536 Philosophy poems

As soon as I speak, I speaks. It wants to be free but impassive lies in the direction of its words. Let x equal x, x also equals x. I speak to hear myself speak? I had not thought that some- thing had such undone. It was an idea of mine.

Believing each simple thing passes from a perception that is less clear into one that is, eventually, more clear. Believing each simple thing contains within it a minimal unity beyond which whatever else can be exists. That the two seeds, or four seeds, are where the pear will go and where it began. Black bark, blossoms in the mild rain, smelling like piss in the spring rain, the chips and twigs raining down beneath our weight as we broke off bouquets for the teacher. “What is that smell?” she asked. Stark, white, delicate, attached with green cuffs, twig to twig, the blooms bursting through the runnels that held them. Five runnels made in the foil by five fingers. The given world is infinite and reality is complete . That’s what I had written in the morning on the blackboard. And then, going home, I was stalled again on the bridge. I looked up and out and there I saw the girl flying and falling, flying and falling in the distance, in the narrow air between two buildings, her arms outspread, over and over against the strip of sky and above the gravel, or grass or ground—the light changed and I couldn’t see at all where or how she had dragged the trampoline that must have been the yielding source of all her motion. If you find a sight like this a kind of gift or sign, you’ve missed the way the mind seals over, the way the simplest thing pulls on its heavy hood and turns away slowly from a thought. For later, weeks later, I was stalled again in mid-bridge and couldn’t remember, yet could vaguely remember, the sense that something was about to happen, that the light would change like a bell or alarm and that in turn would mean the time had come when everyone must leave the school— with every sweater and pencil left in place —to burn, and burn and burn back to the ground.

MATTHEW xiii I know the ways of learning; both the head And pipes that feed the press, and make it run; What reason hath from nature borrowed, Or of itself, like a good huswife, spun In laws and policy; what the stars conspire, What willing nature speaks, what forc'd by fire; Both th'old discoveries and the new-found seas, The stock and surplus, cause and history; All these stand open, or I have the keys: Yet I love thee. I know the ways of honour; what maintains The quick returns of courtesy and wit; In vies of favours whether party gains When glory swells the heart and moldeth it To all expressions both of hand and eye, Which on the world a true-love-knot may tie, And bear the bundle wheresoe'er it goes; How many drams of spirit there must be To sell my life unto my friends or foes: Yet I love thee. I know the ways of pleasure; the sweet strains The lullings and the relishes of it; The propositions of hot blood and brains; What mirth and music mean; what love and wit Have done these twenty hundred years and more; I know the projects of unbridled store; My stuff is flesh, not brass; my senses live, And grumble oft that they have more in me Than he that curbs them, being but one to five: Yet I love thee. I know all these and have them in my hand; Therefore not seeled but with open eyes I fly to thee, and fully understand Both the main sale and the commodities; And at what rate and price I have thy love, With all the circumstances that may move. Yet through the labyrinths, not my grovelling wit, But thy silk twist let down from heav'n to me Did both conduct and teach me how by it To climb to thee.

Between people’s ideals and their realization there is always a greater drop than in the highest of waterfalls. This potential gradient can be exploited rationally, if we build a sort of power station above it. The energy it supplies, even if we use it only to light our cigarettes, is something anyway; for while one is smoking one can very seriously think up ideals even crazier.

In the perfect universe of math it’s said the world’s eternal aberration. In fact, we should be less than dead, math itself disrupted for matter ever to be read as real. A thought so hard to fathom that The Nation in its article on math has said we lack the right imagination: the human head will not subtract itself from the equation, zero out the eager ego to be less than dead. Did the numbers hunger for mistake, for fun upend themselves to recalculate our infinite extinction? And was existence meant for all, since it could be said without our numbers others might have thrived: the black rhinoceros, shortnose sturgeon—? Articles of horn and scale both less and more than dead, figurative dreams that now haunt us in our beds. Memory’s another flaw in our equation. Was it The Nation? I forget. Regardless, I know that someone said in a perfect universe, we’d all be dead.

The man who murders his wife Is not the same as the man Who goes around and murders a stranger. I am a woman but I am not The same as another woman. Identity politics are bullshit. There is only the smart and the evil, The good and the righteous. There is only one color on the earth. In its infinite degradations it becomes music and mathematics. There is shit on my hands When I have been playing around with specifics. Love your lover. You are a lover. With each breath God has put a golden faith Upon the snowy mountains of the world. Here, look at the snowy mountains, Glittering with snow. They are wiser than you might think. And in your soul, the small grey animals Of the world sit and wait to do good For you, and together We are one thing, bleating a Somber, scurrying lullaby to Lapsing pinkish angels. Upon a mountain The angels smile sleepily as they stretch Their very long legs, thinking of us. And wise they might seem, us and the angels, But really it is only God who is wise.

Nihilism, but not in a negative sense—such was his thought, what else to call it? Like snow inside a novelty snow globe, vague possibility descended from probability, descended from likelihood and certainty. Now not even air. Those great words discussed in college— truth, beauty, justice, which had come to embarrass him, like teasing bare-breasted girls in postcards sent from Polynesian islands that each year he had found less likely; absolutes faded like old shirts, as still he tried to create from stray thoughts as if out of wood- chips and mud, the old certainties he once loved, the believable lie.

The perfect satisfaction of wine, cigarettes, the sun at an afternoon angle passes through flesh as if flesh were a sieve to the direct point the soul of matter. Things fix time although the sun moves lazily, creating an image that seems like motive the wine transmutes and becomes blood cigarettes dissolve to blue threads and ash but the sun continues in constant repetition of its slow and rather boring dance.

HOMONCULUS: n., pl. –li 2. a fully formed, miniature human body believed, according to some medical theories of the 16th and 17th centuries, to be contained in the spermatozoon — The Random House Dictionary of the English Language The political contributions of whatever he creates are coincidental and, in any event, irrelevant. The musician may not be relying on mathematical acoustics in his calculations. He may be performing for auditoriums; thus, his physical realities change as he travels. Music seems inevitable. Every question entails some notion of what is being asked. The motley nature is not alien. Certain sounds guide the vulgar mind to notions not anticipated by those creating the sounds. A bartender concocts an Absolut Citroen gimlet, ice-cold but no ice, with one hand; “with the other hand he gathers up gonorrhea.” Most of what is imparted is not verbal. Certain philosophers must be translated before their audiences can respond. The mind is made visible through unconscious functions. The academic is always searching for the plumber. He is faithful to innocence. Order is space and space is order. Order is space and space is order. After being disaffected with Impressionism, Renoir felt he had to learn to draw and paint all over again. In Germany, an aesthetic movement became political and was forced to renounce art without realizing a decision had been made. A philosopher did not realize that the man who expelled poetry from well-ordered republics used to tremble at the thought of doing so, thereby creating through that very act a sublime poetry.

for Dennis Wheeler there are shining masters when I tell you what they look like    some of it is nearly false   their blue hair but they are not ourselves   they are equivalents   of action    they compose forms,    which we hear sound within a context as if that action we are images of    used us the body becomes an instrument sometimes the harp pierces the body and a man only hangs on the strings I hear the airborne-fire, the dead rebels’ second speech, which follows their live words, and the rice, and the motorcycles but public life has fallen asleep like a secret name    the wrong-reader will say he has pity for others where the thought is born in hatred of pity