536 Philosophy poems

We want to give ourselves away utterly but afterwards we resent it, it is the same with the sparrows, their eyes burn so coldly under the dusty pines, their small chests swell as they dispute a crumb, or the empty place where a seed was once: this is our law too, to peck and peck at the Self, to take turns being I, to die in a fierce sidelong glance, then to hold the entire forest in one tilt of a tufted head, to take flight suddenly and fuck in midair, tumbling upward.

Transfixed to the, by the, on the congruities, who is herself a vanishing point coming to closure — dusky flutter — trilling away like a watchdog on drugged sop, channeling her mother and grandmother who’ve engraved on her locket phrases in script: “glide on a blade” and “rustling precedes the shuck.” This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh. Always it’s morning, afternoon or evening — the loot of hours — a magic sack grasping vacuum but heavy in the hand, and from which, together, we pull a swarm of telepathic bees, melons beached in a green bin, a lithograph of the city from its crumbling ramparts, crackled pitchers and the mouth of a cave. Perhaps this is my open weave, my phantom rialto or plume of light. We bow to each other in the mash of flickering things. We are completely surrounded.

It is patent to the eye that cannot face the sun The smug philosophers lie who say the world is one; World is other and other, world is here and there, Parmenides would smother life for lack of air Precluding birth and death; his crystal never breaks— No movement and no breath, no progress nor mistakes, Nothing begins or ends, no one loves or fights, All your foes are friends and all your days are nights And all the roads lead round and are not roads at all And the soul is muscle-bound, the world a wooden ball. The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives And nothing that we do, make or become survives, His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme Completeness means be chokes each orifice with tight Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white All-white Universal, refusing to allow Division or dispersal—Eternity is now And Now is therefore numb, a fact he does not see Postulating a dumb static identity Of Essence and Existence which could not fuse without Banishing to a distance belief along with doubt, Action along with error, growth along with gaps; If man is a mere mirror of God, the gods collapse. No, the formula fails that fails to make it clear That only change prevails, that the seasons make the year, That a thing, a beast, a man is what it is because It is something that began and is not what it was, Yet is itself throughout, fluttering and unfurled, Not to be cancelled out, not to be merged in world, Its entity a denial of all that is not it, Its every move a trial through chaos and the Pit, An absolute and so defiant of the One Absolute, the row of noughts where time is done, Where nothing goes or comes and Is is one with Ought And all the possible sums alike resolve to nought. World is not like that, world is full of blind Gulfs across the flat, jags against the mind, Swollen or diminished according to the dice, Foaming, never finished, never the same twice. You talk of Ultimate Value, Universal Form— Visions, let me tell you, that ride upon the storm And must be made and sought but cannot be maintained, Lost as soon as caught, always to be regained, Mainspring of our striving towards perfection, yet Would not be worth achieving if the world were set Fair, if error and choice did not exist, if dumb World should find its voice for good and God become Incarnate once for all. No, perfection means Something but must fall unless there intervenes Between that meaning and the matter it should fill Time’s revolving hand that never can be still. Which being so and life a ferment, you and I Can only live by strife in that the living die, And, if we use the word Eternal, stake a claim Only to what a bird can find within the frame Of momentary flight (the value will persist But as event the night sweeps it away in mist). Man is man because he might have been a beast And is not what he was and feels himself increased, Man is man in as much as he is not god and yet Hankers to see and touch the pantheon and forget The means within the end and man is truly man In that he would transcend and flout the human span: A species become rich by seeing things as wrong And patching them, to which I am proud that I belong. Man is surely mad with discontent, he is hurled By lovely hopes or bad dreams against the world, Raising a frail scaffold in never-ending flux, Stubbornly when baffled fumbling the stubborn crux And so he must continue, raiding the abyss With aching bone and sinew, conscious of things amiss, Conscious of guilt and vast inadequacy and the sick Ego and the broken past and the clock that goes too quick, Conscious of waste of labour, conscious of spite and hate, Of dissension with his neighbour, of beggars at the gate, But conscious also of love and the joy of things and the power Of going beyond and above the limits of the lagging hour, Conscious of sunlight, conscious of death’s inveigling touch, Not completely conscious but partly—and that is much.

