536 Philosophy poems

No, it won’t do, my sweet theologians. Desire will not save the morality of God. If he created beings able to choose between good and evil, And they chose, and the world lies in iniquity, Nevertheless, there is pain, and the undeserved torture of creatures, Which would find its explanation only by assuming The existence of an archetypal Paradise And a pre-human downfall so grave That the world of matter received its shape from diabolic power.

A true friend is one soul in two bodies. —Aristotle Kant says, transcendental idealism. In Aquinas, we exist apart from bodies but only on Thursdays when his famous ox flies by the window wiser at Cologne where Albertus Magnus, his real name, appoints Aquinas to magister studentium, master of students. Aquinas is petrified but says yes. He feels his soul sailing out of his head floating near the roof where a blue ox wings by. On Wednesday, two bodies are one soul waking at sunrise thanks to the pineal gland of Descartes, who thinks this node in the brain is a tiny sugar cone or salted peanut, the seat of the soul while Aristotle points to the chopping ax as a teleology as if the ax were a living, breathing person which it isn’t. Heraclitus, air and fire while Aquinas objects, no not an ax but ox. If you’re a bird or soul I am only one mile from the sea. If you are a soul in two bodies life is more complex and we must labor twice the field of sorrow after sleep, bath, and a glass as Aquinas whispers,the things we love tell us who we are

It is hard even to admit this theory of hats, that to wear The faithless one brimmed tightly over the eyes— The featherless and discreet one, a hat with a secret code That says,To spoil the child is to fatten the serpent— To wear that hat (imperfectly as a crow’s crown) against the sun Is to bear the ruins of the unborn into our hearts— He, shouting at the brunt of trees; She, shifting like a seer to restore them. It is hard to know happiness with a hat like that. Or to forget the pangs sung with such burly impatience, Or to heal the blurred things and soft hurts. Even the blind self becomes a dervish, what with the torsion And the far-off vita nuova like a new virus or virtuoso, What with the tussles and old, pure-lit suppressions. Then to be surprised by joy: Like the last rain of summer, The big, spiraling, wounded animal of rain With no place to turn, drumming the brown grass, Rain falling without meaning, but perfectly faithful, Into the petals of wind and the unopened roots— Such tenderness looked to, like love, but unquestioned. Then some afternoon with the sky lifting off again, She will come to sit on the porch like a dark sparrow And let the sun creep slowly onto her hair And grow old and wonder about the balance of things. And he beside her, sitting, too, distracted in the sun for hours, But all the same, both of them, at last, so much warmer.

There is someone who knows. In no beginning was there just one language nor did the surface gleam with nineteen hours of music as in our body-heat through the head & limbs the thumb and index finger to form the ovular OH of our self-fathering fable war flail ≈ morning star The original garden erudite, lush lawn, & round of trees behind the limestone square, night rain out of paper, under the lights of the narrow path up the rose hill. From a dark corner rising now to write orange with a knife over green of the elusive wall no one is watching

How anything is known is so thin— a skin of ice over a pond only birds might confidently walk upon. A bird's worth of weight or one bird-weight of Wordsworth.

Does the butterfat know it is butterfat, milk know it’s milk? No. Something just goes and something remains. Like a boardinghouse table: men on one side, women on the other. Nobody planned it. Plaid shirts next to one another, talking in accents from the Midwest. Nobody plans to be a ghost. Later on, the young people sit in the kitchen. Soon enough, they’ll be the ones to stumble Excuse me and quickly withdraw. But they don’t know that. No one can ever know that.

all wrong And I am asked—ask myself (I, too, covered with the gurry of it) where shall we go from here, what can we do when even the public conveyances sing? how can we go anywhere, even cross-town how get out of anywhere (the bodies all buried in shallow graves?

Let those who are in favour with their stars Of public honour and proud titles boast, Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars, Unlook'd for joy in that I honour most. Great princes' favourites their fair leaves spread But as the marigold at the sun's eye, And in themselves their pride lies buried, For at a frown they in their glory die. The painful warrior famoused for fight, After a thousand victories once foil'd, Is from the book of honour razed quite, And all the rest forgot for which he toil'd: Then happy I, that love and am beloved Where I may not remove nor be removed.

I have sought Happiness, but it has been A lovely rainbow, baffling all pursuit, And tasted Pleasure, but it was a fruit More fair of outward hue than sweet within. Renouncing both, a flake in the ferment Of battling hosts that conquer or recoil, There only, chastened by fatigue and toil, I knew what came the nearest to content. For there at least my troubled flesh was free From the gadfly Desire that plagued it so; Discord and Strife were what I used to know, Heartaches, deception, murderous jealousy; By War transported far from all of these, Amid the clash of arms I was at peace.

O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdu'd To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. Pity me then and wish I were renew'd; Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink Potions of eisel 'gainst my strong infection; No bitterness that I will bitter think, Nor double penance, to correct correction. Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye Even that your pity is enough to cure me.