536 Philosophy poems

It would never be possible for a stone, no more than for an airplane, to elevate itself toward the sun in jubilation. — Martin Heidegger The dragonflies again; the last time seeing them skim the river close to forgotten — their singing, their shimmer — now remembered, becoming so much flame; as tongues over the heads of the chosen in the child’s picture book of Christ I learned by heart, descent and weight of after the fact, the gift the fork between hope and vanity, the river that eats itself  turned mirror broken into light; the corpse between the beloved’s good word and the beloved who having spoken was ever spoken into being, lies, unspeaking, and as with any heaviness that lowers then hovers, remains inconceivable; so the letter given in stone, perfection in fire; love; all love’s failures; the winged animal drops to the earth and is there buried in a hole where it digs in the grit like the blade we left in the riverbed, adrift and cry- shaped in the memory, both that dim and that loud; though no accosting why it seems that way, everything ghost of itself or everything made of mythic proportion, the walker sinking from the face of the waters, the dragon I become when I talk to myself, what a belief is, terrifying and relentless; I’ve never been able to tell the difference; the brute and the apparition in reflection speak at once — the rock and the rock’s light — so that now the insect thrums and it is surely a kind of tenderness, an ODing in secret, turning into while turning from the soul the animal raised and devoured in dream; imagine, the child’s wished-for surface gives and ripples up to mouth the perfect imprint, saying “aircraft” and there are aircraft, amen, the walker is surrounded by flight on all sides; the walker walks without wings; see, the recollection is flawless, turning wings of  jewels; the recollection is absolute, swallows whole; echoes; and the dragon feasts; and the dragon flies again;

“The Sailor cannot see the North—but knows the Needle can—” The books were all torn apart, sliced along the spines Light filled all the openings that she in her silence renounced Still: her handwriting on the papers remembered us to her The careful matching of the papers’ edges was a road back One night Muhummad was borne aloft by a winged horse Taken from the Near Mosque to the Far Mosque Each book likens itself to lichen, stitching softly to tree trunks, to rocks what was given into the Prophet’s ears that night: A changing of directions—now all the scattered tribes must pray: Wonder well foundry, well sunborn, sundered and sound here Well you be found here, foundered and found

I have no conscience because I always chew my pencil. Can we say white paper with black lines on it is like a human body? This question not to be decided by pointing at a tree nor yet by a description of simple pleasures. Smell of retrieval. Led to expect the wrong answer. An arsenal without purpose but why yes please. There is no touching the black box. The tree not pointed at lives in your bringing up the subject and leaves space for need, falling. The white ground. The waning heat. I’d like to say the history of the world. Or that grammar milks essence into propositions of human kindness. The difficulty here’s not true or false but that the picture’s in the foreground and its sense back where the gestures link so closely to the bone the words give notice. The application is not easy.

Little has been made of the soft, skirting action of magnets reversed, while much has been made of attraction. But is it not this pillowy principle of repulsion that produces the doily edges of oceans or the arabesques of thought? And do these cutout coasts and incurved rhetorical beaches not baffle the onslaught of the sea or objectionable people and give private life what small protection it's got? Praise then the oiled motions of avoidance, the pearly convolutions of all that slides off or takes a wide berth; praise every eddying vacancy of Earth, all the dimpled depths of pooling space, the whole swirl set up by fending-off— extending far beyond the personal, I'm convinced— immense and good in a cosmological sense: unpressing us against each other, lending the necessary never to never-ending.

An idle poet, here and there, Looks round him; but, for all the rest, The world, unfathomably fair, Is duller than a witling’s jest. Love wakes men, once a lifetime each; They lift their heavy lids, and look; And, lo, what one sweet page can teach, They read with joy, then shut the book. And some give thanks, and some blaspheme And most forget; but, either way, That and the Child’s unheeded dream Is all the light of all their day.

