536 Philosophy poems

The border of a thing. Its edge or hem. The selvage, the skirt, a perimeter’s trim. The blow of daylight’s end and nighttime’s beginning. A fence or a rim, a margin, a fringe. And this: the grim, stingy doorstep where the lapse of passage happens. That slim lip of land, the liminal verge that slips you past your brink. Where and when you blink.

Hand and foot, from head to toe, the body we know like the back of our hands, we say, patting our palms since we don't know back from front, don't know our ass from our elbow. I help Liz find her vagina to use a tampon her first time, Brooke tells me what to expect during a blow job, Jeff says to let the funneled force of Coors hold open my throat, a stranger gives me Valium when I reach for her hand on a plane. Now Depo, condoms, the Pill make way for FSH and BBT, how the sperm that makes boys goes faster, dies sooner, like boys, says Joanna, holding her little girl. Laura's fingers flick to show how the dye popped open her fallopian tubes. Rita Mae says a 48 year old's sperm could cause autism, Esther says kids are nice but they do ruin your life. Billy's friend announces, out of nowhere,I am so happy with my decision not to have children and none of us believe her. X shopped around for the perfect Jewish eggs, Y injected her belly, evenings, with little syringes, the bruises blooming black, now purple, now yellow and green. During implantation the nurses played soft eighties hits— I bought a ticket to the world, I know I know I know this much is true. She says in the ultrasound her ovaries looked like bunches of grapes. Z has a baby at forty-two— in vino she and her husband joke,in vitro a no-no in the Roman Catholic Church. Encyclicals entitled Donum Vitae, Dignitas Personae say why:the human person is objectively deprived of its proper perfection: namely, that of being the result and fruit of a conjugal act. The church, thank god, is soothing, confident, ready to clear all this up. Life a gift, human persons dignified. And we, most of us, are perfect, because fathers put their penises in moms.

Infinity, when all things it beheld In Nothing, and of Nothing all did build, Upon what Base was fixt the Lath wherein He turn

MARIA NEFELE : I walk in thorns in the dark of what’s to happen and what has with my only weapon my only defense my nails purple like cyclamens. ANTIPHONIST: I saw her everywhere. Holding a glass and staring in space. Lying down listening to records. Walking the streets in wide trousers and an old gabardine. In front of children’s-store windows. Sadder then. And in discotheques, more nervous, eating her nails. She smokes innumerable cigarettes. She is pale and beautiful. But if you talk to her she doesn’t hear at all. As if something is happening – she alone hears it and is frightened. She holds your hand tight, tears, but is not there. I never touched her and I never took from her anything. MN: He understood nothing. He kept asking all the time “Remember?” What’s to remember? My dreams alone I remember because I see them at night. Days I feel bad – how to say: unprepared. I found myself so suddenly, in life – where I’d hardly expected. I’d say “Bah, I’ll get used to it.” And everything around me ran. Things and people ran, ran – until I set myself to run like crazy. But, it seems, I overdid. Because – I don’t know – something strange happened in the end. First I’d see the corpse and then the murder. First came the blood and then the blow and cry. And now, when I hear rain I don’t know what’s waiting... A: “Why don’t they bury people standing up like archbishops?” – that’s what she’d say to me. And once, I remember, summer on the island, all of us coming from a party, dawn, we jumped over the bars of the museum’s garden. She danced on the stones and she saw nothing. MN: I saw his eyes.  I saw some old olive groves. A: I saw a column on a grave. A girl in relief on the stone. She seemed sad and held a small bird in her cupped hand. MN: He was looking at me, I know, he was looking at me. We both were looking at the same stone. We looked at each other through the stone. A: She was calm and in her palm she held a small bird. MN: She was sitting and she was dead. A: She was sitting and in her palm she held a small bird. You’ll never hold a bird like that – you aren’t able. MN: Oh if they let me, if they let me. A: If who let you? MN: The one who lets nothing. A: He, he who lets nothing is cut by his shadow and walks away. MN: His words are white and unspeakable his eyes deep and without sleep... A: But the whole upper part of the stone was taken. And with it her name. MN: ARIMNA – as if I could still see the letters carved inside the light... ARIMNA EFE EL ... A: Gone. The whole top gone. There were no letters at all. MN: ARIMNA EFE EL – there, on the EL the stone had cut and broken. I remember it well. A: She must have seen it in a dream since she remembers. MN: In my dreams, yes. In a large sleep that will come sometimes all light and heat and small stony steps. The children will walk in the streets arm in arm like in some old Italian movies. Song everywhere and enormous women in small balconies watering their flowers. A: A large blue balloon will take us high then, here and there, the wind will beat us. The silver domes will stand out first, then the belfries. The streets will appear narrower and straighter than we imagined. The terraces with the white television antennas. And all around the hills, and the kites – so close we’ll just shave past them. Until one moment we’ll see the whole sea. On it the souls will be leaving small white steams. MN: I have lifted my hand against the mountains, the dark and the demonic of this world. I’ve asked love “Why?” and rolled her on the floor. War and war and not one rag to hide deep in our things and forget. Who listens? Who listened? Judges, priests, police, which is your country? One body is left me and I give it. On it those who know cultivate the holy, as the gardeners in Holland, tulips. And in it drown who never learned of sea or swimming... Flux of the sea and you stars’ distant influx – stand by me! A: I have lifted my hand against the unexorcised demons of the world and from the place of illness I have exited to the sun and to the light self-exiled! MN: And from too many storms I’ve exited self among humans exiled!