Don't feel small. We all have been demoted. Go on being moon or rock or orb, buoyant and distant, smallest craft ball at Vanevenhoven's Hardware spray-painted purple or day-glow orange for a child's elliptical vision of fish line, cardboard and foam. No spacecraft has touched you, no flesh met the luster of your heavenly body. Little cold one, blow your horn. No matter what you are planet, and something other than planet, ancient but not "classical," the controversy over what to call you light-hours from your ears. On Earth we tend to nurture the diminutive, root for the diminished. None of your neighbors knows your name. Nothing has changed. If Charon's not your moon, who cares? She remains unmoved, your companion.

Day is carved in marble, a man reclining, a naked giant suffering. Preoccupied Day faces Night, who is a woman, huge, naked, Herculean, both pillowed on their uncarved rough marble bed. They need light to be seen, neither has anything to do with the sun or moon. Art is not astronomy, but the heavens are useful as gardening to poets, not useful as love or loneliness. If I write out of arrogance and ignorance a poem called Day, my chisel and mallet, words and pen, paper my marble, I must not confuse sunlight and Day, petals with hours. I could rhyme, perhaps by reason and chance describe the nature of Day. I might discover Nature is surprisingly sometimes moral, unexpected, a principle over which the lovers Night and Day quarrel. In my poem, faithful Night and faithful Day quarreled; rhyme told me they quarreled because Day is gold, Night hates the thought of celestial money, rages at the starless differences between cost and price. Michelangelo did not choose to make a sculpture Prezzo, or put the finger of God on a coin. Day and Night saw Danaë’s legs spread apart for Zeus to enter as a shower of gold. They are not household gods or saints. Better I write about things nearby, a chair, a stool, the principle I’m sitting on. Day is my dictionary. If my Day were animal, he might be a baby elephant who eats leaves. My good Day stays close to his mother, who is murdered for her ivory tusks. My Day is an endangered specie. I whisper into elephant ears,peace, my darling little Day. An owl hoots,your Day has no given name! True, I refuse names useful to many others: Sabbath, Sunday, Friday, Saturday. My Day is not baptized, circumcised, or blessed. I pick him up and hold Day in my arms. I put my head in Day’s open mouth. I tongue Day, and Day tongues me. Yes, although my Day loves Night, he tongues me in and out of bed. My Day knows Night carnally, lets Night know me. So I love Day today. And I love Night tonight.

On the side of the road a deer, frozen, frigid. Go back to your life, the voice said. What is my life? she wondered. For months she lost herself in work—Freud said work is as important as love to the soul—and at night she sat with a boy, forcing him to practice his violin, helping him recite his notes. Then the ice thawed and the deer came to life. She saw her jump over the fence, she saw her in the twilight, how free she looked. She saw her eyes shiny as marbles, as much a part of this world as the fence a worker pounds into the earth. At night she still sat with the boy. He’s learning “Au Claire de la Lune.” Do you know it? He has established a relationship with his violin. He knows that it takes practice to master it: the accuracy of each note, to wrestle his feelings to the listener. But he’s impatient. Sometimes what he hears and feels are not always the same.Again, the poet says. She knows if he tries to silence his fervor, he might not ever know who he is. The poet contemplates whether a deer can dream. Rich blood-red berries on a branch, pachysandra in the garden. A soft warm bed in the leaves.

It is farming in an inclement sun system like a powerless nether beast fallen amidst random stellar debris fruit changes form light then quavers across distorted mural relics the farmer then living as a clarified adder his land forms compressed his wheat suspended & flaring his unstable forms carving his soil with volcanic blue seeds