It is to Emerson I have turned now, damp February, for he has written of the moral harmony of nature. The key to every man is his thought. But Emerson, half angel, suffers his dear Ellen’s dying only half-consoled that her lungs shall no more be torn nor her head scalded by her blood, nor her whole life suffer from the warfare between the force & delicacy of her soul & the weakness of her frame . . . March the 29th, 1832, of an evening strange with dreaming, he scribbles, I visited Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin. —Emerson looking in, clutching his key. Months of hard freeze have ruptured the wild fields of Ohio, and burdock is standing as if stunned by persistent cold wind or leaning over, as from rough breath. I have brought my little one, bundled and gloved, to the lonely place to let her run, hoary whiskers, wild fescue, cracks widened along the ground hard from a winter drought. I have come out for the first time in weeks still full of fever, insomnia-fogged, to track her flags of breath where she’s dying to vanish on the hillsides of bramble and burr. The seasonal birds—scruff cardinal, one or two sparrows, something with yellow— scatter in small explosions of ice. Emerson, gentle mourner, would be pleased by the physical crunch of the ground, damp from the melt, shaped by the shape of his boot, that half of him who loved the Dunscore heath too rocky to cultivate, covered thick with heather, gnarled hawthorn, the yellow furze not far from Carlyle’s homestead where they strolled, —that half of him for whom nature was thought. Kate has found things to deepen her horror for evenings to come, a deer carcass tunneled by slugs, drilled, and abandoned, a bundle of bone shards, hoof and hide, hidden by thick bramble, or the bramble itself enough to collapse her dreams, braided like rope, blood- colored, blood-barbed, tangled as Medusa. What does she see when she looks at such things? I do not know what is so wrong with me that my body has erupted, system by system, sick unto itself. I do not know what I have done, nor what she thinks when she turns toward her ill father. How did Emerson behold of his Ellen, un- embalmed face fallen in, of her white hands? Dreams & beasts are two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our own natures. Half angel, Emerson wrestles all night with his journal, the awful natural fact of Ellen’s death, which must have been deeper sacrifice than a sacrament. Where has she gone now, whose laughter comes down like light snow on the beautiful hills? Perhaps it is the world that is the matter . . . —His other half worried by the wording.

To sow the remote morose root. To sow the virtuous standby. The backup fodder-crop suffers not from seasonal vicissitudes, mildew and blast, caterpillar attack. Under Saturn sing the golden-sickled beet. Under Saturn sing the ringed mangelwurzel. The great turnip (the dick reuben!). The pickled paucity-strick stew.

Soon I shall take more I will get more light and I'll know what I think about that Driving down Second Ave. in a car the frieze of my hand like a grandmother captured in an institution I know I'll never live here again etc. many many long years ago Millions of peeps in the scrawl the regular trees the regular dog snort & dig. In the West Village you could put on a hat a silly hat & it's clear whereas over here 20 years passed that rotting hat it's loyalty to someone or something that's really so gone the moment clenched like religion or government. Wait a minute. I prefer umm a beatle's cap when it's really really old neighborhood devoted to that. Poetry is a sentimental act everything spring she said being surrounded by so much rot. Pages & pages mounds of them that I'm in not some library but in your little home, like you. Every season I know I'm leaving I'm as loyal as the cross to this smeltering eccentricity down by the river with Daddio toss your ball in the river in the future over bridges they say you have to imagine the 20th century.All these buildings were colored a blasted interior scarlet curtains rattling day cobwebs on inexplicable machinery a theater once dwelled here all I see is rotting ideas the epics I imagined the unified cast of everyone eating turkey together on a stage my idea like waters towers popping up feeling mellow not exactly nothing all this time but the buildings that are absolute gone that I never described. You can't kill a poet. We just get erased & written on. It aches in my brain, my back this beauty I'm eating my toast everyone I knew you would be dead tomorrow &you were. The composing camera infatuated with the shovel on the lid & the pile of rocks. He is not aging same Alexandrian blond in Bini-bons the sirens are gods when I lifted my head from my swarming difficulty You were so marvelous bringing those toys to my feet in between the invisibility of the constant production & consumption the network of that & apart from the mold. You survived.

Perhaps you covet something of its emptiness, its uselessness in matters of  yearning or feeling another’s yearn, that it can’t know a damn thing, yet damns everything it touches: the water it gathers along its passage, the air it pushes through, swallow-like. It is no bird, though you envy the song you hear only after it’s gone, even if  it sings through paper, a goat, the neck of a man wearing a scarf that tufts just as the rest of   him flies out of his shoes and collapses in dirt. Or, how it is like the dirt receiving him, the privilege of not knowing if   he was kind or unkind, as you chamber another, waiting for someone to come for his shoes.

They have no sense of what they’re looking at, Unless the object moves. (Or so he’s read; who knows if that’s the case?) A painted bird’s an empty analogue To the oblivious cat. And it is not his still familiar face So much as that distinctive gait which proves The master to his dog, Who frolics for him like an acrobat. His eyes need movement too, but make their own. His most fixated gaze— On one small figure in a Bruegel scene, Or on the camber of his lover’s lip He worships unbeknown, As though no time or change will supervene— Aflicker with saccade, adjusts and strays Minutely to equip His mind to take in what is being shown. And maybe consciousness employs saccade As well, and flickers back And forth, now in the world, now, briefly, out— The way the gum tree’s canopy overhead Flickers with light and shade, So every leaf is momently in doubt— Its faith saved by such intermittent lack From being surfeited, Its constant sense being constantly unmade.