536 Philosophy poems

(excerpt) "Throughout these infinite orbs of mingling light, Of which yon earth is one, is wide diffus'd A Spirit of activity and life, That knows no term, cessation, or decay; That fades not when the lamp of earthly life, Extinguish'd in the dampness of the grave, Awhile there slumbers, more than when the babe In the dim newness of its being feels The impulses of sublunary things, And all is wonder to unpractis'd sense: But, active, steadfast and eternal, still Guides the fierce whirlwind, in the tempest roars, Cheers in the day, breathes in the balmy groves, Strengthens in health, and poisons in disease; And in the storm of change, that ceaselessly Rolls round the eternal universe and shakes Its undecaying battlement, presides, Apportioning with irresistible law The place each spring of its machine shall fill; So that when waves on waves tumultuous heap Confusion to the clouds, and fiercely driven Heaven's lightnings scorch the uprooted ocean-fords, Whilst, to the eye of shipwreck'd mariner, Lone sitting on the bare and shuddering rock, All seems unlink'd contingency and chance, No atom of this turbulence fulfils A vague and unnecessitated task, Or acts but as it must and ought to act. Even the minutest molecule of light, That in an April sunbeam's fleeting glow Fulfils its destin'd, though invisible work, The universal Spirit guides; nor less, When merciless ambition, or mad zeal, Has led two hosts of dupes to battlefield, That, blind, they there may dig each other's graves, And call the sad work glory, does it rule All passions: not a thought, a will, an act, No working of the tyrant's moody mind, Nor one misgiving of the slaves who boast Their servitude to hide the shame they feel, Nor the events enchaining every will, That from the depths of unrecorded time Have drawn all-influencing virtue, pass Unrecogniz'd or unforeseen by thee, Soul of the Universe! eternal spring Of life and death, of happiness and woe, Of all that chequers the phantasmal scene That floats before our eyes in wavering light, Which gleams but on the darkness of our prison, Whose chains and massy walls We feel, but cannot see. "Spirit of Nature! all-sufficing Power, Necessity! thou mother of the world! Unlike the God of human error, thou Requir'st no prayers or praises; the caprice Of man's weak will belongs no more to thee Than do the changeful passions of his breast To thy unvarying harmony: the slave, Whose horrible lusts spread misery o'er the world, And the good man, who lifts with virtuous pride His being in the sight of happiness That springs from his own works; the poison-tree, Beneath whose shade all life is wither'd up, And the fair oak, whose leafy dome affords A temple where the vows of happy love Are register'd, are equal in thy sight: No love, no hate thou cherishest; revenge And favouritism, and worst desire of fame Thou know'st not: all that the wide world contains Are but thy passive instruments, and thou Regard'st them all with an impartial eye, Whose joy or pain thy nature cannot feel, Because thou hast not human sense, Because thou art not human mind. "Yes! when the sweeping storm of time Has sung its death-dirge o'er the ruin'd fanes And broken altars of the almighty Fiend Whose name usurps thy honours, and the blood Through centuries clotted there has floated down The tainted flood of ages, shalt thou live Unchangeable! A shrine is rais'd to thee, Which, nor the tempest-breath of time, Nor the interminable flood Over earth's slight pageant rolling, Availeth to destroy— The sensitive extension of the world. That wondrous and eternal fane, Where pain and pleasure, good and evil join, To do the will of strong necessity, And life, in multitudinous shapes, Still pressing forward where no term can be, Like hungry and unresting flame Curls round the eternal columns of its strength."

Body my house my horse my hound what will I do when you are fallen Where will I sleep How will I ride What will I hunt Where can I go without my mount all eager and quick How will I know in thicket ahead is danger or treasure when Body my good bright dog is dead How will it be to lie in the sky without roof or door and wind for an eye With cloud for shift how will I hide?

The difficulty to think at the end of day, When the shapeless shadow covers the sun And nothing is left except light on your fur— There was the cat slopping its milk all day, Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk And August the most peaceful month. To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time, Without that monument of cat, The cat forgotten in the moon; And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light, In which everything is meant for you And nothing need be explained; Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself; And east rushes west and west rushes down, No matter. The grass is full And full of yourself. The trees around are for you, The whole of the wideness of night is for you, A self that touches all edges, You become a self that fills the four corners of night. The red cat hides away in the fur-light And there you are humped high, humped up, You are humped higher and higher, black as stone— You sit with your head like a carving in space And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

