536 Philosophy poems

1 We hoped to see things as they are by which we meant without us. We thought once we stripped away smell, taste, color — anything improper — leaving only location and number, the thing would be naked on the teeter-totter of an equation. 2 Then Archimedes told another one. If I had a long enough lever and a fulcrum, I’d get a high resolution image of objectified bodies and hoist myself on my own petard.

To imagine a morning the first sounds from the street and the house, its halls scarifying consciousness Antique glass smudges limbs (more blue than green) flared out over a roof To imagine the raw circumference of a field as it wakes what we make of it where our senses send us Gray oscillates gray and the mountain a line lodged within it gone slack at the end No need to mention weather The yard— the measure An unkempt garden bed convulses synchronous with traffic flashing through the fence Stone bench in a ring of weeds Shadows ring— a sound Bees doused in viscous sun, erased

From my cell I was staring at a cloud, a dog decaying in the woods, etc., as I took up the long-awaited sequel to my Confessions. By this time my hand was so far away that it looked like a small hairless spider whose progress I could hardly help but follow, from the corner of one eye, as it went on filling page after page in a notebook the size of a stamp with words too small for anyone to read. I looked up and noticed my bars had turned to gold. And before I forget, I’d like to be the first to congratulate everyone who has not committed suicide up until now. Camouflaged and lightless congregation, the world will never know your names, never know of its debt to you, or what you suffered; with what uncomplaining anguish you sacrificed the one thing all hold most dear, most have in common, the sense of being completely different from anybody else—it just vanished at some point, having attained its sexually mature and winged stage. You had a great vision about it, but told no one.We have misnamed death life and life death. You saw another world, and it was precisely the same as this one. This time you told everyone, until someone asked you very nicely to quiet down. And the weather—everything you have heard on that subject is a serious understatement. The scarlet horrors were preparing to file in for my ignominious obsequies, already they swarmed freely over my body. Then, there was no weather. I can’t tell you how perfect that was. As it happens I had been gazing up at the dusk stars, as I can be found doing more or less day and night, for I like to think they are growing younger as I die, come by some time and tell me what you think. Under torture—some atrocious form of tickling, for example—I guess I’d describe myself as a fairly good egg in hot water. Family motto roughly translates,April wizards bring May blizzards. We tend to be apprehended eventually, after a futile but all the more spirited attempt at first degree self-impersonation; however, this is not the time for levity, we happen to be speaking of a serious medical goodnight kiss. Traditionally, we are then detained at a local mental facility known for its celebrated alumni, though in recent decades secret and permanent socialist elements in the government have seen to it that the lowest scum of humanity now appear to have open access to those once hallowed halls smeared with our shit and vomit. What I’m getting at is this: after a relatively brief stay, we are invariably released with some deranged doctor’s or other’s blessing, a mixture of relief and disgust on the part of the staff, and the secret eye-signal that will get you into any movie house in Milwaukee free for the next year. Some of us like to get together once a day, rain or shine, and gather furtively at the picnic grounds under those tall wavering candleflame pines, where neither moth nor rust can reach, nor faintest scream, and exchange ribald tales verging on satanic perversion, each drawing his iridescent injection from the same oceanic martini, very dry, about two tears’ worth of vermouth, in an unremembered dream.

