536 Philosophy poems

Assume you have discovered an entropy of spirit, immeasurable of course, but it pulls graveward all those whose element is breath, not as the in and out again of water and the sun, but oblivion’s ass-first downhill twenty-four-hour drag. Knowledge is an after-the-fact affair, fair game for a hunger striker’s skeptic gopher tooth. Remember your “agenbite of inwit,” but don’t, please don’t, go knocking on doors declaring you’ve gone hollow with all the others, no one will believe you so long as your bag of flesh is fair. Fall down the stairs to another street. Have you noticed nature does not care for you, no matter the pathos of your fallacies, your antiperspirant, or you arms folded over the stretch marks of your hardest years? That’s you, cell mate, roping a Platonic calf. Rare air, this is all you’ll catch and never can. Live on that for a week and leave a message on your machine, “nourished by words alone.” Those fireworks you inherited, where are they now? Will you set them off to end the show? You have a story that simply cannot be sold, and no rewrite can change country or cast, so here you are in never-never land again. That figure off there in the mist is Nietzsche, stay clear, they say his breath is vile, he needs his space or so the professors say. Were you handed this out of an old script or are you improvising this to-do? Whatever you are, an actor or a human merely with all the other actors, or can you tell the difference without a script in hand, you talk about a text that is not there. Each morning your own short-form obituary appears on every page. An open mike will follow. But this is only in the babblesphere, don’t inhale those dialogues that bubble up. Weariness grows in direct proportion to answers that recede nightly as you snore. Did you audition for this part or did you win it in an all-night poker game? The difference is the same, none, today. Don’t give your chips to another to bet, that’s stacking the odds in your favor, sharing the blame. Avoid places where the lights are always on. Try finding a sunset through a simple gift of looking west. There can be too much light for your own good. Pace Pascal. Let someone close your eyes. Necessary, or so I’m told. That hand in front of your face, try it now.

I was pre-Pandoran once, clear & amok, scarlet free where scarcely orange or purple romed: all font, Greek, drunk, then, then Tyred, vinegar aspect for breakfast. How I seam now in video footage of national folding where only arson lives lives. Its source is valid because Google calls it 100% relevant and government, which is apt since it’s an historical event. I reseek and pall this chunk’s vocation. Viatical my neighbor asks if I’d ride in the trunk, no kid: my hatchback is mined in the parking lot for its sparkplugs beyond the bar. She masking he then is captured by the faith-based; once she creams, he stops calling it vocation. Down here, they have imported the clouds from Japan, and I hear them, sardine. Keez me, gaghrl, yer old wahn. Geta-crushing Shoji of the air will remember cat-noise and –fish for complements as the King of Terror will never have forced the possible Fed you you you’re not—not. Postal will be yours and you, bulk predellal, tardy urinals on vehicles, art naught but an empty he-port. Grey they err over joy, toupeeing space as picture meant to do. I stream, hand mover, reek, occupy ice and call that night. Of all indecipherably you finally type to say you hosted Uncle Chen in your backyard exclusive. Wake, it’s time to smell the smoke. Darling I incensed. Once could have been your she-port; pretty noun look ahead to repast and yr Gruyerer aspect. Hype alone remains inside the box.

Oh, there are times When all this fret and tumult that we hear Do seem more stale than to the sexton’s ear His own dull chimes. Ding dong! ding dong! The world is in a simmer like a sea Over a pent volcano,—woe is me All the day long! From crib to shroud! Nurse o’er our cradles screameth lullaby, And friends in boots tramp round us as we die, Snuffling aloud. At morning’s call The small-voiced pug-dog welcomes in the sun, And flea-bit mongrels, wakening one by one, Give answer all. When evening dim Draws round us, then the lonely caterwaul, Tart solo, sour duet, and general squall,— These are our hymn. Women, with tongues Like polar needles, ever on the jar; Men, plugless word-spouts, whose deep fountains are Within their lungs. Children, with drums Strapped round them by the fond paternal ass; Peripatetics with a blade of grass Between their thumbs. Vagrants, whose arts Have caged some devil in their mad machine, Which grinding, squeaks, with husky groans between, Come out by starts. Cockneys that kill Thin horses of a Sunday,—men, with clams, Hoarse as young bisons roaring for their dams From hill to hill. Soldiers, with guns, Making a nuisance of the blessed air, Child-crying bellman, children in despair, Screeching for buns. Storms, thunders, waves! Howl, crash, and bellow till ye get your fill; Ye sometimes rest; men never can be still But in their graves.

When first the apprizing eye and tongue that muttered (Banished from Eden’s air? Or pride of apes?) Sat clinking flint on flint, as they shattered Snatched with a grin what fell in craftier shapes, The law was move or die. Lively from tigers; Dainty on deer. As weather called the tune. Oxen, we learned, would bear us. So would rivers. And that was science. On the whole a boon. What caveman on a round rock dumped a-grunting Rubbed at a rueful hip, brow darkening why? Or gaped at boulders over gravel shifting Until—a splendor of wheel-thought like sunrise! No wonder: such example in a heaven Revving immaculate gears, and at his feet The planet on her axle greased and even. Put any wheel to earth, and two wheels meet. Athens cut ruts of marble; ivory courses Caromed Apollo’s car of talkative gold. And Donne saw wagon-ways. The horsepower: horse Over the flats of Kansas sail-cars rolled. First planks on querulous ground, then treads of met Steel set edgewise, over stone for ties. A mountain? Sawtooth rail or crank-and-cable Till iron took serene the incredulous rise. Compleat with a nifty moniker,Puffing Billy, Best Friend of Charleston, Wabash Cannonball, Cycloped

