’Est, if time stood still, if she would come. She is the leopard then, its silvery speed; where will you wrestle her, and in what shadows, and on what crumpled sheets? And all those sheets were pampas and savannas, the soft expanses of all that would be absent forever, all that was past, and future, and not here. And in a white rose there were not to be found any secrets, since in its unfolding there was no centre, nor in its decay. Only the random petals fallen. In the yellow time of poppies when the fields were ablaze those invisible pollens rained around us. The days held us lightlocked in golden surrender and all night long the night shot stars. When my chest unconstricted at last, did yours? The real issue, of course, was this: atomically, energetically, everything was wave function. And a wave continues forever into space, the wavelength never alters, only the intensity lessens, so in the worst cosmic way everything is connected by vibrations. And this, as even a dog would know, is no consolation. Ah but the dogs will save us all in the end & even the planet. Not the superdogs but the household friendlies, always eager to please, hysterically fond, incessant, carrying in the very wagging of their tales an unbounded love not even therapists could imagine; their forgiveness unhinges us. We were reduced to this: this day and night, primary gold and indigo, the binary profusion of distances guessed at, heat and cold, colours logged in the retina and lodged in the spine; we were dogs who knew the infinite is now, that celandine was buttercup, that buttercup was marigold. The dog star marked the dog days and the wild rose was dog rose. The crow’s-foot was wild hyacinth. By day the correspondences were clear. I walked across the whin land. Speedwell bluer than sky. A practised ear could hear, between two breaths, deep space wherein the mind collects itself. Words foundered and cracked.Nearly never bulled the cow. A shining isomorphousness rang out. The roussignol sang all night. All colours were shuffled endlessly but never lost. A practised ear could hear, between two breaths, the secret blackness of the snow come flooding in. On summer’s lawns the ice-melt sprayed its figure-eights from sprinklers. And everything stopped working, second time around, as if it had never happened before. Fans moved the corpses of fireflies through the rooms, supplicant, pathetic, pleading in brittle postures. Everything was magnified by their bug-eyed deaths. We became solemn in that profusion of dying. Cane toads fattened the asphalt in the mist and the rain; our headlights caught them tensed as if listening: they were waiting, mute, for the imbecility of eternity. The clocks merely pulsed, or rather the days. Like shotgun spray on the weatherboard, sleep scattered itself through the blurred heat and secreted itself in the nooks of delirium. Sometimes the magpies would wake us, or the phone, mid-afternoon. And we needed nothing, not even hope, being no different from the dragonflies, or the cows in their despair. It appeared we lived on sunlight and chocolate bars. You blossomed so from not ever reading the newspapers. Things came and went—the years and all the airports. I was a shade scattering my shade seed liberally to the winds and weathervanes. There was not enough absence to go round. I heard voices,stabat mater, in the whine of jets and in air vents and headphones a stream trilling over rocks. On tarmacs and in transit I saw your lips, your nakedness, the trees, that dappled light. I dreamt of orchards. The preciseness of the world came flooding in.

Why so many senseless injuries? This one’s glass teeth knocked out. Eyes missing, or stuck open or closed. Limbs torn away. Sawdust dribbles onto the floor like an hourglass running out. Fingerless hands, noses chipped or bitten off. Many are bald or burnt. Some, we learn, are victims of torture or amateur surgery. Do dolls invite abuse, with their dent-able heads, those tight little painted-on or stitched-in grins? Hurt me, big botched being, they whine in a dialect only puritans and the frequently punished can hear. It’s what I was born for. I know my tiny white pantaloons and sheer underskirts incite violation.

1 What do we like best about ourselves? Our inability to be content. We might see this restlessness as a chip not yet cashed in. 2 You appear because you’re lonely maybe. You would not say that. You come to tell me you’re saving money by cooking for yourself. You’ve figured out what units you’ll need to exchange for units if you intend I know I mustn’t interrupt 3 Hectic and flexible, flames are ideal new bodies for us!

The professor stabbed his chest with his hands curled like forks before coughing up the question that had dogged him since he first read Emerson: Why am I “I”? Like musk oxen we hunkered while his lecture drifted against us like snow. If we could, we would have turned our backs into the wind. I felt bad about his class’s being such a snoozefest, though peaceful too, a quiet little interlude from everyone outside rooting up the corpse of literature for being too Caucasian. There was a simple answer to my own question (how come no one loved me, stomping on the pedals of my little bicycle): I was insufferable. So, too, was Emerson I bet, though I liked If the red slayer think he slays— the professor drew a giant eyeball to depict the Over-soul. Then he read a chapter from his own book: naptime. He didn’t care if our heads tipped forward on their stalks. When spring came, he even threw us a picnic in his yard where dogwood bloomed despite a few last dirty bergs of snow. He was a wounded animal being chased across the tundra by those wolves, the postmodernists. At any moment you expected to see blood come dripping through his clothes. And I am I who never understood his question, though he let me climb to take a seat aboard the wooden scow he’d been building in the shade of thirty-odd years. How I ever rowed it from his yard, into my life—remains a mystery. The work is hard because the eyeball’s heavy, riding in the bow.

