536 Philosophy poems

Thank you but not just at the moment I know you will say I have said that before I know you have been there all along somewhere in another time zone I studied once those beautiful instructions when I was young and far from here they seemed distant then they seem distant now from everything I remember I hope they stayed with you when the noose started to tighten and you could say no more and after wisdom and the days of iron the eyes started from your head I know the words must have been set down partly for yourself unjustly condemned after a good life I know the design of the world is beyond our comprehension thank you but grief is selfish and in the present when the stars do not seem to move I was not listening I know it is not sensible to expect fortune to grant her gifts forever I know

You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver (those forces that control your destiny) the certainty of dust? Couldn’t it be your irreversible time is that river in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read his brevity? A marble slab is saved for you, one you won’t read, already graved with city, epitaph, dates of the dead. And other men are also dreams of time, not hardened bronze, purified gold. They’re dust like you; the universe is Proteus. Shadow, you’ll travel to what waits ahead, the fatal shadow waiting at the rim. Know this: in some way you’re already dead.

When he speaks of deserved and undeserved as more than terms — how they can matter, suddenly — I can tell he believes it. Sometimes a thing can seem star-like when it’s just a star, stripped of whatever small form of joy likeness equals. Sometimes the thought that I’m doomed to fail — that the body is — keeps me almost steady, if steadiness is what a gift for a while brings — feathers, burst- at-last pods of milkweed, October — before it all fades away. Before the drugs and the loud music, before tears and restraining orders and the eventual go fuck yourself get your ass out of here don’t go

As Walter settled in to finish his coffee, he was struck by a phantom, peripheral visage, white as pins in flight, or bunny white, in haze — a visit from “The Agent,” in the nominal parlance of chemical memory, calling from a distant muddied element. Or was it merely the milk he’d spilled in a fatuous fit, hooking out to the Brooklyn back of his cup? All he could abide, he put his face down in the muck, and made off for The Dude’s abode. “These are purple times,” he thought, “when pseudo-pious cliques strike polyester poses while jockeying for pockets. And mocking fatuous Donny? That sweet prince, that palsied, hiccuping flake of bunny fluff?” Not for this aggression would he stand — not for that element. It required satisfaction, and of superior sort to parlance. Oh, but he would have his ear! Though for this spar: lance and blade, tooth and trigger — less to mind, and more, would he abide, in body to this immodest plum-clad receptacle. He popped a Velemint, and rang His Dudeness’s door. “Bolted,” Duder’s hand had struck in ink, “Out of cream. Gone to market. 8pm practice.” His buddy was benumbed: “Dash this dairy! You’ve become fat to us with cordials of coffee and curds. Oh, uncareful beverage! Such fatuous froth and foam will be your undoing!” Yet not undone, but in parlay with his special lady, laid up in zesty enterprise, coital as bunnies, making maudlin moan. The story is ludicrous. Though if one abides that one must “feed one’s monkey,” in manner most gutter-struck, and not with precious prandials, “Brie pour lui. Et pour elle, 
emmental,” one can dig El Duderino’s doings. All others are cowards — elements without sentiment, without Johnsons or ethos, foreign and fatuous, with lingonberries on leashes, and marmot marmalades struck onto pancakes. Neither good men nor thorough, poor in parlance and in practice, unable to fix cable or walk on water — though may abide it when seated, in slumber, in summer, with clouds above, as Bunny puffs on polish. The poor woman, helpless as a frail fawn beneath a nude sun. A trophy wife, atrophied, fallen in with the wrong element: known pornographers; sycophants; Aimee Mann. Difficult to abide, and not exactly lightweights, is she herself to blame for her fatuous caprices? Her husband’s lost legs? The Dude’s stained parlor rug — his only tether, the life and memory of it, dimmed when stricken? Oh, the little for which we are compensated. About the size of our abidance, and theirs: some Credence tapes; a can of ashes, released to the 
elements; specklike Brandt, crisp and shivering. A yet-to-be-dismantled toe, Bunny’s.

