536 Philosophy poems

Existence trumps nonexistence every time. It has all the colors and all the shapes and all the moves, it is rude in its bounty and its grotesque reach that overcomes all before it. This bit of stick I found in the park was showing off because the dead can’t have it. They can’t have any of it. It was sticky and prickled with a showy, dazzling presence, though it’s quietened a little now, now that I’ve taken it home and have it here on the mantelpiece. It has dressed in purple robes and carried its being like a chalice with such disarming mock-solemnity down and down the pale carved steps into its candlelit depths. Its being rests inside it now and purrs quite inaudibly with a sound like the most exclusive refrigerator, or a sound you might take for your own sovereign wheels spinning. Little stick. Wait for me. I’m coming.

To be free of situations, To live from day to day without events And to be free from the need to narrate them. One small detail, the blossoming crab apple, For example, on the lengthening boulevard Of the stanza, this very one, That parallels the perturbation of the waves Mid-April—the Mississippi flowing above the locks Of Minneapolis, once called St. Anthony— Two blocks away, the river high with snowmelt, And where this morning I heard the call Of what I took to be a sparrow, white-throated, The leap of a minor third Two octaves above middle C. Four birds outside this afternoon. Four distinct calls In a dispirited late daylight. And you? “You”? Waiting to experience a moment That has no precedent. The wish to be a child, Or the wish to be outside of time, The craving, that is, for a kind of death In which one stays somehow alert... Listening to the Schumann Violin Concerto: Written in that last period as he descended into the madness Brought on by syphilis when he heard the singing Of the angels, this piece was thought to be unplayable Until the metronome markings were ignored; In the second movement a brief passage comes and goes Like the frenzied clustering of bees, pure monotony, Like madness gathering its forces. Clara, Schumann’s wife, Asked that the piece never be performed, but one musician Said of his music that all madness contains a kind Of vulgarity, but even after he went insane, Schumann’s music retained that odd nobility. Outside, sounds of traffic, a woman’s cry from down the street. Idea for a frightening story: Last week I heard a scream so distant that it Had lost its call-to-rescue and its horror—dim vehemence, Like an auto accident seen from a train, The blood grown small, and the outcries As soundless as a branch in wind, Or like a child in snow straggling behind his parents, The drifts so deep he has trouble making headway, Being five years old, and so he calls out to them, “Hold!” because he cannot think of the proper word— Probably “Wait” or “Stop,”—and when they hear Him begging them to slow down and to wait for him, They turn around to laugh. Their laughter makes the child Sad and enraged, so he stops to cry, Whereupon his parents, still amused, bring out a camera To snap a picture of him as he wails. He understands that his unhappiness Was a diversion to them both, that they were bored By children and therefore found him comical, So there they are, laughing with delight. Today, sixty years later, he is Photographed, bundled in his winter coat. Oh, and the bored laughter, behind the camera, And the impossibility, the inconsequence Of any sympathy.

Flaunting in the atrium, ostentatious at the gates I saw a shooting star thru a window on Alcatraz Ave & cladding struck up against those who demand We stomach the stick and tend the commode They're selling trees in the paint store! trees in the paint store Datebook chips in the soft skin of our wrists On NBC, CNN, and NPR broken windows are weeping We'll have 35 apples and shrieking in the thickets Aloft in the air golden and golden the dial among the mounds So much is stunted in understanding of what a light can be They storm the scrimmage line and clear-cut bran and germ We want the petal unto itself, the unalterable vessel The arc end of the precipice grows 1.9% annually What was popular music like before the crisis?

Either the world is coming together, or else the world is falling apart — here — now — along these letters, against the walls of every heart. Today, tomorrow, within its weather, the end or beginning’s about to start — the world impossibly coming together or very possibly falling apart. Now the lovers’ mouths are open — maybe the miracle’s about to start: the world within us coming together, because all around us it’s falling apart. Even as they speak, he wonders, even as the fear departs: Is that the world coming together? Can they keep it from falling apart? The image, gradually, is growing sharper; now the sound is like a dart: It seemed their world was coming together, but in fact it was falling apart. That’s the nightmare, that’s the terror, that’s the Isaac of this art — which sees that the world might come together if only we’re willing to take it apart. The dream, the lure, is the prayer’s answer, which can’t be plotted on any chart — as we know the world that’s coming together without our knowing is falling apart.

We keep trying to kill it, split it, hack It to itsy bits. We suspend it On the wall where we can see it Passing. We hang it around our necks Or wrists, laying pulse next to Pulse as if each might like Company. Ba-bump, etc. Rising And setting has everything to do With it. In the afternoon we feel so Lazy we try not to close our eyes And jerk awake, wondering what has Passed, and where did we go For that suspended hour, And could anything keep us here.

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians    ...    for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same. — Plutarch, Vita Thesel The answer of course is that the ship doesn’t exist, that “ship” is an abstraction, a conception, an imaginary tarp thrown across the garden of the real. The answer is that the cheap peasantry of things toils all day in the kingdom of  language, every ship like a casket of words:bulkhead, transom, mast steps

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Discipline. Free will Doesn't mean freewheel. But what about Eros?Let Eros harrow whom he will. I have sipped my sip And poisoned the well. I am well pleased with my thirst. I know my thirst no evil. You'll die of thirst, Shail. If  the salt sea wills.

“The most beautiful bodies are like transparent glass.” They are bodies of the selfless or of those newly dead. What appears transparent is really flame burning so brightly it appears like glass. What you’re looking through is the act of giving: One thing in life needed desperately, given to another, or perhaps life itself. The most beautiful bodies are not transparent, but sometimes the color of lead, like the elephant whom a child with some peanuts lifts by the trunk in his hand in the swirling dust, so that it appears he has lifted a monument or a city with all its pain. The bodies that seem transparent are made of an ice so pure it appears to be glass sweating, where you, desiring another, glimpse your own face that weighs nothing and is burning.

Patience, though I have not The thing that I require, I must of force, God wot, Forbear my most desire; For no ways can I find To sail against the wind. Patience, do what they will To work me woe or spite, I shall content me still To think both day and night, To think and hold my peace, Since there is no redress. Patience, withouten blame, For I offended nought; I know they know the same, Though they have changed their thought. Was ever thought so moved To hate that it hath loved? Patience of all my harm, For fortune is my foe; Patience must be the charm To heal me of my woe: Patience without offence Is a painful patience.