I How can we accommodate these reforms? The nights of bell-flowers are as finished as the hell of water that has unrolled and become news. Pull at the ox’s ring and the wall of the sinuses falls down. Pull at the hoop in the eyelid, dormitories are felled. A marriage of fists and kites, the smile is hammered so painstakingly into the gut it forms a ring. II I am staring up at a boxing match in which white Everlasts and red Everlasts take on the breakneck speed of cupids. Art Deco façades hem in the open-air courtyard; a black belt of skyline circles off their incandescent white waists. The sunrise pulls level with the sea. The boxers’ shadows furl and unfurl, drawing into cups. III You open your heart’s wings like a bread riot, split the uncooked potatoes on the table with a glance, and eat. You make the hours work like fragile perceptions for the food they get, the warmth they get, for the variable, contradictory spontaneities imposed on their bodies as love or triumph in mistaken assertions.

Sonnet 29 Is there a sound? There is a forest. What is the world? The word is wilderness. What is the answer? The answer is the world. What is the beginning? A beginning is happiness. What is the end? No one lives there now. What is a beginning? The beginning is light. What makes happiness? Nothing. What makes an ending? What does not. What is her skin?Her skin is composed of strange clothing and clouds of butterflies, of events and odors, of the rose fingers of dawn, transparent suns of full daylight, blue loves of dusk and night fish with huge eyes.

When I say the ghost has begun you understand what is being said. That time is not how we keep it or measure first there was then wasn’t . . . It twitters and swerves like the evening news. Now outside is 3D. Inside non- representational space. Every law has an outside and inside I have witnessed cruelty break and gulp and sweat then punch out a smile. To be awake. This talking in space. To be absorbed in the ongoing. Belief’s a shadow to be looked into and into until relief is gone. The dark triangle settled in the midst of traffic is on us. Time comes in adverbial bursts, a glass of beer, a smoke . . . The evening air refreshes, startles, and the questions grow deeper like shadows across storefronts. A forsythia ticking against the dirty pane. This was time. Up. Down. Up. And you were a part of it. If I say it can you feel it now? Imagine. Lightning strikes. Rain falls and drives. Clouds pass. Night clarified. Stars. In silent pictures the tree falls in the optic nerve. The sound is chemistry. There’s no getting to it or if getting to it feels like the actual sound is that silence? Alone here with my shadows drawn . . . So what’s this about? A horse and a castle, a tree and its leaving? What’s this about in solitary splendor? The undertow and its threshold, a door and the opening sky? Or because a play of reflection lit up my bumper and caught my eyes I saw the shadow of a falcon. Because a sound a poor man uttered reached my ear I fell into song. If the syntax of loyalty is not tragic then what is the wager? If there were time, would it be ours?

It was as hot as what stars must feel like so far away, certainly there, inside me. I took it in my hands, put it where it should be in the wet softness where my heart sits. Ugly things came to threaten me, to say I had lost the last lock holding me to truth. That was not true, because old truths were now lies, I saw families as human. I found the goodness in what is not perfect, and a new perfection in what is not good. This happened in a new home twelve time zones away, as the world collapsed. in a clitter clatter like a busy kitchen, the universe forming now inside all of me.

Fle fro the pres, and dwelle with sothefastnesse, Suffise thin owen thing, thei it be smal; For hord hath hate, and clymbyng tykelnesse, Prees hath envye, and wele blent overal. Savour no more thanne the byhove schal; Reule weel thiself, that other folk canst reede; And trouthe schal delyvere, it is no drede. Tempest the nought al croked to redresse, In trust of hire that tourneth as a bal. Myche wele stant in litel besynesse; Bywar therfore to spurne ayeyns an al; Stryve not as doth the crokke with the wal. Daunte thiself, that dauntest otheres dede; And trouthe shal delyvere, it is no drede. That the is sent, receyve in buxumnesse; The wrestlyng for the worlde axeth a fal. Here is non home, here nys but wyldernesse. Forth, pylgryme, forth! forth, beste, out of thi stal! Know thi contré! loke up! thonk God of al! Hold the heye weye, and lat thi gost the lede; And trouthe shal delyvere, it is no drede. Therfore, thou Vache, leve thine olde wrechednesse; Unto the world leve now to be thral. Crie hym mercy, that of hys hie godnesse Made the of nought, and in espec{.i}al Draw unto hym, and pray in general For the, and eke for other, hevenelyche mede; And trouthe schal delyvere, it is no drede.