536 Philosophy poems

1 Claude says he, too, was given the tracks and not the train, the way — and not the way out, not the beyond beyond that bend, or the next. The place they call Drybridge — for the waterless bed of rails — where on the banks, you grow up learning more news from hoboes than from the mailman. But you know nothing of the train as it passes behind the backs of grander houses, gutted warehouses, chained dogs, as it grazes an alien grid of fences — of stone, metal, and chain-link. Or that when it passes beneath the underside of a bridge, a boy your own age waves the way you do, and that there is a horse doesn’t lift its head, and one that does, only to lower it again. 2 You are a grown man when the train comes to a scalding stop, and a lantern swings down the road. A man has been killed, they call out from behind the light’s aura, and would you come see what you can tell of him by what’s left. You do know his hat, and that burn scar on the back of his hand. What you know of his wife you do not say and will not even the next night when you sit up with the body in the house he wanted that much shut of, her voice rigid as its walls while the train you hear out there in the darkness passes by the way it always does, as though the same, the very same, and, again, on the time it will this night be able to keep.

We remember the rabbit when we see the duck, but we cannot experience both at the same time —E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion WHAT do you remember? When I looked at his streaky glasses, I wanted to leave him.And before that? He stole those cherries for me at midnight. We were walking in the rain and I loved him. And before that? I saw him coming toward me that time at the picnic, edgy, foreign. But you loved him? He sat in his room with the shades drawn, brooding.But you loved him? He gave me a photo of himself at sixteen, diving from the pier. It was summer. His arms outstretched.And before that? His mother was combing his soft curls with her fingers and crying. Crying. Is that what he said? He put on the straw hat and raced me to the barn.What did he tell you? Here’s the dried rose, brown as tobacco. Here’s the letter that I tore and pasted. The book of blank pages with the velvet cover.But do you still love him? When I rub the nap backwards, the colors lift, bristle.What do you mean? Sometimes, when I’m all alone, I find myself stroking it.

We remember the rabbit when we see the duck, but we cannot experience both at the same time. —E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion What do you remember? When I looked at his streaky glasses, I wanted to leave him.And before that? He stole those cherries for me at midnight. We were walking in the rain and I loved him. And before that? I saw him coming toward me that time at the picnic, edgy, foreign. But you loved him? He sat in his room with the shades drawn, brooding.But you loved him? He gave me a photo of himself at sixteen, diving from the pier. It was summer. His arms outstretched.And before that? His mother was combing his soft curls with her fingers and crying. Crying. Is that what he said? He put on the straw hat and raced me to the barn.What did he tell you?

Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown, Of thee from the hill-top looking down; The heifer that lows in the upland farm, Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm; The sexton, tolling his bell at noon, Deems not that great Napoleon Stops his horse, and lists with delight, Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height; Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone. I thought the sparrow's note from heaven, Singing at dawn on the alder bough; I brought him home, in his nest, at even; He sings the song, but it pleases not now, For I did not bring home the river and sky; — He sang to my ear, — they sang to my eye. The delicate shells lay on the shore; The bubbles of the latest wave Fresh pearls to their enamel gave; And the bellowing of the savage sea Greeted their safe escape to me. I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar. The lover watched his graceful maid, As 'mid the virgin train she stayed, Nor knew her beauty's best attire Was woven still by the snow-white choir. At last she came to his hermitage, Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage; — The gay enchantment was undone, A gentle wife, but fairy none. Then I said, "I covet truth; Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth:" — As I spoke, beneath my feet The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath, Running over the club-moss burrs; I inhaled the violet's breath; Around me stood the oaks and firs; Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground; Over me soared the eternal sky, Full of light and of deity; Again I saw, again I heard, The rolling river, the morning bird; — Beauty through my senses stole; I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

Doors open and shut. We ’ ve come to the place where nothing shines. I hear eternity Is self-forgetting.  Interiors warm with the nightmare of guests and poetry And you.  Everything darkly Reverent years of reading about death eluded. Bled Back from the ear sidestepping your bullets bloom in on ye lay Rock.  Rud.  Spread So swiftly tastes like mud.  Dredged mud off The corpse sled hushed down woodsmoke. Said the stars thrum on Marie Marie.  Hold on tight. In the depths of outer space Is man.

