536 Philosophy poems

The generator hums like a distant ding an sich. It's early evening, and time, like the dog it is, is hungry for food, And will be fed, don't doubt it, will be fed, my small one. The forest begins to gather its silences in. The meadow regroups and hunkers down for its cleft feet. Something is wringing the rag of sunlight inexorably out and hanging. Something is making the reeds bend and cover their heads. Something is licking the shadows up, And stringing the blank spaces along, filling them in. Something is inching its way into our hearts, scratching its blue nails against the wall there. Should we let it in? Should we greet it as it deserves, Hands on our ears, mouths open? Or should we bring it a chair to sit on, and offer it meat? Should we turn on the radio, should we clap our hands and dance The Something Dance, the welcoming Something Dance? I think we should, love, I think we should.

If not being (something) is the same as being, then I will live forever. • Round shadow inside the sunflower’s corona. • If I lived forever would the present’s noose be looser? • Moon shadow made of angry bees, confined. Come in.

At last we decoded the terminal message, Only to find the pattern we had expected Was false — a false trail of false bread crumbs Designed to leave pitfalls undetected. We found a new pattern. We found a hand Moving pieces we had thought were only Part of  the board, and shifting them to vantage points We had ignored. We rewrote the battle plan And reconfigured the satellite array To show our progress from the very beginning. The fault should be traceable — and hence correctable — And once we found it, we’d be winning. We found a new pattern. We followed its track To a forest beside an abandoned tunnel Diving wide as a boxcar into the rock. A stale breeze blew over rusting shovels And all of our instruments confirmed a hit. We set a perimeter. We sent in a scout. From the interior, nothing looked back at us. No tracks indicated a force had come out. But we had a pattern. At dawn, we dispatched A team of our best, our trackers and stone killers, To see if  the signals were finally a match And if so, to counterattack. And now we wait. And now we wait. The tunnel gives nothing back. The trees are revealing the first signs of gold But the air is unmoving. The air is still. It is quiet here, and getting cold.

If it please God, let less happen. Even out Earth's rondure, flatten Eiger, blanden the Grand Canyon. Make valleys slightly higher, widen fissures to arable land, remand your terrible glaciers and silence their calving, halving or doubling all geographical features toward the mean. Unlean against our hearts. Withdraw your grandeur from these parts.

Crude seeing’s all our joy: could we discern The cold dark infinite vast where atoms burn —Lone suns—in flesh, our treasure and our play, Who’d dare to breathe this fern-thick bird-rich day?

There are  at  least two  types of people,  the  first for  whom the  ordinary worldliness is easy.  The  regular  social routines  and  material  cares  are nothing too external to them and easily absorbed. They are not alien from the  creation  and  maintenance of the world, and the world does not treat them  as  alien. And also, from  them, the efforts  toward the world, and to them,  the  fulfillment  of the  world's  moderate desires, flow. They are ef- fortless at eating, moving, arranging their arms as they sit or stand,  being hired, being paid, cleaning up,  spending, playing, mating.  They are in an ease and comfort. The world is for the world and for them. Then there are those over whom the events and opportunities of the every- day  world wash  over.  There  is  rarely,  in this  second type, any easy kind of absorption.  There  is only  a  visible  evidence  of having  been made of a different  substance,  one that  repels.  Also, from them,  it is almost impos- sible  to  give  to  the  world  what  it will  welcome or reward. For how does this  second  type  hold  their arms?  Across their chest? Behind their back? And  how  do  they  find  food  to eat  and  then prepare this food? And how do  they  receive  a  check or endorse it? And what also of the difficulties of love  or  being loved, its  expansiveness,  the way it is used for markets and indentured moods? And what is this  second  substance?  And how does it come  to have as one of  its  qualities  the  resistance of the world  as it is?  And also,  what is  the person  made  of  the  second  substance?   Is this a  human or more or  less than one? Where is the true impermeable community of the second human whose  arms  do  not  easily  arrange  themselves and for whom the salaries and  weddings  and  garages do not come? These are, perhaps, not two sorts of persons, but two kinds of fortune. The first is soft and regular. The second is a baffled kind, and magnetic only  to the second substance, and made itself out of a different, second, substance, and having, at its end, a second, and almost blank-faced, reward.

