536 Philosophy poems

Balance is everything, is the only way to hold on. I've weighed the alternatives, the hold as harbor: It isn't safe to let go. But consider the hover, choices made, the moment between later and too late. Hesitation is later, regret too late. You can't keep turning and turning, or expecting to return. This earth is not a wheel, it is a rock that erodes, mountain by mountain. And I have been too soft, like sandstone, but there is a point where I stand without a story, immutable and moved, solid as a breath in winter air. I have seen my death and I know it is my neighbor, my brother, my keeper. In my life I am going to keep trying for the balance, remembering the risks and the value of extremes, and that experience teaches the length of allowable lean; that it is easier — and wiser — to balance a stone as if on one toe though it weigh a hundred pounds than to push it back against the curve of its own world.

After Stevens It was when he said expansively There is no such thing as the truth

Ουδέν μονιμότερον του προσωρινού We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query— Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back. Nothing is more permanent than the temporary. We dine sitting on folding chairs—they were cheap but cheery. We’ve taped the broken window pane. tv ’s still out of whack. We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query. When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry, But there are always boxes that you never do unpack. Nothing is more permanent than the temporary. Sometimes when I’m feeling weepy, you propose a theory: Nostalgia and tear gas have the same acrid smack. We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query— We stash bones in the closet when we don’t have time to bury, Stuff receipts in envelopes, file papers in a stack. Nothing is more permanent than the temporary. Twelve years now and we’re still eating off the ordinary: We left our wedding china behind, afraid that it might crack. We’re here for the time being, we answer to the query, But nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Je vois les effroyables espaces de l’Univers qui m’enferment, et je me trouve attaché à un coin de cette vaste étendue, sans savoir pourquoi je suis plutôt en ce lieu qu’en un autre, ni pourquoi ce peu de temps qui m’est donné à vivre m’est assigné à ce point plutôt qu'à un autre de toute l’éternité qui m’a précédé, et de toute qui me suit. —Pascal, Pensées sur la religion The approach of a man’s life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here? —Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House Spared by a car or airplane crash or cured of malignancy, people look around with new eyes at a newly praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these. For I’ve been brought back again from the fine silt, the mud where our atoms lie down for long naps. And I’ve also been pardoned miraculously for years by the lava of chance which runs down the world’s gullies, silting us back. Here I am, brought back, set up, not yet happened away. But it’s not this random life only, throwing its sensual astonishments upside down on the bloody membranes behind my eyeballs, not just me being here again, old needer, looking for someone to need, but you, up from the clay yourself, as luck would have it, and inching over the same little segment of earth- ball, in the same little eon, to meet in a room, alive in our skins, and the whole galaxy gaping there and the centuries whining like gnats— you, to teach me to see it, to see it with you, and to offer somebody uncomprehending, impudent thanks.

When you hate the world the world hates you what if you try lo love it?

In English we place a noun meaning fixed purpose before our verbs to create the future tense. Here, in the private life my team invents, I’m in a floodlit kitchen like the set of an old-time ad for Tide and I am chopping something. Isn’t this the past perfect? Should I feel nostalgic? This corn is highly leveraged and I’m wearing a pink slip.

Position is where you put it, where it is, did you, for example, that large tank there, silvered, with the white church along- side, lift all that, to what purpose? How heavy the slow world is with everything put in place. Some man walks by, a car beside him on the dropped road, a leaf of yellow color is going to fall. It all drops into place. My face is heavy with the sight. I can feel my eye breaking.

After Rilke's “Les Fenêtres” i how much     loss gains suddenly in emphasis and     brilliant sadness ii far from that which lives and turns iii languages of our vain comings and goings wilt and gnaw iv beat them,                                punish them for having said and always said v tear out, finally,      our spells vi one life pours and grows impatient for another life vii and the lovers, look on them there, immobile and frail pinned like the butterflies for the beauty of their wings viii too great in the outdoors ix like the lyre, you should be rendered a constellation

I come off a little bit ventilated but you must realize the material world is constantly crumbling under my eyes it's too much for the novel tongue I speak the glitter of pavement in my brainstem, you must accommodate the polytonal grimace of the set lips becoming a smile, and you must accept the thin section of arm advancing across your peripheries to grip you in pleasure, measuring feeling in your restraint We have lived through the most furious little chunk of history for this? that we must unburden ourselves on night roof air, presuming the poise and perks of champ pigeon teams planing the evening winds until, signaled from the roof with a flag we become American birds

For the young man who would have myrrh from a woman, and cinnamon and aloes, smoother than oil is her mouth. She flatters him with it. Between her lips lies death. The young man learns that as his bride he should instead have taken Wisdom to him. Wisdom is the words that figure her as fear of the Lord. She has seen Israel choose the ways of the oppressor. The young men Strangeness would claim She instructs. Wisdom pleads with them at the city gates that when pride comes, then comes shame. Let a man meet rather with a bear and her whelps than with folly. Withhold not good from those to whom it is due. The Lord’s eyes are on every place, as on Hell and destruction. Whose order was it that made the ends of the earth? Who put clothes on the deep? What is his name, and what is his son’s name, if you can tell? Wisdom can. Still a child, she attended God when God had not yet divided the waters. It was no one but God’s to do to divide what isn’t said from what is. If God was male already, Wisdom was not male. (It may have been Wisdom’s difference from God that let God speak good into being.) Wisdom was God’s delight. She was with him over the waters. The still unformed deep would have lasted had God not given it form. It made God tremble that His call for it to be light there would not let night touch day. (There had to be room between them or they couldn’t be what God said they were.) God and Wisdom were two. Day and night were two also. Day gave it to be seen at once that down was and up. The deep had a face. God’s breath hovered over it until there was wind there instead. The wind is in force in many places over the earth’s dry land. Its going on like that is so it too can have extension and still not be seen. A door woke me. It was having to open and then flap shut against the stable’s north wall. some thuds were back-to-back. After others, there’d be a minute or more of only the wind. The wind had become something the trees had had between them for days now. They’d showed to their tops that they’d be moved only so much. At the same time that it was many trees, the night wind I was hearing them in was one. (One has to be the number God has against the too-many-to-count.) If it had a back to it in those places how far north where right then it was quiet, the wind’s broad front was as high as just below God. (That’s where God starts to be a different nothing than wind.) If nothing’s around the wind to any of its sides, Wisdom confides that God’s around all. Inside all God holds, Wisdom’s at the work of meaning for the faithful that there’s good to be had, if God’s heeded. I wanted to be asleep so I wouldn’t go on making God up out of the wind.