—“mu” sixty-first part— Gray morning, blue morning, a feather blown between. Mashed earth incumbent, gone up from, never more naked if ever to be naked, brink what it was to be on... Where next we came stick-figure people greeted us. Abstract was abstract, also something else. Line, shape, extension each other than itself, of number we’d have said the same... Aspect arrested us, riveted we stood... Stick- figure epiphany held us in our tracks, everyone’s bones in full view... Gray morning, blue morning, an unheard string between. Bad heads’ morning reluctance, ennui’s next-day dispatch... We were chill, shiver, exegetic sweat, backed- up interpreters put upon by sluff, none of us could say what was what. Pale admonishment poised upon lack, like to unlike, pale strain recumbent, re- combinant, rude amniotic straw... Took leave, leave long since taken, awoke to what would otherwise not have been. We contested birth, we wanted to be pre- andoumboulouous, done-dead gnostics again... Sound bubbled up, it kept bubbling, sonic residue, sonic remit. A fickle sonance, fraught sonance, warning we knew nothing, stick-figure entourage otherwise issue- less, beginning to be remiss it seemed... Erst- while ecstatics’ lapsed enchantment, trance gone none could say since when... Ghost of what lifted us, ghost what lifted us, erstwhile enchantment between... Fell back, full-out extended. Pilgrim someone called me, I said no, then I said yes... Brax was on the box was what it was, toned uncertainty Stick-figure counsel all air, edge, angle, down from where we’d been and we were again where the Alone lived, adage, had it not been so abstract, it might’ve been... Long day of the abalone-shell sunset... Stood among redwoods expecting the worst... What was of note and what abjured nothing. What was all, none, one, all the same _________________ It was a ghost of a trance. I was a guest of the trance. What went on we blamed on the ghost... It was the ghost of a trance, each of us a guest of the trance. No two times were the same... When we hit a wrong not we said nothing. When we hit the right note we said so what... Tell my horse, we were told, fluke solace, horse we were mounted by... What was done was done by the ghost, gray morning, blue morning, eternity be- tween _________________ Told my horse we would gather at Nod House, down drinks at the no-host bar. Dirt was in the drinks we drank, planet sludge. Double-take told its horse whoa, told it unwhoa, back and forth and back without end... Talk spun our heads, told our horses ride on. Unresolved which to insist on, stick with. Could it whoa unwhoa's ramble unresolved... Spinning heads made us feel we sat on swivel seats... Double-take talked us in, took us in _________________ Sat again at the same table, no two times the same, twinship long since gone. Leaned back, the back legs of our chairs broke, Nod House Nub's new address... A straining look made our faces look raw, made our skin flush... Dreamt each other's dream, donned each other's costume, hosted one another, one stepped in as one stepped out

There’s only one horizon, yet it can be found in every direction we look. You’d think it would be easier to get the hell out of here. Just ask an iceberg. In any Chinese restaurant, never order the 42. Never answer your door during dinner, it’s probably another little shit peddling Snickers. Posing behind their windows, the mannequins remind us of their absent stylist. This is all hero worship. This poem ends the same way they all do— list everyone you’ve ever had sex with here:

What can I do but make of the eyes of others my own eyes, but make of the world a ghazal whose radif is a haunting of me, me, me? Somewhere there are fingers still whole to tell the story of the empire that devours fingers. Somewhere there is a city where even larvae cannot clean the wounds of the living and cannot eat on the countless dead who are made to die tomorrow and tomorrow. Carrion beetles and boot bottoms grind corpses powder-soft to feed the small-mouthed gods of gardens and wind. Roses made to toss their silk to earth like immolated gowns, hills spewing ribbons of charred air from cities occupied by artillery and pilfered grain, limbs blown from their bodies and made into an alphabet that builds this fool song, even now, presented before you as false curative, as vacant kiss — even what is lost in the fabrication of strangers needs naught from strangers. Even somewhere stings with stillness, stings with a home not surrendered but a given. • But I have not been with my feet on the earth there where bullets make use of skin like flags make use of the land. My thinking is as skeletal as the bombed-out schools and houses untelevised. What do I know of occupation but my own colonized thinking to shake free from. While my days themselves tremble from time and shake off place to feel falsely placeless, a hollow empathy as if its soft chisel could make of this wall — my ignorance mighty before me upon which drawn figures alight against the stone — my own; what is mine is the wall my votes and non-votes, my purchases wrapped in unthought have built and stretched, undead gray. There are no secrets in debris. I have a home I hate, its steel and lights red and blue upon me. Home itself a mist through which I pass and barely notice. Home, to assume you are home is to assume I am welcome in you — to what degree let the wounds say so — and can come and go as I please. The television tells me Over there, and one must point with a fully extended arm to show how far from, how unlike here there really is.Over there where they blow each other up over land and God. And it feels good to stretch as if from waking — this silence could be called a kind of sleep — and think beyond, where I am not and where those who are are not — wall upon which drawings of fists strike skyward and faces of activists stare into me from my Google search. Turnstiles separate home from home. Barbed wire catches clouds in its coil saws. What do I know of injustice but having a home throughout which bullets, ballots, and brutality trifecta against people who were here before here was here and people were brought here to change the landscape of humanity? That word has rolling hills and towering walls. To hammer against it not to get to the other side — believe nothing is there — but to make obsolete side— know there is nothing. I know this: my metaphors have small arms, my wallet has made monstrous my reflection, I have done terrible things by being alive. I have built a wonder of terror with my life. • [Image of an eight-meter-tall wall, constructed by connected prefabrications. Interspersed among them are surveillances (I’ll make them pay). What is closed opens then settles. Spill: a scream, what makes it. On the wall a body leans, which is a caption: “This is not prayer.” (Which side are you on?) Here where there is no here, endurance measured by a field’s disruption and around it what makes possible a furthering (to settle this in court or to settle in this courtyard). Argument: this thinking is real because it has been made touchable if touch is the mutual rejection of objects from entering into the other (let’s settle this once and for all) who’s going to pay for what reaches toward and fails at heaven? To settle the debt, settle in silence. If it is not silent (this roaring (is it fire / stone / a pen lifting (ban no ban no b — ) or falling?) is it home?) make it so.] • Between his war with self and the war in a sand-sealed country neither of us could spell, juvie took from R what little childhood Chicago hadn’t taken. Between bloody showers and rushed meals, him forced by bigger boys until pain became expectation and expectation pleasure. A shortened sentence meant fighting for a country against people for whom R held no hatred while hating the ones he fought for. There is venom in coercion misnamed loyalty. Boys and bloody water in his head when he left to fight in heat and camo. Then in the barrack’s shower, three soldiers raped R. Sand is the Plaza of Pardon. Wind draws its name across the grains and leaves the grains with the name it gave. Who would I be after so many tried to live in me forcibly? R in the desert, our Skype lost connection when an explosion blew out what little service he had.Oh shit, we been hit. Then blackout silence and my pulse explicit. Let us rejoice in this: war is a love song that makes your body dangerous to others, that makes you unlivable. You become more private. You are always early to yourself. When I saw him again, marijuana discharged him dishonorably and the men inside him shooting guns and shooting cum went with him. This is one veteran’s legacy, one man