Translation broadens language as divorce and remarriage extend family. Born to fade and break, facts huddle inside black brackets. Work means inquisition as a child separates a cricket’s wings from thorax. Ideas come apart as monads, metastasizing rhapsody on the edge of delicate dusk. Thunder sounds in the distance or television, always on in this constant rain.

Not, in the saying of you, are you said. Baffled and like a root stopped by a stone you turn back questioning the tree you feed. But what the leaves hear is not what the roots ask. Inexhaustibly, being at one time what was to be said and at another time what has been said the saying of you remains the living of you never to be said. But, enduring, you change with the change that changes and yet are not of the changing of any of you. Ever yourself, you are always about to be yourself in something else ever with me.

When one isn’t enough, you need two when two aren’t enough, you need four with four the progression begins, moving toward a number that schoolteachers will call absurd. Question: How many men do you need to put up a house? Answer: You need absurd men when one isn’t enough and two can’t do the work of One. And how much money should we give these men to compensate them? You need absurd coins when one coin sliced in half and handed out isn’t enough. And how many words do you need to transform them? Absurd and absurd and absurd words when silence isn’t enough. This is what they call progression: Absurd men aren’t enough for putting up the house, absurd coins don’t make them happy absurd words can’t dissuade them.

That twig of light, that branch, that fork, that form. Beyond that, a city. A horse drowning in a river, and beyond that, a city. Wildfire, and beyond that, a city. God, a slippery thing, an eel, is twined from our hands. That rainy hum is the wharf, is the light that etches a bridge between pronouns, the bottle of amber formaldehyde, the infant orangutan, the wing of a gull stitched to its scapula. Here is a river drowning in a horse’s dark eye. Devitalized, humming, rainy, the feather of this gull, this small spill of light, the written thing that glues each hill to the earth, that follows a pull with its wobbly needle. God is a drowned horse fifty hands at the shoulder. To write what convinces with the impossible whisper. After that, a city. They call this floating thing an angel and hurry you out of the tent. A bear eating its own paws, and after this, a city. A window full of smoke, and after this, a city. A meter to measure day and time Adapted for that purpose by the God of our hands.

One day the Earth will be just a blind space turning, night confused with day. Under the vast Andean sky there’ll be no more mountains, not a rock or ravine. Only one balcony will remain of all the world’s buildings, and of the human mappa mundi, limitless sorrow. In place of the Atlantic Ocean, a little saltiness in the air, and a fish, flying and magical with no knowledge of the sea. In a car of the 1900s (no road for its wheels) three girls of that time, pressing onwards like ghosts in the fog. They’ll peer through the door thinking they’re nearing Paris when the odor of the sky grips them by the throat. Instead of a forest there’ll be one bird singing, which nobody will ever place, or prefer, or even hear. Except for God, who listening out, proclaims it a goldfinch.

inside the bottle with the ship were several Drowned sailors elegy acts on inward skies what you imagine about radio waves these elegant machines bend sinister sentience itself, disordering of the senses, sentimental disgust, disuse, unease by palliative measures supply sufficient echoes to eliminate our organs scattered bones prove the date of the body they are rexed beyond the farthest shoal consumed by a mosaic, a forest of saltshakers an obstinate minor puzzle at my bidding everything is procedural a relative view is counterintuitive, journalism is not written by journalists the diaspora was juggled, then slain intercept a preferred designator a kernal, a Trophy low birth fashioned a hallmark swagger to replace geometrical dreams with scant leviathans: is this an improvement? where is the life that later I led how to account for the strategems, in what I am weakest exemplify I am departed, protean twinned stick figures cut up drawings with scissors, put the pieces in their pockets, confidence in shapes . . . this picture is not very accurate inner turmoil is as oblique as how fair realism fares the objects of its attention; externalized or just compacted to a fêted untouchable Vitamin doll exception spines boundary what kind of skirts are outskirts a primitive, endangered mahogany mask, a convict’s garb, soil cleared from weeds. these teeth sown won’t become full grown: prey talks foreign; heads hang in the halls. habit is only two dimensional, as with any tool barbarous cattle, drudgery of ammunition, improper use of artificial blue collars I died of foliage; I died of typed patterns on carbon paper; I died of a chief delight. fare thee well, crackpot. I break a sweat, the dish is still cold read my Palm, do what it says it’s time that we get up on all fours