536 Philosophy poems

Why am I if I am uncertain reasons may inclose. Remain remain propose repose chose. I call carelessly that the door is open Which if they may refuse to open No one can rush to close. Let them be mine therefor. Everybody knows that I chose. Therefor if therefore before I close. I will therefore offer therefore I offer this. Which if I refuse to miss may be miss is mine. I will be well welcome when I come. Because I am coming. Certainly I come having come. These stanzas are done.

You're presenting me with a telescopic line of reasoning. You think because one dies then to die must be a good idea. Let me get this straight. So you think to follow suit is what's In the cards and the works and the stars. It may be that's The next step that's clear or it may be there's another way. You may find a friend for whom to die is not the be-all Or the end. There were ten rooms and a thousand shelves And ten thousand bottles filled with ten million tickets. You Were on the end of the ladder in a blue sky filled with litter. It was tantamount to a ticker tape parade on the streets of A stunned city. Staccato ropes couldn't hold you any longer. And in the evening's sudden stillness I breathed in your ear. From now on out everything gets said in a whisper. If you like If you want if you care to come closer. This way is better.

The silver hour drops— a spider on the mirror. * Silver the hour like drops of a spider’s mirror. * The silver drops, the spider’s hour, the mirror . . .

Perhaps is a new and sudden way of being. Like satisfaction not yet begun or some other kind of kindness: a more gentle one? Night makes us all into the middle of something until we aren't anything anymore. The sky isn't any color here. It's OK because consolation is color enough for your cheeks, wind bitten and glorified by the light of the wine in this glass draining toward a better time, a better space. I invented a notion of hell, and you invented a notion of hello. Amazing similarities and bizarrely coincidental snow Like a twig falling from an oak's tallest point, I keep wondering when forgiveness found its way into this world in a time before bargaining and beckoning. It's quiet again and now the sky is a tangled mess of rags seeking out the bored and unwilling. I'd like to make a map not of the land but of the path I took to arrive in this place, a map with no idealized purpose, a map of a thousand airless pines.

Deafness to imperatives is profundity in the wise man, children and grandchildren don’t bother him, don’t alarm him. To represent a particular outlook, to act, to travel hither and yon are all signs of a world that doesn’t see clearly. In front of my window —

I believe you can build a boat. I believe you can get to water. I do not believe you can get the boat on water. How do other people bear what you are still afraid of? The answer is that when big things happen you do go through the looking glass, but it is still you who goes through, the inner text is all still right to left, so you just keep reading. Because there is no boat and there is no water. I stare at my tiny baby's face but he so wriggles he can't quite be seen. He grows steadier, more the blur is gone; joins us in the myth of the stable. Of the quakiness of infancy and old age we shimmer and shimmy into being and out again. In the mean- time, we're horses in the stable of the myth. A quick check of the ocean, or any fire, is a reminder of how things seem; I can't seem to see them. You’re on the beach and you find out the secretary of defense thinks calico cats are agents of the devil. Your friend asks if they get 10 percent. She was funny, your friend. The water in this metaphor is unreal because of the way time passes, so you can't quite get the boat on water, but you can build the boat, and a boat is good for a lot of things not just on water. Will we, without the boat on water, always feel that we are missing something basic to the picture? No. That is what I'm trying to say. It is important to let sense quiver; even in this stable of the myth of stable, even living aboard a boat mired in mud in view of the sea. Who wants yet another world? It's enough already.

It’s not enough to cover the rock with leaves — as if  vernal fluidities could be enough for the stern assault of  fact. As if  a living ornament, light and subject to temporal  breezes, could be enough to overcome despair, that chunk of  something solid in the air, unmoving, as words repeated are. It’s not enough to cover despair with motion. Motion itself  is flawed, continuous motion a narrow, thin escape from what is rooted. Leaves do sway, but in truth, they’re only flapping out, ancillary, uncertain, buffeted this way and that. They remain the fact they are bound to, involuntary notions victim to the weather of  a day, gripped by what has thrust between the rocks, flexible as everything not rock is, reckless as imagining is reckless.

Me trying to understand say whence say whither, say what, say me with a pencil walking, say reading the dictionary, say learning medieval Latin, reading Spengler, reading Whitehead, William James I loved him, swimming breaststroke and thinking for an hour, how did I get here? Or thinking in line, say the 69 streetcar or 68 or 67 Swissvale, that would take me elsewhere, me with a textbook reading the pre-Socratics, so badly written, whoever the author was, me on the floor of the lighted stacks sitting cross-legged, walking afterwards through the park or sometimes running across the bridges and up the hills, sitting down in our tiny diningroom, burning in a certain way, still burning.

As if engine parts could be wrenched out at random and the car would still start and sound even, hearts can go with chambers broken open.

The stones we have thrown I hear fall, glass-clear through the year. In the valley confused actions of the moment fly howling from tree-top to tree-top, quieting in air thinner than now's, gliding like swallows from mountain-top to mountain-top till they reach the furthest plateaus along the edge of existence. Where all our deeds fall glass-clear to no ending except ourselves.