Let the relentless fist be kissed. The salt cannot be cooked; the past is overlooked. Full once they nibble, fleas quibble. Teeth in a hyena’s face always slide into place. No donkey can cart what weighs down your heart. Outside a man is respected; at home that man is neglected. The strangers weep and leave; family members grieve. Even half-blind men hope to see again. True words end; lies extend. Translated from the Oromo

It would not sound so deep Were it a Firmamental Product— Airs no Oceans keep— —Emily Dickinson Afloat between your lens and your gaze, the last consideration to go across my gray matter and its salubrious deliquescence is whether or not I’ll swim, whether I’ll be able to breathe, whether I’ll live like before. I’m caught in the bubble of your breath. It locks me in. Drives me mad. Confined to speak alone, I talk and listen, ask questions and answer myself. I hum, I think I sing, I breathe in, breathe in and don’t explode. I’m no one. Behind the wall of hydrogen and oxygen, very clear, almost illuminated, you allow me to think that the Root of the Wind is Water and the atmosphere smells of salt and microbes and intimacy. And in that instant comes the low echo of a beyond beyond, a language archaic and soaked in syllables and accents suited for re-de-trans-forming, giving light, giving birth to melanin hidden within another skin: the hollow echo of the voice which speaks alone.

From the first, I was too reluctant, achieving by dribs and drabs, Happy to linger in shallows while others jackknifed from cliffs, wrong To exact perfection from a sad piece or add notes to a proven tune; But ever the classicist: in swimming lessons, slowest to learn; In fights, tentative, preferring the hammerlock to the jab and hook; cautious In the earliest romances, choking in the clutch, fumbling the caress; or shy Among the crew-cut Cupids bristling at the armory’s weekend dances; But shifty in every game, keeping it close. Always holding still And adjuring others to go slow until we leapt forward that night out of control And pinned to the seats of Tyler Wilson’s outlandishly unstock Ford While, from the opposite side of the valley, scalding in each curve, came the black din And brunt of Sonny Walker’s highjacker Chevrolet, everyone screaming And bearing down to be first across the bridge at Hurricane Creek. Many trophies show us frozen: a leg poised for the hurdle, an arm cocked for the unanswerable spike. What I remember through the windshield’s splintering lens is time, a mailbox Rushing by, the letters TURRENTINE, then darkness rolling inside; Though memory, at best, retrieves maybe six percent in studio light, So even now I think we might have turned: smart with his hands, There is a kind of savior who blusters through the South, good with animals and machines, Who surely somehow would have found a gap, through an open gate Into a marshy cornfield or up a logging road into a hillside wood. At any rate, there is just a little while, shy of any bridge, just as judgment Balances its two blind alternatives and a third accelerates head-on. I’ve made a careful study: things that can only be accomplished in deep space, In another language, in far history, at an almost incalculable speed. Courage is not included, or much foolishness. They spin the purest glass, they split the atom, they speak with God. They make a sort of Teflon hip and attach it with metal screws, Only the threads upbone keep stripping so they have to operate Again and again, and what she’s accomplished is more of a gait, really, Than a walk, so when she moves toward me, across any room, I think too much of my own will implicated in that dragging brace. Each step is obviously trained, and the whole earned motion full Of muscle, plastic, and bone is coordinated by nerves even the Strictest dance does not require. She has said there is no fault, But even in such talk, grace occurs as an accident someone caused. If what I require is a thing too certain, braided from probabilities, There is another thing articulated in the scars that saved her face— And no right now in that night we were shaken and rolled like dice, no right to Say this guilt to be alive is love, or the opposite of lucky is wrong.

Not, this time, to infer but to wait you out between regret and parking lot somewhere in the day like a dare Salt grime and the foodcarts’ rising steam, at Prospect St. a goshawk huge and aloof, picking at something, nested in twigs and police tape for a while we all held our phones up It is relentless, the suddenness of every other song, creature, neighbor as though this life would prove you only by turning into itself

If it hadn’t rained, we would’ve gone to the beach. — Phuc Tran If we were in infinity, we would be everywhere, even inside ourselves, as taste resides in the walnut, and the walnut resides in the shell. Then we would thrive inside the subjunctive, where nothing happens but dreams of being, as paradise dreams of its inferno, the inferno of cotton candy. If only the world had ripened, like a pear, it might have melted the mirror in me, delivering its softness to the hard road of the mind, sixty miles from town. And if our grammar were even to our heat, comma, conditional phrase, comma, we’d be addicted to the sentence, sentenced to an exile that sees, hears, and thinks, and is often mistaken for love. Trees are chronologies; every leaf shines, and in turning over it winks an eye: if,if, and then. The world is possible meaning; the world is possible, meaning: I might have been an elf, had I been elfin. But I am not an elf. I am a giant with tiny hands: would,could, and should. Had I been winged, I might have flown from industrial field to pastoral alley on great woolen wings, with the blue face of a bee. Then it would have been said, “He is repairing to his persona,” or “He is retiring to his future.” I’ll copy this by way of the stars, reflective. Get back to me by facsimile or dream of climbing a night ladder to the place of ideal size, near a town of simple affection. If we had been born, lived our lives, and died, we might have existed. On the side of darkness, infinity; on the other, a sixty watt bulb.