536 Philosophy poems

(after Albert Cook) All day, that is forever, they fall, leaves, pine needles, as blindly as hours into hours colliding, and the chill rain—what else do you expect of October?— spilling from one roof to another, like words from lips to lips, your long incertain say in all of this unsure of where the camera is and how the light is placed and what it is that’s ending.

Drown on all fours Pennies from a box flood the frump market Blasts of nacre, triage under weather’s speckled pool The idée fixe never happens yet can’t be ignored Still the moon is half full? Speak for yourself with your hands up The search is on Search and destroy, if you will Elimination starting with a lit fuse Vacuumed anon Your pleasure is the lee shore Thunder smites the tundra’s paw This should be memorable Legs whited out The runners advance

best thought, you had taught me — a river runs through it, the foot of the soul standing stubbornly in the freeze, all the shards of ice crumpling up the banks, what survives in the ignorance. Play it away. Be ceremony. Be a lit candle to what blows you. Outside, the sun gives a favorite present, mountain nests in ironic meadows, otter takes off her shoes, the small hands of her feet reaching, reaching; still, far away people are dying. Crisp one dollar bills fold another life. You taught me to care in the moment, carve day into light, or something, moving in the west that doesn't destroy us. Look again, in the coming summer, the cruelest month alive still eats up the hours. Regret is an uneven hand, a rough palm at the cheek — tender and calloused. I drink another glass of water, turn on the tap for what grows, for you, for what lasts, for the last and the first found thought of you.

Music, wind, someone’s car horn Imagining to return Buddha’s big toe on the lake Your intricate gaze of form Eating the lake like a word Unzipped carefully by day You walked it hesitantly You taste something step by step • Losing my way, wildly blue Perhaps annotated past The return gaze, my snowfall My city gate firmly shut Even to wonder how you’ve been Isn’t what you want, therefore Lightly enclosing my text Cast down toward what I’ve not seen • Happily a ceiling fan You grasp the word sweltering Days are tectonic, the sound Of one memory spoken Who waits for you at the lake’s Wild edge? Bright glint of the noun You knew dissatisfaction Speaking even against time • Recorded a length of time I held memory tightly Unoriginal dimming Of  the light there, a found scene Number three on the dirt path Father carries his school bag Without use for meter, yet Both skies open to thunder • Don’t speak to me of sorghum Red fields, pressed up toward a sky Whatever called to me there Too wild, attempting a face Old verses for my father Dignify the cooling page Black earth is the word it makes Tilts forward, consequential

What torture lurks within a single thought When grown too constant; and however kind, However welcome still, the weary mind Aches with its presence. Dull remembrance taught Remembers on unceasingly; unsought The old delight is with us but to find That all recurring joy is pain refined, Become a habit, and we struggle, caught. You lie upon my heart as on a nest, Folded in peace, for you can never know How crushed I am with having you at rest Heavy upon my life. I love you so You bind my freedom from its rightful quest. In mercy lift your drooping wings and go.

Ranks of electroplated cubes, dwindling to glitters, Like the other pasture, the trigonometry of marble, Death’s candy-bed. Stone caked on stone, Dry pyramids and racks of iron balls. Life is observed, a precipitate of pellets, Or grammarians freeze it into spar, Their rhomboids, as for instance, the finest crystal Fixing a snowfall under glass. Gods are laid out In alabaster, with horny cartilage And zinc ribs; or systems of ecstasy Baked into bricks. There is a gallery of sculpture, Bleached bones of heroes, Gorgon masks of bushrangers; But the quarries are of more use than this, Filled with the rolling of huge granite dice, Ideas and judgments: vivisection, the Baptist Church, Good men and bad men, polygamy, birth-control . . . Frail tinkling rush Water-hair streaming Prickles and glitters Cloudy with bristles River of thought Swimming the pebbles— Undo, loosen your bubbles!

