536 Philosophy poems

1 Touch each chakra in turn and say, “Nothing shocks me.” 2 Watching bombs fall on Syria, we feel serious, occupied, not preoccupied as we were previously. 3 “Makes me end, where I begun,” wrote   John Donne, turning love into geometry.

... who can bear the idea of Eternal Recurrence? I Even as you went over, Nietzsche, in your last letter, as ever, you tried to reach him: “Dear Herr Professor, When it comes to it I too would very much prefer a professorial chair in Basel to being God; but I did not dare to go so far in my private egoism as to refrain for its sake from the creation of the world.” The past before him, the hateful present stifling no end of futures with noisy smoke, what could the Dear Herr Professor, magnificently sober Jacob Burckhardt, do or do for you; how thrust pitiful hands into what proclaimed itself a sacred solitude? Maybe too at times, syringa blowing through his classroom (gape- mouthed angels Paracelsus pressed into his lectures in this very room, throwing all Basel into an uproar and a hatred that finally drove him out, familiars also like a rout of mornings bickering to swell the retinue of Dr. Faustus after breakfast), trumpeting through the profundity of his pauses, maybe he could let that host, with nothing to lose in being, be themselves, especially as there sprang among them heroes out of Raphael with everything to gain. Even now Astorre the horseman, in the twinkle of that scholar eye, spurs quarrying the dark, falcon-plumed, plunges, a warrior of Heaven, to the rescue of a youth, fallen with copious wounds, by this aid exalted. II Alas, for all Astorre’s audacious charging down the margin of the page, the Professor’s age, parading with its Sunday family-walks and the thundrous drummers of Basel in trim, upholstered parks, benumbed him. What was there for him to do who saw his begetters, fighting men, furious, mighty in their pride, tumbled to such petty end? That beauty being slain on the high places in the midst of its noblest battle, should he, exclaiming, dare to tell it, publish it in the streets so prim and polished, to see the daughters of the philistines rejoice? He let you go, best emparadised, or so you said, in the sparkling shadow of a sword, retiring into frozen heights, a terrible loneliness, enhanced by sun. III At the end, rocks breaking their doors for you, out poured the shaggy men, hordes of flame and drunkenness. Solitude, dressed in winds and falcons, rang, a honeycomb of voices hailing: dancer David; Agamemnon, amethyst with proud and deadly twisting; Dr. Faustus; Borgia and Astorre, those human hours, sowing splendors with their wily wrists. The peaks, much moved, conscious of the love that guides by the same capricious path as stars the agony, the maggot’s tooth, hurtling to your beloved town, stormed its arcades past the drowsiest beds. God was dead, long live the gods. In that third-floor room, still going about in your academic jacket and down at heel, all the heavens rejoicing, laughing, lifting up your legs, into the middle of the rout you leaped, a satyr’s dance, as always, the conclusion of the tragic truth . . . IV You in what we are, alas, and by your effort that had to fail have reached us. And we go, perhaps as the Dear Herr Professor did, saddened that we cannot give ourselves, the Greeks at last, Paul, St. Augustine, Luther, Calvin too, surpassed by the resolution—not time could tame it, not the mob’s indifference—of your fury.

Only open homes & woods & pansies’ blue ledges can lead the zero with his only arms to embrace himself in open fields for all to gape upon. He unbuttons steel-gray sheets, a knotted top coat, bares himself, his hole, a vision as framed by the marker that is where his body blew and left enclosure intact, skeletal innards enough to make moviegoers ask, “Has anyone finished themselves yet?” I haven’t. I swim the lagoon, take note: the babies are barely dirty, their armpits smooth with silky soot weighted in apartment cycles like we keep movement in boxes for thunderstorms, and the railroad leaves a dancing behavior absorbed by every second thought, escaping the socket that was his mission, his body incomplete, to help us to the maidenhead of Niagara, a target awakening the chlorophyll of trees, their tongues the densest forest canopy and floor thigh deep with root rot we sleep on and fold into growing-whole sheep what becomes of the lot: night’s zero hour of what is & what isn’t, till death, not us part.

Gliding o'er all, through all, Through Nature, Time, and Space, As a ship on the waters advancing, The voyage of the soul—not life alone, Death, many deaths I'll sing.

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture Me myself in the summer heaven godlike Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs. Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths—and then I lost it. Water came to rebuke the too clear water. One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

108 In a decidedly vacant stone plaza, you are tapped on the shoulder by the convulsions of a section of light, and turn back, to your delight. However, to think that the countless hidden fibers of the atmosphere were already attacking you at once and tying you up, shadow and all. Inside the convulsive laughter, fight. Because the fighting spirit is that of the enemy, flooding over the plaza.

Distrust this season breeds in me whole blue worlds, am second to leafy nouns, pinned back darkening lip of the night, untrustworthy sidewalk glazed and sleeping there, peachy trees, a line drawn from one brow of a star down and planted, each pillow little shimmer, little wilt startled from out the arranging field moonlit pale behind no foxes, in me finding the fragrant new crisis, not dead still where I love you in feast and pledge, worlds rolling first on crookedly and on.

In this land the children tear their hearts in half. Let me explain. If ten things are wanted, only ten can be had. If a stand of birches is found to be made of tin, the soil around them will bleed with rust. In this land children study their magazines in broad daylight, and in their books any soldier who stumbles will not fall. No one will fall, a gift parents try not to make much of. At every meal some is set aside. In every garden a patch lies fallow. At parties there are whispers of illegal cheeses. Camembert, especially, is said to taste alive. And so the children learn to make room. To leave some. Nothing will come, but nothing will go. To love like this half must rattle in its pit.

Forever – is composed of Nows – ‘Tis not a different time – Except for Infiniteness – And Latitude of Home – From this – experienced Here – Remove the Dates – to These – Let Months dissolve in further Months – And Years – exhale in Years – Without Debate – or Pause – Or Celebrated Days – No different Our Years would be From Anno Dominies –

Focus on the taxidermied light, the quarked vehemence of splayed negation, to rags, your britches, seeping glib intent, sight catastrophic, given to seizures. The curlicue scent has not the mother in it. The fall of romance, the hold of the tender new, programs aloft, every nerve to shudder: ghosting monitions of the incomplete. Either will the aching swells, apart from bliss. Coordinates of favor, hip neath fiber strip follicle sheath of slip chord parent display. Sensitized gift wagon fern entrenched, the halo of the nation is the caul-throated blood of hench, rosella’d to the peak of taxonomied childless. Where your mottled hologram, the feathered monster of the throttled. Quizzical with the world, am to console, the hope for saplings edifice disjunction. The dissociated fanfare of motivated loss entrees the ingredient of dining undertaken. Your teeth the grinder, your lips the sensitive house. The beds’ laments’ the reindeers’ horses’ dreams’ in halves’ cameo’d sighs.