536 Philosophy poems

Send forth the high falcon flying after the mind Till it come toppling down from its cold cloud: The beak of the falcon to pierce it till it fall Where the simple heart is bowed. O in wild innocence it rides The rare ungovernable element, But once it sways to terror and descent, The marches of the wind are its abyss, No wind staying it upward of the breast— Let mind be proud for this, And ignorant from what fabulous cause it dropt, Or with how learned a gesture the unschooled heart Shall lull both terror and innocence to rest.

Soul, don’t complain, says Senhal, who means by “soul” a thing like “future,” possesses without knowing it not soul, but future, is little present, Senhal, & less past when this she shares, not always willing all, the pale pearl earth with you & shelters in her heart a stunted lemon tree, inviolate, & shielded by a sour ring of fire, the kind that keeps a Valkyrie asleep. Always born too early, Senhal lights these candles not to read by, but to watch the diamonds flower & die within their hot, blue nuclei, which seem to flicker with secret intent that fails, all told, to comprehend her. & arguably, this darkness is, for her, the best of them, refusal of the soul she never recognizes as refusal of the future which she is instead of all her otherwises — & might she have been — conscience-calmed — perhaps — or else a bird of the earthly paradise in which one barely needs to eat or else subsists on manna or some other fragrant zero denuded of the tang of death & the numb green shade, a starry zone, orthogonal with luminous errata, in which a lake of ultramarine has been used with never parsimony in all the places where blue is required to smudge a Thule out of sand & sea & air, a seeming there that seeming wants to hold her in its arms, in which one could be one & yes the ripe quicksilver that the artificer poured into the throats of statues to give them voice had never brought the air alive with hoarsest cries & muffled pleas (lutes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber did they cry?) as if nor it nor any thing mercurial had ever learned to savor love & poison in one mouth?

A thing too perfect to be remembered: stone beautiful only when wet. *     *     * Blinded by light or black cloth— so many ways not to see others suffer. *     *     * Too much longing: it separates us like scent from bread, rust from iron. *     *     * From very far or very close— the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle. *     *     * As if putting arms into woolen coat sleeves, we listen to the murmuring dead. *     *     * Any point of a circle is its start: desire forgoing fulfillment to go on desiring. *     *     * In a room in which nothing has happened, sweet-scented tobacco. *     *     * The very old, hands curling into themselves, remember their parents. *     *     * Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.

In the stillest hour of the night, as I lay half asleep, my seven selves sat together and thus conversed in whisper: First Self:  Here, in this madman, I have dwelt all these years, with naught to do but renew his pain by day and recreate his sorrow by night.  I can bear my fate no longer, and now I rebel. Second Self:  Yours is a better lot than mine, brother, for it is given to me to be this madman’s joyous self.  I laugh his laughter and sing his happy hours, and with thrice winged feet I dance his brighter thoughts.  It is I that would rebel against my weary existence. Third Self:  And what of me, the love-ridden self, the flaming brand of wild passion and fantastic desires?  It is I the love-sick self who would rebel against this madman. Fourth Self:  I, amongst you all, am the most miserable, for naught was given me but odious hatred and destructive loathing.  It is I, the tempest-like self, the one born in the black caves of Hell, who would protest against serving this madman. Fifth Self:  Nay, it is I, the thinking self, the fanciful self, the self of hunger and thirst, the one doomed to wander without rest in search of unknown things and things not yet created; it is I, not you, who would rebel. Sixth Self:  And I, the working self, the pitiful labourer, who, with patient hands, and longing eyes, fashion the days into images and give the formless elements new and eternal forms—it is I, the solitary one, who would rebel against this restless madman. Seventh Self:  How strange that you all would rebel against this man, because each and every one of you has a preordained fate to fulfill.  Ah! could I but be like one of you, a self with a determined lot!  But I have none, I am the do-nothing self, the one who sits in the dumb, empty nowhere and nowhen, while you are busy re-creating life.  Is it you or I, neighbours, who should rebel? When the seventh self thus spake the other six selves looked with pity upon him but said nothing more; and as the night grew deeper one after the other went to sleep enfolded with a new and happy submission. But the seventh self remained watching and gazing at nothingness, which is behind all things.

