536 Philosophy poems

legato con amore in un volume ciò che per l’universo si squaderna . . . If what began (look far and wide) will end: This lava globe huddle and freeze, its core Brittle with cold, or pulled too near its friend Pop once like one gun in a long-drawn war, And the stars sputter one by one, the night So empty judging empty’s out of date (Space and time gone), then only, height on height, Mind that impelled those currents and that freight, Mind that after five days (see those days! Regions all tropic one day, one all ice!) Whistled man from the sea-moss, saw him raise The blundering forepaw, blink from shaggy eyes— If image, likeness in the ox-yoke brow Long out of focus, focused mind to Mind— Ah what unspeakable two and two allows That silence huddle and all eyes go blind? Our ups and downs—there! that remembered makes Memory which is the single mind. How sweet Carmine stars of the maple fumed in rakes At 1350 such and such a street. A thing to keep in mind. Yes and keep yet When the vile essence violescence lies. Once in winter by the richening sill Quiet, the fireplace tiny in our eyes— I mention this; there’s more. The Almighty will Aeons late stumble on it with surprise.

Your joke Is like a lake That lies there without any thought And sees Dead seas The birds fly Around there Bewildered by its blue without any thought of water Without any thought Of water.

How it is fickle, leaving one alone to wander the halls of the skull with the fluorescents softly flickering. It rests on the head like a bird nest, woven of twigs and tinsel and awkward as soon as one stops to look. That pile of fallen leaves drifting from the brain to the fingertip burned on the stove, to the grooves in that man’s voice as he coos to his dog, blowing into the leaves of books with moonlit opossums and Chevrolets easing down the roads of one’s bones. And now it plucks a single tulip from the pixelated blizzard: yet itself is a swarm, a pulse with no indigenous form, the brain’s lunar halo. Our compacted galaxy, its constellations trembling like flies caught in a spider web, until we die, and then the flies buzz away—while another accidental coherence counts to three to pass the time or notes the berries on the bittersweet vine strewn in the spruces, red pebbles dropped in the brain’s gray pool. How it folds itself like a map to fit in a pocket, how it unfolds a fraying map from the pocket of the day.

Constancy is an evolution of one’s living quarters into a thought: a continuation of a parallelogram or a rectangle by means—as Clausewitz would have put it— of the voice and, ultimately, the gray matter. Ah, shrunken to the size of a brain-cell parlor with a lampshade, an armoire in the “Slavic Glory” fashion, four studded chairs, a sofa, a bed, a bedside table with little medicine bottles left there standing like a kremlin or, better yet, manhattan. To die, to abandon a family, to go away for good, to change hemispheres, to let new ovals be painted into the square—the more volubly will the gray cell insist on its actual measurements, demanding daily sacrifice from the new locale, from the furniture, from the silhouette in a yellow dress; in the end—from your very self. A spider revels in shading especially the fifth corner. Evolution is not a species’ adjustment to a new environment but one’s memories’ triumph over reality, the ichthyosaurus pining for the amoeba, the slack vertebrae of a train thundering in the darkness, past the mussel shells, tightly shut for the night, with their spineless, soggy, pearl-shrouding contents.

Honest self-scrutiny too easily mutinies, mutates into false memories Which find language a receptive host, Boosted by boastful embellishments. Self-esteem is raised on wobbly beams, seeming seen as stuff enough To fund the hedge of personality, Though personally, I cannot forget Whom I have met and somehow wronged, wrung for a jot of fugitive juice, Trading some ruse for a blot or two, Labored to braid from transparent diction Fiction, quick fix, quixotic fixation. As the pulse of impulses Drained through my veins, I tried to live Twenty lives at once. Now one is plenty.

