536 Philosophy poems

Where I live      distance is the primal fact The world is mostly      far away and small Drifting along through cause and effect      like sleep As when the distance      unlikeliest of stems Bears the unlikely      blossom of the wind Engendering our only weather      dry Except in winter      pine trees live on snow So greedy      pulling down these drifts that bury The fences snap      the trunks of smaller trees If the forest wants      to go somewhere it spreads Like a prophecy      its snow before it Technology      a distant windy cause There is no philosophy      of death where I live Only philosophies      of suffering

You change a life as eating an artichoke changes the taste of whatever is eaten after. Yet you are not an artichoke, not a piano or cat— not objectively present at all— and what of you a cat possesses is essential but narrow: to know if the distance between two things can be leapt. The piano, that good servant, has none of you in her at all, she lends herself to what asks; this has been my ambition as well. Yet a person who has you is like an iron spigot whose water comes from far-off mountain springs. Inexhaustible, your confident pronouncements flow, coldly delicious. For if judgment hurts the teeth, it doesn’t mind, not judgment. Teeth pass. Pain passes. Judgment decrees what remains— the serene judgments of evolution or the judgment of a boy-king entering Persia: “Burn it,” he says, and it burns. And if a small tear swells the corner of one eye, it is only the smoke, it is no more to him than a beetle fleeing the flames of the village with her six-legged children. The biologist Haldane—in one of his tenderer moments— judged beetles especially loved by God, “because He had made so many.” For judgment can be tender: I have seen you carry a fate to its end as softly as a retriever carries the quail. Yet however much I admire you at such moments, I cannot love you: you are too much in me, weighing without pity your own worth. When I have erased you from me entirely, disrobed of your measuring adjectives, stripped from my shoulders and hips each of your nouns, when the world is horsefly, coal barge, and dawn the color of winter butter— not beautiful, not cold, only the color of butter— then perhaps I will love you. Helpless to not. As a newborn wolf is helpless: no choice but hunt the wolf milk, find it sweet.

(after Ehrich Weiss) I Geography matters. It is the plan, the arrangement of things that confuses our enemies, the difference between what they expect and what they get; as simple as bobbing for apples becomes difficult, deception is an achievement in ordering the obvious. II Let us make a song for our confusion: Call it “Red Skies over Gary” or “Red Skies in the Sunset” or “Red Skies and the Open Hearth.” Red Skies over Gary, you are my sunset, my only home. Let us make ourselves invisible, not make songs, or even disappear suddenly from the sidewalks of Calumet. III Cobalt and carborundum are refinements of the art. So it’s true, you held the razor in your teeth, or was it pure magic, a miracle of place? One makes for workability, the other for hardness, and chromium bright, the stainless achievement. IV I came from Calumet to Gary, and it was early evening; south of the mills, poppy fields toxic red above the car lots, have a Coke on Texaco ’til the mercury arcs devour us and it is purple night.

Was he then Adam of the Burning Way? hid away in the heat like wrath conceald in Love’s face, or the seed, Eris in Eros, key and lock of what I was?      I could not speak the releasing word.      For into a dark matter he came and askt me to say what I could not say.      “I ..” All the flame in me stopt against my tongue. My heart was a stone, a dumb unmanageable thing in me, a darkness that stood athwart his need for the enlightening, the “I love you” that has only this one quick in time, this one start when its moment is true. Such is the sickness of many a good thing that now into my life from long ago this refusing to say I love you has bound the weeping, the yielding, the yearning to be taken again, into a knot, a waiting, a string so taut it taunts the song, it resists the touch. It grows dark to draw down the lover’s hand from its lightness to what’s underground.

I was sitting in Old Town Square with tourists and birds and I was reading Foucault, how “he who is subjected to a field of visibility ... becomes the principle of his own subjection” and all around me the beautiful Czechoslovakian boys moved through the first day of spring like perennially visible inmates in the opening credits of a prison porno. The sun reflected off the glass and my table was an inscrutable tower of light from which I peered, invisibly, at the swan-graceful boys who seemed to skirr across the stones, traveling, it seemed, to something vaguely ridiculous and charmingly anachronistic: cuff link shopping, or brunch with the duchess. The coffee had made me jittery and I was beginning to sweat from both sun and desire. I considered moving to the outer edge of the circled tables, so the boys could see me as I could see them, but then the 600-year-old orloj sounded the hour and the twelve apostles and skeletal death spun around and I was afraid to leave my tower. I didn’t want to be visible in the way those small dancing figures were visible and as much as I wanted a handsome companion, I feared my foot getting caught in a sewer grate or my spoon falling from my saucer and clattering on the pavement, startling the birds into a ruckus. An errant ball of sweat fell from my chin and onto the page. I looked down to where it had landed on the word “reciprocal” which made me think how looking is always reducible to twos — two eyes, two parties, two possible outcomes, and how those who watch from the panopticon’s black pupil may, in any case, not even exist.

That everything's inevitable. That fate is whatever has already happened. The brain, which is an elemental, as sane, as the rest of the processing universe is. In this world, I am the surest thing. Scrunched-up arms, folded legs, lovely destitute eyes. Please insert your spare coins. I am filling them up. Please insert your spare vision, your vigor, your vim. But yet, I am a vatic one. As vatic as the Vatican. In the temper and the tantrum, in the well-kept arboretum I am waiting, like an animal, For poetry.

They that have power to hurt and will do none, That do not do the thing they most do show, Who, moving others, are themselves as stone, Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow: They rightly do inherit heaven's graces And husband nature's riches from expense; They are the lords and owners of their faces, Others but stewards of their excellence. The summer's flower is to the summer sweet Though to itself it only live and die, But if that flower with base infection meet, The basest weed outbraves his dignity: For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

I caught a bird which made a ball And they thought better of it. But it is all of which they taught That they were in a hurry yet In a kind of a way they meant it best That they should change in and on account But they must not stare when they manage Whatever they are occasionally liable to do It is often easy to pursue them once in a while And in a way there is no repose They like it as well as they ever did But it is very often just by the time That they are able to separate In which case in effect they could Not only be very often present perfectly In each way whichever they chose. All of this never matters in authority But this which they need as they are alike Or in an especial case they will fulfill Not only what they have at their instigation Made for it as a decision in its entirety Made that they minded as well as blinded Lengthened for them welcome in repose But which they open as a chance But made it be perfectly their allowance All which they antagonise as once for all Kindly have it joined as they mind

The news, descriptive. Rhetoric, void. It’s finally here:inarticulate brachiopods have no matching teeth and sockets and their valves are held together only by muscles —

Once, a man named a thing beautiful& so we wore it, buried it, turned it into currency. Somewhere, maybe here, maybe now, I stand completely still until he looks in my direction. Sometimes I don’t believe I exist until someone calls me beautiful. Sometimes any warm thing will do. Sometimes it’s me, a warm thing in the low light.Beautiful is what the man called me after he did what he wanted with — I’m running out of ways to describe it — my body, my silence. Beautiful. Why, I ask, in order to love yourself must you, first, be loved? A bone sucked clean of its marrow. A trail of ants magnified into ash. & of course, I’m asking no one. & of course, I know the answer. Of course, I know it’s not me they’re looking for, the men, I mean. & I wished he didn’t feel the need to speak, really wished — like me — he just kept quiet, but no, he had to speak, he had to say beautiful— & now, goddamnit, my body appears, trapped in the long tunnel of a telescope. & now I am here attending the aftermath of my own ruin, with nothing but beautiful to keep me company. Maybe he meant the city beyond the window. Maybe he was talking to himself. Maybe beautiful, as in good job, as in look what I just did with my own two hands.