I like it quiet like this, Alton. I like to think. I love the way spring light falls easy, soft. This morning I was driving the cruiser, savoring gold pollen everywhere out in the south of the county. Real nice, seeing forsythia and daffodils, ditch irises, and a few Cherokee roses opening white. It was a blue day, and I had a Tampa Jewel, just counting cows, seeing an April breeze in the catkins and new leaves, the radio off. I know that’s hardly right, but curse any citizen who’d grudge me an hour’s peace. Then I started seeing this marksmanship in the caution signs, the yellow diamonds that warn of deer or curves ahead, a steep grade—there’s one of those. Four circles and a jagged hole, likely a thirty-eight slug, smack in the center neater than Willard cleaves meat at the joint. A dozen and more. I got mad because I get paid to protect what the county commission declares holy— the park with its petting zoo, the rebel sentry on the square, and all the highway signs— and here’s all indications that some felon has no respect, some felon who can shoot. I admit my feelings were mixed, that right indignation at the broken law, but envy of his eye for centers. Mind you, I saw nary a rip on the fringes or a near miss. Bull’s-eyes, every sign I saw. A fool is what I feel, you understand, cause I motored over to Pig Burton’s store near The Bottle and asked him—he was stacking feed sacks on Robert Ring’s vehicle— who the hell was the target king of Beat Three. Pig always has his hands in every pie; he’d know if some individual had been hauling off all the turkey shoot prizes. I know I should know, too, but a sheriff’s got beaucoup chores to do, mostly idiot paperwork. I’ve lost touch since the last bond vote hired me four new deputies, all dirt-dumb. Well, old Pig has that laugh he can’t hold back, and he points his finger pistol-like at Robert, who’s got a shamed look on his face. “Pow,” he says at me or Bob, looking back and forth, just “Pow.” Seems Bob’s boy Earl, the one that ain’t got the sense of a chicken under that cowlick red as a rooster comb, is known to have sneaked Bob’s Colt a week before and shot every yellow sign he could till his pa ran him down and whacked him good, then locked him in the fall-down curing shed overnight—he’s a hard man, but he loves that boy. I remember once ... but how the hell can any half-wit you wouldn’t trust to milk hit the bull by the eye first time he ever gets loose with a handgun? “It’s easy,” says Bob, less shamed than afraid now he’ll have to pay for fresh metal—his people have always been tight—but he’s showing a grin I don’t like. “Real easy. He just cuts loose from the hip, five short feet back, sometimes maybe six, and comes back later to paint the target circles wheresomever his bullet hits. He aims that paintbrush right smart.” Blessed if I don’t feel the fool for being full dumbstruck at a trick Earl’s not bright enough to see as a joke. But I didn’t write it up nor charge a soul, just ground my cigar in the dirt and helped myself to a Dr. Pepper, made believe it didn’t mean a thing, but all day I’ve been riding, listening to crime reports on state radio— robbery at the mall, attempted rape maybe, wrecks on the bypass and a set fire in Brill’s deer woods. It gets to be too much. I shouldn’t even take the time to sit here watching this dark space where folks have been dancing all evening, hearing the quiet after all those raucous songs, but Alton, don’t you see, the feeble boy’s right, or half right, at least? It all comes to the same, whether you get what you want in the end or want what you get. The law works that way: each law makes more crime, but it’s not my job to say. Warm up my cup just one last time. I’ve got to circle Ampex once more before I turn it home. God, this dark feels right, no matter what flowers out there shed spring light. The dark is what hits me as holy. I’m calling it a day. Catch you later. Night.

X Should the wide world roll away Leaving black terror Limitless night, Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand Would be to me essential If thou and thy white arms were there And the fall to doom a long way.