A pot poured out Fulfills its spout

After we passed The Shore, we repented softly our middle years in cold, gratis parallel woods -flottage I know a hermitage has dyed speaker waves in my hair in my Venetian-blonde I withdrew aim, hit chloroform still carrying pure quantities past evening light shut off when armored silver-tinctured hook er liquid defenestrating gas you 'd huff to be the sands in rice glass      A re liance on romance or Pimm's is a similar sugarcube structure but white or Rawer? ETA error became quite visible on the surveillance camera at the psy choanalyst's live. No-one believes we are right about to surface again. Yellow stained my tea this morning after we passed The Shore, read The Voyeur, we plated our own Need  to  be  madly convened on porcelain We lapped up our own cottage spread can't quite make you out post-1- use bicycle          transformation as caring  as encased in whitening sea scene—inn's Spectacular imm ediate incompatibility Hug we Turned-gold Armitron Quartz watch that had stopped at 1 shy of 5 after 10 forever. ETA I've read now is the Evolutionary Transformative Agent,  a  quality  well we all  have that instinctively understands the greater plan; if we are especially playful, we have the potential to become the very ETA itself, just to see what will happen. Sugarcube struc ture faces the morphinists we'll all soon treat, a red hole perceived Lost, as a red trout enters, in the dis jointed pavement. If you were to write the story backward, knowing it all, Reverse yellow silk folding night after night of unfolding, I'd brighten backward, my impulse to not a bundt-cake unbridled ... in the sparkle of the outside and not an easily applied cos metic inner confirmation downgrading or, back-pedaling of Sun in me suddenly 4 horizon passions are most often different but, a sense memory or trauma object begins to take my —heurté Treatment garde the afterimage ... disk Image interference was we were asleep in the cabin after the Mineralogist came, Geometrician in antique nightslip Intercepted and disrespecting the floor [If you expect to rate as a gentleman Do not expectorate on the floor] Rott ed, resisted own essence to ... skip reveal comparison to how phase space,hard to sleep in First Place formerly Vulnerable risk-averse threads à vue! anticipation at you nodding, Rabbit sheerly nodding off Seen behind yellow silk, should We make a curtain? Should we have made a curtain? We made the curtain, and then we cross the chromatic index 4 pentagram inside  —flottage,  disk the pentagon—tried to cross— almost anxious stares crossed, that fit the on-edge holds and saw the fabric upon the heap at estate, exposed, fruit limitations failed projective plane of Gently when want a yard logement —flottage gleaming for us like new UFO Energy to feed a Piano man knew anything and felt for hot-plate, his wife's yellow silk / his brow she has bleached to make Fabric-Safe concurrently frucht from brun to yellow, in a transformation that would make it a Perfect Form but it was brown and actually, Confide in purchase rather ... drink than by whom I whistle nearest, also dissolves a placate Lost, my affiliation never been a privilege to get party to public fiction, sticking —also your torrent of simple, raging parchment, Scorpion in Titian-red herbicide blossoms has some variety of human experience whether logement, disque. earth DON'T MAKE WAVES in such as a glass-dome paper glare at other women   weight to scale perspectival encasing non-cyclic, places inedibles minor- close guy ... oar Satisfied, trembles, select, induced me to get Clams as —forbidden subgraphs. Coptic Time again: of or relating to the sense of touch, in particular relating to the perception and manipulation of mystical derisive no historical substance for dialogues using the senses of near-extinct touch, Ophelia and proprioception. reappears —a hole, done by Paddles ... fade in lapels. I DO NOT NEED TO DESCRIBE YOU, YOU ARE SPEAKING. It's touching. runs Counter to paid companion's monotony of Roulette blue as stationary magnetic cliff Should not mean Chiromancy, but. 3 rd potential of              nucleus already mean 5 nus Pulleys at least to produce  Yellow- golden jaggery in its 'purest state'  (mal Practice could turn around on hearing that) meant I brighten ... I am alone here. mov ing away from head-arms hadn't heard along viol ent agitations of Cl - and Na deplete Motional EMF, not being a Force. Generators well up and breaks appear as Spittoons in salt, struck drift- wood until the bell but more distant ... end of beach, a rock in hand, a fresh brioche ... all very perfumed plumes must be further in we presume in this moment of brilliance, decreases in the glass and every thing becomes darker,       a pack of floating Gauloises    suck in hand, voice without detour shatter it. All other surfaces were blurred in my Undying late summer salad 4-eyes Vertexes / cash of azure Agent Sequent finesse

...this insignificant interval between death and dying. One cannot accept or refuse, O death, emptiness, air, sun. The "I" is the miracle of the "You." "This follows from a certain logic," he said: "the 'I' to designate the 'You,' the 'You' to justify the 'I,' and 'He' for disappearing." There is no present. There is a past haunted by the future and a future tormented by the past. The present is the time of writing, both obsessed with and cut off from an out-of-time brimming with life. (Now that all is silent within me, will I, who have hardly known how to talk to myself, still be able to speak? I almost cannot hear myself any more. On this 'almost' I shall rest my words or, rather, what stub- bornly still wants to be words—though they be deaf to the call of the world—an take entire charge of them. Expressing nothing, they will express me all the better.)