Meanwhile the sea moves uneasily, like a man who suspects what the room reels with as he rises into it is violation—his own: he touches the bruises at each shoulder and, on his chest, the larger bruise, star-shaped, a flawed star, or hand, though he remembers no hands, has tried—can't remember . . . That kind of rhythm to it, even to the roughest surf there's a rhythm findable, which is why we keep coming here, to find it, or that's what we say. We dive in and, as usual, the swimming feels like that swimming the mind does in the wake of transgression, how the instinct to panic at first slackens that much more quickly, if you don't look back. Regret, like pity, changes nothing really, we say to ourselves and, less often, to each other, each time swimming a bit farther, leaving the shore the way the water—in its own watered, of course, version of semaphore–keeps leaving the subject out, flashing Why should it matter now and Why, why shouldn 't it, as the waves beat harder, hard against us, until that's how we like it, I'll break your heart, break mine.

Radiant dog on doublecross, and I, by night, a raven fly. My fear is that eternity has an alm that is ordinary to ten thousand and worn from my strings, my console of limbs, and I a missing part. It is the world that's new, not I, and submarines can shoot the land from the wheelbarrow of sickly pastorals. Give me the swamp any day! or the huts that pave the slave to freedom. From a small cloud in my ears the song has leapt the valley curtained with snow, and for ascendant harmony the gambler thumbs his cards. Of all the queens one is a witch whose curse is that she's held. The horses roll the stone and trot after their maturity sweepstakes. This time the homeliest won't ride my bet into hasty subtract glue. The pieces fly and here I lie, triangle of head and gut and thigh. Put me on my mount, Tomahawk, and past the river our cortege will dust the heavy fur, and peasants' prayers will touch the smell of holy cadaver. I will have sun and manly rage, and Mike Atlas will trim me up to rip the bier from my brother's hearse, and avenge me for my loss. The gallows hurt! and for my scheme I hang on the bridge's span where my mother will trust my lips with tears, the ones I send her now.

The smashed weirdness of the raving cadenzas of God Takes over all of a sudden In our time. It speaks through the voices of talk show moderators. It tells us in a ringing anthem, like heavenly hosts uplifted, That the rhapsody of the pastoral is out to lunch. We can take it from there. We can take it to Easy Street. But when things get tough on Easy Street What then? Is it time for realism? And who are these guys on the bus Who glide in golden hats past us On their way to Kansas City?

That is why I am here not among the ibises. Why the permanent city parasol covers even me. It was the rains in the occult season. It was the snows on the lower slopes. It was water and cold in my mouth. A lack of shoes on what appeared to be cobbles which were still antique Well wild wild whatever in wild more silent blue the vase grips the stems petals fall    the chrysanthemum darkens Sometimes this mustard feeling clutches me also. My sleep is reckoned in straws Yet I wake up and am followed into the street.

Do not look for illumination. Mostly there is the twitch that precedes gesture, the button’s resistance as you try to slide it into the too-small aperture slashed in a finger-width of cloth. And yes, I know it is hard to disregard how tiny and even the stitches are, how they ring the space that had to be opened first to make way for the fastening. Don’t feel betrayed if there is only silence in the trees, months of near continuous rain. Thoughts sometimes rush to collect at the bottom of the drain pipe. Other times they vaporize in the heat, fall for the voices warbling discontent. When it rains, I am oddly comforted. The rain soaks through, asks me to give up a little of myself. Asks me not to be so hard.

