536 Philosophy poems

Up — or out? — here: a problem of preposition, my uneasy relation with the world. Whether I’m above it or apart. On the other side of the latched glass door, a man loves me. Worries. Calls my name. • Where — for art — thou- sands of windows go dark in slow succession. On Essex and Ludlow and Orchard. A thousand times goodnight. • A boy throwing stones at a window. Right window, wrong boy. • Love goes toward love — And the place death, down there waving its white kerchief —

The whole ball of who we are presses into the green baize at a single tiny spot. An aural track of crackle betrays our passage through the fibrous jungle. It’s hot and desperate. Insects spring out of it. The pressure is intense, and the sense that we’ve lost proportion. As though bringing too much to bear too locally were our decision.

Inside every world there is another world trying to get out, and there is something in you that would like to discount this world. The stars could rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts, and you would not know if you were ruining your life or beginning a real one. You could claim professional fondness for the world around you; the pictures would dissolve under the paint coming alive, and you would only feel a phantom skip of the heart, absorbed so in the colors. Your disbelief is a later novel emerging in the long, long shadow of an earlier one— is this the great world, which is whatever is the case? The sustained helplessness you feel in the long emptiness of days is matched by the new suspiciousness and wrath you wake to each morning. Isn’t this a relationship with your death, too, to fall in love with your inscrutable life? Your teeth fill with cavities. There is always unearned happiness for some, and the criminal feeling of solitude. Always, everyone lies about his life.

1 Tense and tenuous grow from the same root as does tender in its several guises: the sour grass flower; the yellow moth. 2 I would not confuse the bogus with the spurious. The bogus is a sore thumb while the spurious pours forth as fish and circuses.

As the extinguished. As creatures, coming out to play in the twilight of creation human faces intelligent and suffering, turned upward entering the trees. The charismatic megafauna: polar bears, moose, rippling massive flanks to shake loose biting flies. The fox and the vixen. The leopard dazzling in his camouflage, breaking the urgent glass. In the underlayer of  humus and moss and broken clay the cryptogams, the earthworms turning between the wizardly fingers of the forest, managed growth of the second order, the third, steered toward what shoal, a history for the benefit of imaginary extrinsic persons. In the branches snowy owls and ravens, or the rock pigeons we call pigeons, that can’t perch in trees, that swarm cities like the flying rats they are, hungry, iridescent at the neck like the rats themselves shining like a collar at the base of a public sculpture monument to the fundamental flight through corridors of power, mathematics, heat death rippling like an invisible wave down State Street, paralleling Michigan, pushed by the restless concinnations of  the El, cutting longitudes across the lake itself, desert of water meeting the migrations of alien carp and cosmic rays, diving deep for the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald or swimming invisible lines, boundaries policed by radar, from Canada a mass of air launched by minute variations in temperature, push and pull over heat islands, carbon dioxide absorption, ozone exhaustion invisible and intervening like a god: that which manifests through its action on substance, not itself substance: weak forces, atmospheres, unnamed unmet animal species gone extinct, whole genuses, phyla, unknowable kingdoms and principalities, coral reefs burned black like the crouched and burdened angels, muscular sketches of our vacancy as in an etching by Blake, horizontal, the spiritual body dividing like a hyphen the upper from the lower, phatic messenger of  betweenness, inhuman round eyes fixed on nothing, on suffering, folly, sporting events, on Gaza — wings outstretched to bandage the eyes of  Heaven, our eyes as they would bandage the wound of a headless child or conceal the strength of a people from their weakness, the mortals masquerading as their own fates, individuals slashed open by solitude, acts of mourning and revenge, writing themselves into the text of righteousness. The messengers reveal nothing, like the animals marching slowly toward me now, two by two, tongues lolling, eyes lit from within hollow and sparkling as a cave concealed from light for thirty thousand years but concealed no longer. Grace have I none but what can be inferred by arms opening, palms, head tilting back to catch rain in my jaws: what is born, now, what wrests its way out of the eternal feminine, the body my only warrant, against monuments my pledge to the immaculate moment. What is born is not of me, or the we, or of god, or animals. It is a wing. It is bleeding. It masks my eyes until the thunder comes to open the openness over all.

Nothing remained: Nothing, the wanton name That nightly I rehearsed till led away To a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream. In this a huge contagious absence lay, More space than space, over the cloud and slime, Defined but by the encroachments of its sway. Stripped to indifference at the turns of time, Whose end I knew, I woke without desire, And welcomed zero as a paradigm. But now it breaks—images burst with fire Into the quiet sphere where I have bided, Showing the landscape holding yet entire: The power that I envisaged, that presided Ultimate in its abstract devastations, Is merely change, the atoms it divided Complete, in ignorance, new combinations. Only an infinite finitude I see In those peculiar lovely variations. It is despair that nothing cannot be Flares in the mind and leaves a smoky mark Of dread. Look upward. Neither firm nor free, Purposeless matter hovers in the dark.

Psychoanalysis always looks for the egg in a basket that has been lost. *       *       * I sample sin as if it were the beginning of well-being. *       *       * I don't like Paradise as they probably don't have obsessions there. *       *       * If God absolves me he always does so for insufficient evidence. *       *       * Everyone is a friend of his own pathology. *       *       * When I raise a toast to madness, I toast myself as well. *       *       * There are nights that don't ever happen.

I The most devout long to breathe the dirt's scent once more. The cat runs faster at night; he sees you better. Only the ordinary is reprehensible, but praise disgusts the just. Wine is not drunk enough. Be bitter but only about the Truth. With a friend, poison is sweet; sweetness, with an enemy, poisons. The colder things are, the slower, unless they are flowers. You will never know the river wets your hair. What is sweetness, that bees do not remember honey? Work is wings. II If you would judge, then be a Judge. If you would be judged, be just. The color of a stone is darker in water. To be loved, love no one. The catacombs are not the end. Past them lies a wall. I am an enemy to what I have forgotten. If a bell rings, then a bell has been moved from its sleep. Change admits error, but will prove correct in its assumptions. Every antipole is itself. Every identity is another. As I walked along the river, an old man carried a walking stick on his shoulder, as a soldier will carry a rifle. When we passed I greeted him, but he could not bring himself to answer, though I too am an old man, taking pains as I go.

I was trying to love matter. I taped a sign over the mirror: You cannot hate matter and love form. It was a beautiful day, though cold. This was, for me, an extravagantly emotional gesture. .......your poem: tried, but could not. I taped a sign over the first sign: Cry , weep , thrash yourself , rend your garments — List of things to love: dirt, food, shells, human hair. ....... said tasteless excess. Then I rent the signs. AIAIAIAI cried the naked mirror.

Are they shadows that we see? And can shadows pleasure give? Pleasures only shadows be Cast by bodies we conceive And are made the things we deem In those figures which they seem. But these pleasures vanish fast Which by shadows are expressed; Pleasures are not, if they last; In their passing is their best. Glory is most bright and gay In a flash, and so away. Feed apace then, greedy eyes, On the wonder you behold; Take it sudden as it flies, Though you take it not to hold. When your eyes have done their part, Thought must length it in the heart.