At the end of the story, When the plague has arrived, The performance can begin. Displacing flimsy heaven And its contraptions, now Come practical urgencies: Getting the price of salvation, Divined from the guts of birds Or from cruciform insects. Like The savior Oedipus, kittens Are histrionic: defiant swagger Then ritual flight in terror. “The soul of the cat is the form Of its body.” In Christendom, Civic mourners were hired To walk the stricken city ways Chanting: “I am sick, I must Die

The challenge: to start not with theory but with tangible performance You and others, approaching We shall be asked for a way out to be fed to keep warm and dry Starting with experience, magic genuine science More than once we have been lost in a trackless wilderness dwarfed and shadowed by mighty buildings subway trains wild as elephants One goes blindly back to one’s desk These moments come, their dark shadow We glimpsed control and more tragic waste We entered with 40,000,000 warriors with the dignity of cathedrals The lake is upon you. You have two canoes, your tent The child has entered upon this desert You have your axes What, precisely, is your procedure?

The nominalist in me invents A life devoid of precedents. The realist takes a different view: He claims that all I feel and do Billions of others felt and did In history’s Pre-me period. Arguing thus, both voices speak A partial truth. I am unique, Yet the unceasing self-distress Of desire buffets me no less Than it has other sons of man Who’ve come and gone since time began. The meaning, then, of this dispute? My life’s a nominal/real pursuit, Which leaves identity clear and blurred, In which what happens has occurred Often and never—which is to say, Never to me, or quite this way.

For we have thought the longer thoughts And gone the shorter way. And we have danced to devils’ tunes, Shivering home to pray; To serve one master in the night, Another in the day.

For some people the day comes when they have to declare the great Yes or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes ready within him; and saying it, he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction. He who refuses does not repent. Asked again, he’d still say no. Yet that no—the right no— drags him down all his life.

And in a little while we broke under the strain: suppurations ad nauseam, the wanting to be taller, though it‘s simply about being mysterious, i.e., not taller, like any tree in any forest. Mute, the pancake describes you. It had tiny roman numerals embedded in its rim. It was a pancake clock. They had ’em in those days, always getting smaller, which is why they finally became extinct. It was a hundred years before anyone noticed. The governor general called it “sinuous.” But we, we had other names for it, knew it was going to be around for a long time, even though extinct. And sure as shillelaghs fall from trees onto frozen doorsteps, it came round again when all memory of it had been expunged from the common brain. Everybody wants to try one of those new pancake clocks. A boyfriend in the next town had one but conveniently forgot to bring it over each time we invited him. Finally the rumors grew more fabulous than the real thing: I hear they are encrusted with tangles of briar rose, so dense not even a prince seeking the Sleeping Beauty could get inside. What’s more, there are more of them than when they were extinct, yet the prices keep on rising. They have them in the Hesperides and in shantytowns on the edge of the known world, blue with cold. All downtowns used to feature them. Camera obscuras, too, were big that year. But why is it that with so many people who want to know what a shout is about, nobody can find the original recipe? All too soon, no one cares. We go back to doing little things for each other, pasting stamps together to form a tiny train track, and other, less noticeable things. And the past is forgotten till next time. How to describe the years? Some were like blocks of the palest halvah, careless of being touched. Some took each others’ trash out, put each other’s eyes out. So many got thrown out before anyone noticed, that it was like a chiaroscuro of collapsing clouds. How I longed to visit you again in that old house! But you were deaf, or dead. Our letters crossed. A motorboat was ferrying me out past the reef, people on shore looked like dolls fingering stuffs. More keeps coming out, about the dogs I mean. Surely a simple embrace from an itinerant fish would have been spurned at certain periods. Not now. There is a famine of years in the land, the women are beautiful, but prematurely old and worn. It doesn’t get better. Rocks half-buried in bands of sand, and spontaneous execrations. I yell to the ship’s front door, wanting to be taller, and somewhere in the middle all this gets lost. I was a phantom for a day. My friends carried me around with them. It always turns out that much is salvageable. Chicken coops haven’t floated away on the flood. Lacemakers are back in business with a vengeance. All the locksmiths had left town during the night. It happened to be a beautiful time of season, spring or fall, the air was digestible, the fish tied in love-knots on their gurneys. Yes, and journeys were palpable too: Someone had spoken of saving appearances and the walls were just a little too blue in mid-morning. Was there ever such a time? I’d like to handle you, bruise you with kisses for it, yet something always stops me short: the knowledge that this isn‘t history, no matter how many times we keep mistaking it for the present, that headlines trumpet each day. But behind the unsightly school building, now a pickle warehouse, the true nature of things is known, is not overrided: Yours is a vote like any other. And there is fraud at the ballot boxes, stuffed with lace valentines and fortunes from automatic scales, dispensed with a lofty kind of charity, as though this could matter to us, these tunes carried by the wind from a barrel organ several leagues away. No, this is not the time to reveal your deception to us. Wait till rain and old age have softened us up a little more. Then we’ll see how extinct the various races have become, how the years stand up to their descriptions, no matter how misleading, and how long the disbanded armies stay around. I must congratulate you on your detective work, for I am a connoisseur of close embroidery, though I don’t have a diploma to show for it. The trees, the barren trees, have been described more than once. Always they are taller, it seems, and the river passes them without noticing. We, too, are taller, our ceilings higher, our walls more tinctured with telling frescoes, our dooryards both airier and vaguer, according as time passes and weaves its minute deceptions in and out, a secret thread. Peace is a full stop. And though we had some chance of slipping past the blockade, now only time will consent to have anything to do with us, for what purposes we do not know.