1    The dragons on the back of a circular bronze mirror swirl without end. I sit and am an absorbing form: I absorb the outline of a snowy owl on a branch, the rigor mortis in a hand. I absorb the crunching sounds when you walk across a glacial lake with aquamarine ice heaved up here and there twenty feet high. I absorb the moment a jeweler pours molten gold into a cuttlefish mold and it begins to smoke. I absorb the weight of a pause when it tilts the conversation in a room. I absorb the moments he sleeps holding her right breast in his left hand and know it resembles glassy waves in a harbor in descending spring light. Is the mind a mirror? I see pig carcasses piled up from the floor on a boat docked at Wanxian and the cook who smokes inadvertently drops ashes into soup. I absorb the stench of burning cuttlefish bone, and as moments coalesce see to travel far is to return. 2    A cochineal picker goes blind; Mao, swimming across the Yangtze River, was buoyed by underwater frogmen; in the nursing home, she yelled, “Everyone here has Alzheimer’s!” it blistered his mouth; they thought the tape of erhu solos was a series of spy messages; finding a bag of piki pushpinned to the door; shapes of saguaros by starlight; a yogi tries on cowboy boots at a flea market; a peregrine falcon shears off a wing; her niece went through the house and took what she wanted; “The sooner the better”; like a blindman grinding the bones of a snow leopard; she knew you had come to cut her hair; suffering: this and that: iron 26, gold 79; they dared him to stare at the annular eclipse; the yellow pupils of a saw-whet owl. 3    The gold shimmer at the beginning of summer dissolves in a day. A fly mistakes a gold spider, the size of a pinhead, at the center of a glistening web. A morning mushroom knows nothing of twilight and dawn? Instead of developing a navy, Ci Xi ordered architects to construct a two-story marble boat that floats on a lotus-covered lake. Mistake a death cap for Caesar’s amanita and in hours a hepatic hole opens into the sky. To avoid yelling at his pregnant wife, a neighbor installs a boxing bag in a storeroom; he periodically goes in, punches, punches, reappears and smiles. A hummingbird moth hovers and hovers at a woman wearing a cochineal-dyed flowery dress. Liu Hansheng collects hypodermic needles, washes them under a hand pump, dries them in sunlight, seals them in Red Cross plastic bags, resells them as sterilized new ones to hospitals. 4    Absorb a corpse-like silence and be a brass cone at the end of a string beginning to mark the x of stillness. You may puzzle as to why a meson beam oscillates, or why galaxies appear to be simultaneously redshifting in all directions, but do you stop to sense death pulling and pulling from the center of the earth to the end of the string? A mother screams at her son, “You’re so stupid,” but the motion of this anger is a circle. A teen was going to attend a demonstration, but his parents, worried about tear gas, persuaded him to stay home: he was bludgeoned to death that afternoon by a burglar. I awake dizzy with a searing headache thinking what nightmare did I have that I cannot remember only to discover the slumlord dusted the floor with roach powder. 5    Moored off Qingdao, before sunrise, the pilot of a tanker is selling dismantled bicycles. Once, a watchmaker coated numbers on the dial with radioactive paint and periodically straightened the tip of the brush in his mouth. Our son sights the North Star through a straw taped to a protractor so that a bolt dangling from a string marks the latitude. I remember when he said his first word, “Clock”; his 6:02 is not mine, nor is your 7:03 his. We visit Aurelia in the nursing home and find she is sleeping curled in a fetal position. A chain-smoking acupuncturist burps, curses; a teen dips his head in paint thinner. We think, had I this then that would, but subjunctive form is surge and ache. Yellow dips of chamisa are flaring open. I drop a jar of mustard, and it shatters in a wave. 6    The smell of roasted chili; descending into the epilimnion; the shape of a datura leaf; a bank robber superglued his fingertips; in the lake, ocean-seal absorption; a moray snaps up a scorpion fish; he had to mistake and mistake; burned popcorn; he lifted the fly agaric off of blue paper and saw a white galaxy; sitting in a cold sweat; a child drinking Coke out of a formula bottle has all her teeth capped in gold; chrysanthemum-shaped fireworks exploding over the water; red piki passed down a ladder; laughter; as a lobster mold transforms a russula into a delicacy; replicating an Anasazi yucca fiber and turkey-feather blanket. 7    He looks at a series of mirrors: Warring States Western Han, Eastern Han, Tang, Song, and notices bits of irregular red corrosion on the Warring States mirror. On the back, three dragons swirl in mist and April air. After sixteen years that first kiss still has a flaring tail. He looks at the TLV pattern on the back of the Han mirror: the mind has diamond points east, south, west, north. He grimaces and pulls up a pile of potatoes, notices snow clouds coming in from the west. She places a sunflower head on the northwest corner of the fence. He looks at the back of the Tang mirror: the lion and grape pattern is so wrought he turns, watches her pick eggplant, senses the underlying twist of pleasure and surprise that in mind they flow and respond endlessly. 8    I find a rufous hummingbird on the floor of a greenhouse, sense a redshifting along the radial string of a web. You may draw a cloud pattern in cement setting in a patio, or wake to sparkling ferns melting on a windowpane. The struck, plucked, bowed, blown sounds of the world come and go. As first light enters a telescope and one sees light of a star when the star has vanished, I see a finch at a feeder, beans germinating in darkness; a man with a pole pulls yarn out of an indigo vat, twists and untwists it; I hear a shout as a child finds Boletus barrowsii

I found a weed that had a mirror in it and that mirror looked in at a mirror in me that had a weed in it