I know and have lost to distance, my own pulling me from everything I’m meant to hold close. What do I know of exile but self-imposed self-removal. When R kissed my forehead goodbye the first time I felt citizenly, patriotic, my white handkerchief au revoir-ing a friend from my mind who returned with sand hissing down his pant legs. A hero is an hourglass. For what does his countdown drop its grains, skull to heel? • One night, words came, swift as if prayed for, showing myself to me to correct myself: Grief unhides beneath bombed mosques while the sky blows into pale blue absence dust and vaporized skin. Grief and sky, unrequited lovers. Whose hurt could hold the other’s? Grief knows the passage of the worm and the temperatures of dirt. Sky knows the neon of kite sail and tail. Fifteen thousand names written in the air by ribbon, rhombi billowed into shields, glide into the Guinness Book of Records , memories passed page to page across oceans and treaties in ink out-blacking smoke. Waves leave soft creases on the Gaza Strip and know airborne diamonds by the shadows of their measured shapes tethered like falcons to a child’s quick hands ... How to mistake American arrogance for love, to think kites could humanize the already-human and hide the anti-human from its history. Why cloak our custom of cloaking? To make palatable the blade we turn on ourselves we turn it on others. In good light the metal will give us back to ourselves. Does the wolf know it has a reflection? Ask the water if it shows to us its beast self or has one given to it. • [Image of an eight-meter-tall wall, over which is painted “Is you coming or going or is I?” A ray of light ballistic through the form is both answer and rejection of an answer’s possibility.] • Tragedy disturbs tragedy. There can never be just one way to see the end to ourselves. The Mediterranean has endless room where capsized boats of hundreds bloomed once with refugees. Water can’t be trusted. The wind with its countless hands hasting water into waves can’t be seen so can’t be trusted even though we feel it, even when we know along its unseen force bobs curt hymns from the dead to the living. We don’t hear them rising from the salt like fins. We hear bombs and think Each storm carries the broken criesof a broken nation in its contortion. Alibi for the living is the land: it’s the earth itself that refuses the dead a home in burr or field, in the stone plateaus or tableaux of scree from a city of wild boars and roads that lead to a burning garden, a gutted church, a school uniform hemmed by soldiers, a birch limned with blood and pointing dually west to a row of houses roofless but for crows and east to a rifle hung above a threshold like a saint. Something’s always watching, well-aimed and unkind, empty and on fire or just- finished burning. And the water will rust the skin, will extinguish the fire and the flesh. Baptism is what the living do. The rest are left to idols of fish and worm, are left with the living’s pens and books bereft and intricate as mausolea woven from husks of stories the dead cannot tell. They brux in our renditions as we cull their truth for our song. • The wilderness within us creeps closer to the surface of thought and burial. We drag ourselves from the selves that laid bear traps that trapped us into our own dragging, one leg limp behind like a memory pain brings forward. Low grass collects pockets of our blood as if any gloss could reduce droughts in the smallest needs. If we make eye contact with the most beleaguered of us, we pray the remains of god would shower spears to smite clean such embarrassment. We are not neighbors, just near. We are failures of nature and the stars burn down through trees no light we can trust. Because we were shrewd with conviction the pads of our right hands’ digits have singed into them one letter each to spell faith. What we touch with that hand will fell our enemies who are ourselves. We draw a maze with our blood, follow paths drawn from the cruelties sculpted into another’s body. I am losted by a child’s missing eye, dead-ended by a family encrusted with shrapnel. If I follow my own disaster more closely, if I allow buzzards spiraling above prophecy enough to reveal time as caught in the loop of their pinions, if I remove my shirt from my bloodied torso and twist from it my own oil, if in my pocket I find the final ballot before the mine was tripped in god’s patience, if I see my vote had predicted the immolation of seasons and the beheading of goats sacrificed to rain that washed away no blood and emulsified sickness into the oceans and seas, if pain rises from the mouths of the dead in the shape the dead took when alive, if all this time we’ve been building tombs and calling them home — • [Image of an eight-meter-tall wall bearing a hole in its center, or a 1.7272-meter-tall wall, which is me, bearing a hole in my center. I am the wall and the hole is what makes me better. I want to be better.] • Hajjar, does a body on its back act as the body’s own grief? Is a body downed the mind’s shadow? If we must love our souls, does that mean we must love what leaves?