There’s something in me that likes to imagine the things I’m afraid of, for example, the future. I don’t mean the celestial fireworks from melting reactors, or New York under six feet of sea water, but the future in its most intimate, most probable forms—vignettes subversive enough to slip through the radar. That’s how I come to be crouched behind a stripped car wondering would it be too dangerous to piss in the street? It would, I’m a woman. So I go on holding it, distracting myself by trying to remember every fruit I’ve ever eaten, their exact textures and flavors. So far the most exotic is the custard apple. I use up a whole hour of daylight and then another—apricot, blueberry, plum— calves cramping from having to stay low, waiting behind a car pitted with the acne of automatic fire. There are still too many guns walking around out there, and no one I know, so I’m waiting for twilight at least. Is everyone alone now? The wind says so. It says a winter is coming without oil. It bites to get my attention and scatters a few leaflets, pictures of a blackened car, a city that seems to catch on fire every sunset, though there’s little enough to burn. Stone only chars. This isn’t a likeness of the future, is it? Every person in the street a stranger? Will a word like ‘neighbor’ survive this? I fired a gun once. It smelled rancid, sour, like bad food. It hurt my shoulder and left a wound of oil on my shirt. My mind is thinking of sleep again. Sleep lets things escape—my pocket-knife vanished through a knife-sized hole. There’s nothing to cut, no guava, nectarine, winter pear, and nothing left of the car at all, not even the rear-view mirror I was counting on, hoping my face could tell me it was safe to go home, and where is that? A place with a bed and a desk where I sit and plot next year’s garden on graph paper. The skin of a tangelo is faintly pebbly, easy to peel, but the sweetest citrus is the satsuma, then the clementine. If I had to choose between natural disaster and a firing squad, I’d take the river of lava any day. Hurricane, tidal wave, tornado, drought. I want the earth, which is waiting under the sidewalk, to be the one. Not any of these human shadows sporting their silhouetted guns. There were gun shadows before, but the two worlds overlapped, guns and the amber waves of grain. It’s hard to say whether bramble fruits actually have skins. Does a raspberry? Does each tiny globe have its own? How will I live without the earth? In a stripped car, unable to piss when I want to, all the time cold? Maybe weapons interbred with humans, and a strain of hybrids was born, half metal, half flesh. I know there’s an enemy— look at all the damage it’s doing. Maybe it’s still a baby, its weak neck wobbling as its carriage lurches over the broken pavement. But probably by now it’s a sulking adolescent starting to look like serious trouble, with a silky little shadow-moustache and a gun. Who’ll kill it? Will I? What if it doesn’t look like the enemy? What if it comes disguised as a savior, or resembles nothing so much as hunger, so that everyone has his own private piece to kill? Will we do it?

for M.B. The answer is entropy—how smell works— little bits of everything—always spinning off from where they were—flying off at random into the world—which is to say into air. There are other ways of solid to gas— they’re substance specific, like iodine, or dry ice—how I felt when I saw you— straight to a new state without passing through expected ones—as though enough of me left at the moment you appeared that I could never be whole without you—apply heat—I turn straight into ether.

It doesn't matter to me if poems mean nothing: there's no floor to the universe and yet one walks the floor.

Success is counted sweetest By those who ne'er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need. Not one of all the purple Host Who took the Flag today Can tell the definition So clear of victory As he defeated – dying – On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Burst agonized and clear!

There is one mind in all of us, one soul, who parches the soil in some nations but in others hides perpetually behind a veil; he spills light everywhere, here he spilled some on my tie, but it dried before dinner ended. He is in charge of darkness also, also in charge of crime, in charge of the imagination. People fucking do so by flicking him off and on, off and on, with their eyelids as they ascertain their love's sincerity. He makes the stars disappear, but he makes small stars everywhere, on the hoods of cars, in the ommatea of skyscrapers or in the eyes of sighing lovers bored with one another. Onto the surface of the world he stamps all plants and animals. They are not gods but it is he who made us worshippers of every bramble toad, black chive we find. In Idaho there is a desert cricket that makes a clock-like tick-tick when he flies, but he is not a god. The only god is the sun, our mind, master of all crickets and clocks.

Surfaces serve their own purposes, strive to remain constant (all lives want that). There is a skin, not just on peaches but on oceans (note the telltale slough of foam on beaches). Sometimes it’s loose, as in the case of cats: you feel how a second life slides under it. Sometimes it fits. Take glass. Sometimes it outlasts its underside. Take reefs. The private lives of surfaces are innocent, not devious. Take the one-dimensional belief of enamel in itself, the furious autonomy of luster (crush a pearl— it’s powder), the whole curious seamlessness of how we’re each surrounded and what it doesn’t teach.