536 Philosophy poems

Down in fame’s flood, down an alley, down wind of now, elegant in self-denial, an Iron Range wraith junking cue cards, an ideal, an idol before which the Zeitgeist kneeled. Dylan, named for a poet named from an old tale of the child who crawled to the sea, this land is yours: the black plain the needle ploughs from lip to label; be all, end all.

In which everything goes backwards in time and motion Palm trees shrink back into the ground Mangos become seeds and reappear in the eyes of Indian women The years go back cement becomes wood Panama hats are seen upon skeletons walking the plazas Of once again wooden benches The past starts to happen again I see Columbus’s three boats going backwards on the sea Getting smaller Crossing the Atlantic back to the ports of Spain    Cadiz    Dos Palos    Huelva Where the sailors disembark and go back to their towns To their homes They become adolescents again become children                infants they re-enter the wombs of their mothers till they become glances Clutching a pound of bread through a busy plaza that becomes the taste of the sound of church bells in reverberation.

I asked for much; I received much. I asked for much; I received little, I received next to nothing. And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors. A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table. O wrong, wrong—it was my nature. I was hard-hearted, remote. I was selfish, rigid to the point of tyranny. But I was always that person, even in early childhood. Small, dark-haired, dreaded by the other children. I never changed. Inside the glass, the abstract tide of fortune turned from high to low overnight. Was it the sea? Responding, maybe, to celestial force? To be safe, I prayed. I tried to be a better person. Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror and matured into moral narcissism might have become in fact actual human growth. Maybe this is what my friends meant, taking my hand, telling me they understood the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted, implying (so I once thought) I was a little sick to give so much for so little. Whereas they meant I was good(clasping my hand intensely)— a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos. I was not pathetic! I was writ large, like a queen or a saint. Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture. And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying, a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse to persuade or seduce— What are we without this? Whirling in the dark universe, alone, afraid, unable to influence fate— What do we have really? Sad tricks with ladders and shoes, tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring attempts to build character. What do we have to appease the great forces? And I think in the end this was the question that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach, the Greek ships at the ready, the sea invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking it could be controlled. He should have said I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

Unlike Francis Bacon, we no longer believe in the little patterns we make of the chaos of history. —Overheard remark As he looked up from his glass, its quickly melting ice, into the bisected glowing demonic eyes of the goat, he sensed that something fundamental had shifted, or was done. As if, after a life of enchantment, he had awakened, like Bottom, wearing the ears of an ass, and the only light was a lanthorn, an ersatz moon. It was not that the calendar hadn’t numbered the days with an orbital accuracy, its calculations exact, but like a man who wants to hang a hammock in his yard, to let its bright net cradle him, but only has one tree, so he — wild and aware of it — knew he had lost the order he required, and with it, rest — his thoughts only a sagging bundle of loose ends, and the heart, a naked animal in search of a pelt, that once fell for every Large Meaning it could wrap itself in, as organs are packed in ice for transit from one ending to the next, an afterlife of parts — and the whole? Exorbitant claim — not less than all, and oddly spelled; its ear rhyme is its opposite, the great hole in the heart of things. The goat, he noticed, had a rank smell, feral. Unnerved, he looks away, watches the last of his ice as it melts, the way some godlike eye might see the mighty glaciers in a slow dissolve back into sea. He notes how incommensurate the simile, a last attempt to dignify his shaking gaze, and reaches for the bill; he’s damned if the goat will pay.

Has it turned out we’ve wasted our time? We’ve wasted our time. Our magnificent bodies on the dissecting table. Our day after tomorrow. Our what to do now. The stink of us so undignified. The end game of bloom. We will lose the sun struck and disassembled lightly down and crawling like a worm. This earth it is a banquet and laid on its table we. A puncture in the wound room, crude and obvious. The raving lunatics they are upon us, but we are raving too.

“We're going,” they said, “to the end of the world.” So they stopped the car where the river curled, And we scrambled down beneath the bridge On the gravel track of a narrow ridge. We tramped for miles on a wooded walk Where dog-hobble grew on its twisted stalk. Then we stopped to rest on the pine-needle floor While two ospreys watched from an oak by the shore. We came to a bend, where the river grew wide And green mountains rose on the opposite side. My guides moved back. I stood alone, As the current streaked over smooth flat stone. Shelf by stone shelf the river fell. The white water goosetailed with eddying swell. Faster and louder the current dropped Till it reached a cliff, and the trail stopped. I stood at the edge where the mist ascended, My journey done where the world ended. I looked downstream. There was nothing but sky, The sound of the water, and the water’s reply.

If you are not to become a monster, you must care what they think. If you care what they think, how will you not hate them, and so become a monster of the opposite kind? From where then is love to come—love for your enemy that is the way of liberty? From forgiveness. Forgiven, they go free of you, and you of them; they are to you as sunlight on a green branch. You must not think of them again, except as monsters like yourself, pitiable because unforgiving.

Falling to sleep last night in a deep crevasse between one rough dream and another, I seemed, still awake, to be stranded on a stony path, and there the familiar enigma presented itself in the shape of a little trembling lamb. It was lying like a pearl in the trough between one Welsh slab and another, and it was crying. I looked around, as anyone would, for its mother. Nothing was there. What did I know about lambs? Should I pick it up? Carry it . . . where? What would I do if it were dying? The hand of my conscience fought with the claw of my fear. It wasn't so easy to imitate the Good Shepherd in that faded, framed Sunday School picture filtering now through the dream's daguerreotype. With the wind fallen and the moon swollen to the full, small, white doubles of the creature at my feet flared like candles in the creases of the night until it looked to be alive with newborn lambs. Where could they all have come from? A second look, and the bleating lambs were birds— kittiwakes nesting, clustered on a cliff face, fixing on me their dark accusing eyes. There was a kind of imperative not to touch them, yet to be of them, whatever they were— now lambs, now birds, now floating points of light— fireflies signaling how many lost New England summers? One form, now another; one configuration, now another. Like fossils locked deep in the folds of my brain, outliving a time by telling its story. Like stars.

If we could get the hang of it entirely It would take too long; All we know is the splash of words in passing And falling twigs of song, And when we try to eavesdrop on the great Presences it is rarely That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate Even a phrase entirely. If we could find our happiness entirely In somebody else’s arms We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s Yammering fire alarms But, as it is, the spears each year go through Our flesh and almost hourly Bell or siren banishes the blue Eyes of Love entirely. And if the world were black or white entirely And all the charts were plain Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters, A prism of delight and pain, We might be surer where we wished to go Or again we might be merely Bored but in brute reality there is no Road that is right entirely.

I have tried to say that, although Love is not judgement analysis too is a style of affect since the scale that rends me vulnerable has cut, from abundance, doubt (not that identity shunts civic ratio or consequence) Sure — I would prefer to respond to only the established charms (and forget inconvenience) but her hair was also a kind of honey or instrument. All that is beautiful, from which I choose even artifice, which I hold above nature won’t salve these stuttered accoutrements