The thick-walled room’s cave-darkness, cool in summer, soothes by saying, This is the truth, not the taut cicada-strummed daylight. Rest here, out of the flame—the thick air’s stirred by the fan’s four slow-moving spoons; under the house the stone has its feet in deep water. Outside, even the sun god, dressed in this life as a lizard, abruptly rises on stiff legs and descends blasé toward the shadows.

If you open up any atlas and take a look at a map of the world, almost every single one of them slices the Pacific Ocean in half. To the human eye, every map centers all the land masses on Earth creating the illusion that water can handle the butchering and be pushed to the edges of the world. As if the Pacific Ocean isn’t the largest body living today, beating the loudest heart, the reason why land has a pulse in the first place. The audacity one must have to create a visual so violent as to assume that no one comes from water so no one will care what you do with it and yet, people came from land, are still coming from land, and look what was done to them. When people ask me where I’m from, they don’t believe me when I say water. So instead, I tell them that home is a machete and that I belong to places that don’t belong to themselves anymore, broken and butchered places that have made me a hyphen of a woman: a Samoan-American that carries the weight of both colonizer and colonized, both blade and blood. California                          stolen. Samoa sliced in half stolen. California, nestled on the western coast of the most powerful country on this planet. Samoa, an island so microscopic on a map, it’s no wonder people doubt its existence. California, a state of emergency away from having the drought rid it of all its water. Samoa, a state of emergency away from becoming a saltwater cemetery if the sea level doesn’t stop rising. When people ask me where I’m from, what they want is to hear me speak of land, what they want is to know where I go once I leave here, the privilege that comes with assuming that home is just a destination, and not the panic. Not the constant migration that the panic gives birth to. What is it like? To know that home is something that’s waiting for you to return to it? What does it mean to belong to something that isn’t sinking? What does it mean to belong to what is causing the flood? So many of us come from water but when you come from water no one believes you. Colonization keeps laughing. Global warming is grinning at all your grief. How you mourn the loss of a home that isn’t even gone yet. That no one believes you’re from. How everyone is beginning to hear more about your island but only in the context of vacations and honeymoons, football and military life, exotic women exotic fruit exotic beaches but never asks about the rest of its body. The water. The islands breathing in it. The reason why they’re sinking. No one visualizes islands in the Pacific as actually being there. You explain and explain and clarify and correct their incorrect pronunciation and explain until they remember just how vast your ocean is, how microscopic your islands look in it, how easy it is to miss when looking on a map of the world. Excuses people make for why they didn’t see it before.

All clocks are clouds. Parts are greater than the whole. A philosopher is starving in a rooming house, while it rains outside. He regards the self as just another sign. Winter roses are invisible. Late ice sometimes sings. A and Not-A are the same. My dog does not know me. Violins, like dreams, are suspect. I come from Kolophon, or perhaps some small island. The strait has frozen, and people are walking—a few skating—across it. On the crescent beach, a drowned deer. A woman with one hand, her thighs around your neck. The world is all that is displaced. Apples in a stall at the streetcorner by the Bahnhof, pale yellow to blackish red. Memory does not speak. Shortness of breath, accompanied by tinnitus. The poet’s stutter and the philosopher’s. The self is assigned to others. A room for which, at all times, the moon remains visible. Leningrad cafe: a man missing the left side of his face. Disappearance of the sun from the sky above Odessa. True description of that sun. A philosopher lies in a doorway, discussing the theory of colors with himself the theory of self with himself, the concept of number, eternal return, the sidereal pulse logic of types, Buridan sentences, the lekton. Why now that smoke off the lake? Word and things are the same. Many times white ravens have I seen. That all planes are infinite, by extension. She asks, Is there a map of these gates? She asks, Is this one called Passages, or is that one to the west? Thus released, the dark angels converse with the angels of light. They are not angels. Something else. for Poul Borum

There is a distance where magnets pull, we feel, having held them back. Likewise there is a distance where words attract. Set one out like a bait goat and wait and seven others will approach. But watch out: roving packs can pull your word away. You find your stake yanked and some rough bunch to thank.