I sit in my own shadow, she says, the way my mother gave birth to it. In artificial light, blinds drawn against the darkness of power.  I think of you as if you were that shadow, a natural enclosure, a world, not a slight, so I can wander through your darkness. Has our contract inverted time, made our universe contract, a cramped bed for two? And when I say your name, do I draw water, a portrait, curtain, bridge, or conclusion? Place there is none, he quotes. Not even to hang up our archetypes. Let alone Star-Spangled Banners. We go forward and backward, and there is no place. Therefore it is a name for God. My eye, steadfast on traffic lights, abolishes the larger part of the round world. I should look at my feet. Space sweeps through us, a hell of distances bathed in the feeble glow of emptiness. Outward mobility, unimpeded. Suddenly we’re nobody home, without any need of inattention, imposture, or talent for deceit. The wind whips my skin as if it were water, she says. My skin is water. For wind read wind, news, sky falling. Is it a mental disturbance or the higher math of love if I hear you talking under my breath and from the torn fragments assume the sun is far away and small, and a look can cause a burn? Superstition, too, is a kind of understanding, and to forgo it may have consequences. Clusters of possibilities whiz through our head, he says. Electric charges, clogged highway, screeching brakes, a house too full of guests. With grounds for disagreement and miscarriage. The light rushes in dry, screaming. But the opaque parts of the nerve oppose the noise and void the options. Then the project must be prolonged in terms of lack.

After bitter resistance the river unravels into the night, he says. Washes our daily fare of war out into a dark so deaf, so almost without dimension there is no word to dive from. Body weight displaced by dreams whose own lack promises lucidity so powerful it could shoot a long take to mindlessness. Fish smell travels the regions of sleep, westward like young men and the dawn. Then I return, too early to bring anything back, unsure of what I want, terrified I’ll fail, by a hair, to seize it. We talk because we can forget, she says. Our bodies open to the dark, and sand runs out. Oblivion takes it all with equal tenderness. As the sea does. As the past. Already it suffuses the present with more inclusive tonalities. Not orchestrating a melodic sequence, but rounding the memory of a rooster on top a hanging silence. Or injured flesh. Impersonal. Only an animal could be so. An avatar of the holy ghost, he chuckles. Or the angel of the annunciation beating his wings against a door slammed shut. Behind it, love already plays the organ. Without the angel. He is invisible because we have rejected his message. On the old photos, she says, I see a stranger staking out my skin. As if an apple could fall too far from the tree. Yet I call her “me,” “my” years of furtively expanding flesh, with almost-certainty. It’s a belief that seems exempt from doubt, as if it were the hinge on which my doubts and questions turn. Still, I may seem the same “I” to you while I’ve already rolled it through the next door. From left to right.

How tired are you? How benevolent the cause for those slim, aching moments of blinding obscurity, and the blinds drawn and the sunlight louvered until even the knickknacks cling to their dust as to Time passing passing, if even that. The yearning to be not bothered, to be passed on the street, the rehab, the food mart, the many shoppe window reflections. So many times, the eyes averted in fear, so many times you remain obscure, even to your more obscured self. A silence charting your whereabouts at the many roundabouts, the Tenderloins forever unnamed. Even the sounds of the half-painted trams remain silent in passing. Their wheels grinding yet silent. The rain silent. The accusations even more silent, or the “friends” who never talk back, clouded in darkness. The landscapes drifting. The equestrian trots drifting. All the genres mixed up or simply misplaced. The memories gone blank. The mundane measured in hours, minutes, or decades, intervening, descending.

Like a child, mind wants to play, but even the butterflies are on the clock. Still, attention is happy to comport with the swallowtail as it jerkily rounds the corner. Like a child, mind follows, imitates. First and last it loves sequence. I’ve counted up to one this season.

Muses that sing love's sensual empery, And lovers kindling your enraged fires At Cupid's bonfires burning in the eye, Blown with the empty breath of vain desires; You that prefer the painted cabinet Before the wealthy jewels it doth store ye, That all your joys in dying figures set, And stain the living substance of your glory; Abjure those joys, abhor their memory, And let my love the honour'd subject be Of love, and honour's complete history. Your eyes were never yet let in to see The majesty and riches of the mind, But dwell in darkness; for your god is blind.