Fame is the one that does not stay — It's occupant must die Or out of sight of estimate Ascend incessantly — Or be that most insolvent thing A Lightning in the Germ — Electrical the embryo But we demand the Flame

Time is filled with beginners. You are right. Now each of them is working on something and it matters. The large increments of life must not go by unrecognized. That’s why my mother’s own mother-in-law was often bawdy. “MEATBALLS!” she would shout superbly anticipating site-specific specificity in the future of poetry. Will this work? The long moment is addressed to the material world’s “systems and embodiments” for study for sentience and for history. Materiality, after all, is about being a geologist or biologist, bread dough rising while four boys on skateboards attempt to fly, spinning to a halt micromillimeters before I watch them, my attention riveted on getting tangled and forgetting the name of the chair, for example and the huge young man, he is covered with tattoos I think. Life is a series of given situations of which the living have to take note on site and the storytellers give an account as the wind tangles the rain or the invaders take over the transmitter. The exchange of ideas constitutes a challenge to the lyric ego. And so I am reporting that I was wrong. A real storyteller never asks what story one wants to hear, not the happy Joel nor the sleepy Clara nor the dreamy Jane, the seductive Sam, the sullen Robbie Jones. Nonetheless I have bought a bicycle. I have to remember to stop. Thank you. I hope you will enjoy it. A bike that is simply locked but freestanding will be immediately stolen. Of course there can’t be much wrong in helping people get what they want but creeps and purveyors of negativity and cruelty are tucked into every institution and most corners and though my inclination is to vote in favor of everyone’s dearest dreams of advancement I disagree with the remark that “deathlessness” and “fearlessness” don’t work. I think they do. “Deathlessness” immediately invokes the “breathlessness” we thought we’d half heard in the panting of deathlessness whose dashing is life. “Writhing” is self-indulgent however but the near-rhyme with “writing” is terrific. Don’t change that. Poetry can’t be about flight — that would make flight a perching instead of a flight. When one thing becomes another the other is free to become something else. I remember just where we were sitting under the influence of the wind watching a crow becoming something else in this case a crow. The state of milk in jars takes place and the state of world affairs can now change. No cereal manufacturer intentionally includes angels but marshmallow bits may look angelic in a bowl. Who knows? A poem full of ruptures could be one from which all kinds of things are flying.

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

It’s a spring morning; sun pours in the window As I sit here drinking coffee, reading Augustine. And finding him, as always, newly minted From when I first encountered him in school. Today I’m overcome with astonishment At the way we girls denied all that was mean In those revered philosophers we studied; Who found us loathsome, loathsomely seductive; Irrelevant, at best, to noble discourse Among the sex, the only sex that counted. Wounded, we pretended not to mind it And wore tight sweaters to tease our shy professor. We sat in autumn sunshine “as the clouds arose From slimy desires of the flesh, and from Youth’s seething spring.” Thank you, Augustine. Attempting to seem blasé, our cheeks on fire, It didn’t occur to us to rush from the room. Instead we brushed aside “the briars of unclean desire” And struggled on through mires of misogyny Till we arrived at Kierkegaard, and began to see That though Saint A. and Søren had much in common Including fear and trembling before women, The Saint scared himself, while Søren was scared of us. Had we, poor girls, been flattered by their thralldom? Yes, it was always us, the rejected feminine From whom temptation came. It was our flesh With its deadly sweetness that led them on. Yet how could we not treasure Augustine, “Stuck fast in the bird-lime of pleasure”? That roomful of adolescent poets manqué Assuaged, bemused by music, let the meaning go. Swept by those psalmic cadences, we were seduced! Some of us tried for a while to be well-trained souls And pious seekers, enmeshed in the Saint’s dialectic: Responsible for our actions, yet utterly helpless. A sensible girl would have barked like a dog before God. We students, children still, were shocked to learn The children these men desired were younger than we! Augustine fancied a girl about eleven, The age of Adeodatus, Augustine’s son. Søren, like Poe, eyed his girl before she was sixteen, To impose his will on a malleable child, when She was not equipped to withstand or understand him. Ah, the Pygmalion instinct! Mold the clay! Create the compliant doll that can only obey, Expecting to be abandoned, minute by minute. It was then I abandoned philosophy, A minor loss, although I majored in it. But we were a group of sunny innocents. I don’t believe we knew what evil meant. Now I live with a well-trained soul who deals with evil, Including error, material or spiritual, Easily, like changing a lock on the kitchen door. He prays at set times and in chosen places (At meals, in church), while I Pray without thinking how or when to pray, In a low mumble, several times a day, Like running a continuous low fever; The sexual impulse for the most part being over. Believing I believe. Not banking on it ever. It’s afternoon. I sit here drinking kir And reading Kierkegaard: “All sin begins with fear.” (True. We lie first from terror of our parents.) In, I believe, an oblique crack at Augustine, Søren said by denying the erotic It was brought to the attention of the world. The rainbow curtain rises on the sensual: Christians must admit it before they can deny it. He reflected on his father’s fierce repression Of the sexual, which had bent him out of shape; Yet he had to pay obeisance to that power: He chose his father when he broke with his Regina. Søren said by denying the erotic It is brought to the attention of the world. You must admit it before you can deny it.