pyramidal, its certain form certain it is a form    wittgenstein or anyone can think of a stag in their mind but not be able to shoot that stag and where is all that everlovin antimatter that matter supposedly co-creates? at the end of the dream, the poem at the end of everything    what else, the end    sighs sor juana the doors have an 11-minute song called ‘the end’ which feels serious when you are 11 and stupid six or eight months later    nor did I offer up my own dream which was a meadow in my cup    meadowtation ha ha ha the ship kissed the sands of galenic shores at the buttressed end of my dream where spectacles do not fear to interpose long fallen out of  the mouth of vishnu    so long gabriel so long usen now the instrument of my reflection no longer necessary since the inside is the out    and I’ve jiggered the mechanism such that my jacket’s always dry & clean & my cock is hard only when I want    no more embarrassing sublunarities    and my cunt is wet just as my lover thinks of fucking it    cities appear    golden to my gaze    a figure empyreal    arises in shadow    long for this world    aching on the threshold of my upturned arse and my one ways and means, lilified cloak enmaned w/ tresses, baldly dignified, the cloak was regal it did not speak, yet diogenes leapt on it, yet the trumpets pointed one direction    entrained to a kind of roseate beam the same pink beam philip k. dick saw emanating from the fish necklace around the neck of that delivery girl he saw in his doorway after he’d had his wisdom teeth removed that same beam that triangulated w/ arcturus, aka alpha boötis, to flash up and hit it smack in the third eye till it and we and we are bent sobbing, having given up our library, having died of the plague and worse, having vowed never again to write w/ pen and ink having inscribed yo la peor, I the worst, in blood on the back of a dirty pamphlet, but oh what unmiserable mind is this    no me miserum    noli me tangere nothing miserable    nothing touches me

Where analgesia may be found to ease the infinite, minute scars of the day; What final interlude will result, picked bit by bit from the morning's hurry, the lunch-hour boredom, the fevers of the night; Why this one is cherished by the gods, and that one not; How to win, and win again, and again, staking wit alone against a sea of time; Which man to trust and, once found, how far— Will not be found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, Nor Blackstone, nor Gray's, nor Dun & Bradstreet, nor Freud, nor Marx, Nor the sage of the evening news, nor the corner astrologist, nor in any poet, Nor what sort of laughter should greet the paid pronouncements of the great, Nor what pleasure the mulitudes have, brining lunch and the children to watch the condemned to be plunged into death, Nor why the sun should rise tomorrow, Nor how the moon still weaves upon the ground, through the leaves, so much silence and so much peace.

You know how hard it is sometimes just to walk on the streets downtown, how everything enters you the way the scientists describe it—photons streaming through bodies, caroming off the air, the impenetrable brick of buildings an illusion—sometimes you can feel how porous you are, how permeable, and the man lurching in circles on the sidewalk, cutting the space around him with a tin can and saying Uhh! Uhhhh! Uhh! over and over is part of it, and the one in gold chains leaning against the glass of the luggage store is, and the one who steps toward you from his doorway, meaning to ask something apparently simple, like What’s the time, something you know you can no longer answer; he’s part of it, the body of the world which is also yours and which keeps insisting you recognize it. And the trouble is, you do, but it’s happening here, among the crowds and exhaust smells, and you taste every greasy scrap of paper, the globbed spit you step over, your tongue is as thick with dirt as though you’ve fallen on your hands and knees to lick the oil-scummed street, as sour as if you've been drinking the piss of those men passing their bottle in the little park with its cement benches and broken fountain. And it’s no better when you descend the steps to the Metro and some girl’s wailing off-key about her heart—your heart— over the awful buzzing of the strings, and you hurry through the turnstile, fumbling out the money that’s passed from how many hands into yours, getting rid of all your change except one quarter you’re sure she sees lying blind in your pocket as you get into a car and the doors seal themselves behind you. But still it isn’t over. Because later, when you’re home, looking out your window at the ocean, at the calm of the horizon line, and the apple in your hand glows in that golden light that happens in the afternoon, suffusing you with something you’re sure is close to peace, you think of the boy bagging groceries at Safeway, of how his face was flattened in a way that was familiar—bootheel of a botched chromosome—and you remember his canceled blue eyes, and his hands, flaking, rash-reddened, that lifted each thing and caressed it before placing it carefully in your sack, and the monotonous song he muttered,paper or plastic, paper or plastic, his mouth slack, a teardrop of drool at the corner; and you know he’s a part of it too, raising the fruit to your lips you look out at the immense and meaningless blue and know you’re inside it, you realize you’re eating him now.

107 I have always been the way I am even when I wasn't the way I am and none can ever know the way I am because I am not merely the way I am 122 Him or someone else, what's it to me if every time I'm lonely afterward? Alone here with my moribility . . . if there only were such a lovely word . . . 124 These hemorrhoids, this bleeding from behind . . . I'm spilling out of all my holes—yes, all. My ass is wrecked . . . (My speech is so refined . . .) There ought to be a plumber I could call. 154 You want to die with me, you dumb shit? Excavate my heart with your shovel? This is getting to be a hell of a habit. Want me to swear on my knees? Grovel?