The night mist leaves us yearning for a new location to things impossibly stationary, the way they’d once float houses made from dismantled ships, brass and timber, from Plymouth, Massachusetts, across the sound to White Horse Beach. You were only a boy. Years later, gazing out to the red buoys of the harbor, you sought those houses, each the location of your childhood’s end. Jon, I make this all sound too complex. Our view of time is stationary, a long prediction of remorse. We’re drinking in timber, camping above Tucson, Arizona. Below, the houses are vague points of light, describing a grief you’ve housed since watching those buildings careen on water, a boy too sullen for your father. So the aspens creak like timber in an aging sloop. The others sleep. You locate the figure of your son, small and stationary, but tell me he’ll die young, body unsound, a childhood diabetic. The bourbon makes you sound entranced—to think one day you’ll return to the house to find that you’ve outlived him, maybe the radio station playing some popular song. Outliving the boy, you’ll outlive yourself. Drunk, we’ve lost our location. I shine my flashlight to find the others. The timbre of your voice grows slack. Leaves and timber rustle in the promise of rain, in the sound of distant thunder that, like death, has no location. Below, relentless clouds will cover houses. The campfire sputters, then grows, buoyed by wind, our bodies the only things stationary. Because of death, our small, unstationary lives become narration—a child is lost in timber in a fable when night approaches. The boy can’t even see his hands. Only owl-cry, the sound of his heart. But soon the aspens part, the houses of his village appear, their location precise and consoling. He’s stationary, not a sound from below. Beyond the timber, floating houses. And there his papa’s lantern, a light the boy can locate.

A learned and a happy ignorance Divided me From all the vanity, From all the sloth, care, pain, and sorrow that advance The madness and the misery Of men. No error, no distraction I Saw soil the earth, or overcloud the sky. I knew not that there was a serpent’s sting, Whose poison shed On men, did overspread The world; nor did I dream of such a thing As sin, in which mankind lay dead. They all were brisk and living wights to me, Yea, pure and full of immortality. Joy, pleasure, beauty, kindness, glory, love, Sleep, day, life, light, Peace, melody, my sight, My ears and heart did fill and freely move. All that I saw did me delight. The Universe was then a world of treasure, To me an universal world of pleasure. Unwelcome penitence was then unknown, Vain costly toys, Swearing and roaring boys, Shops, markets, taverns, coaches, were unshown; So all things were that drown’d my joys: No thorns chok’d up my path, nor hid the face Of bliss and beauty, nor eclips’d the place. Only what Adam in his first estate, Did I behold; Hard silver and dry gold As yet lay under ground; my blessed fate Was more acquainted with the old And innocent delights which he did see In his original simplicity. Those things which first his Eden did adorn, My infancy Did crown. Simplicity Was my protection when I first was born. Mine eyes those treasures first did see Which God first made. The first effects of love My first enjoyments upon earth did prove; And were so great, and so divine, so pure; So fair and sweet, So true; when I did meet Them here at first, they did my soul allure, And drew away my infant feet Quite from the works of men; that I might see The glorious wonders of the Deity.

1 About can mean near or nearly. A book can be about something or I can be about to do a thing and then refrain. To refrain is to stop yourself. A refrain is a repeated phrase. 2 This table is an antique from the early Machine Age. The indented circle within a circle motif which appears at three-inch intervals around the base may be a nod to craftsmanship or may be a summary dismissal of same. It is charming in its mute simplicity. 3 People will ask, "Why should we care about this unattractive character?" despite the fact that turning yourself into an admirable character has been considered gauche for as long as I can recall. The word "transparent" is often affixed to such efforts while the mystification surrounding the unflattering self-portrait at least provides some cover. Now someone will say, "You don't need cover unless you're standing naked at a window shouting, 'Look up here!'"

for Henry Adams Effort for distraction grew Ferocious, grew Ferocious and paced, that was its exercise. Effort for distraction strained, Legged in the hour-like single stretch Its heels and sight to feel, so slit its eyes. Effort without effort or with Greatest possible effort always centered Back in the concentrated trough where lies The magnet to the filings, The saw tooth to the tongue, The turn of life to a returning life. By all the traction of mind and spin of spirit Having gained grasp gasped to bear it, Having got ground groaned, furious title holder. Paced and cried, so sore for a different direction, grew Ferocious, grew Unkind to strength that gave it strength to grow.