536 Philosophy poems

for Gary Snyder “I think I’ll be the Buddha of this place” and sat himself down 1. It’s a real rock (believe this first) Resting on actual sand at the surf’s edge: Muir Beach, California (like everything else I have somebody showed it to me and I found it by myself) Hard common stone Size of the largest haystack It moves when hit by waves Actually shudders (even a good gust of wind will do it if you sit real still and keep your mouth shut) Notched to certain center it Yields and then comes back to it: Wobbly tons 2. Sitting here you look below to other rocks Precisely placed as rocks of Ryoanji: Foam like swept stones (the mind getting it all confused again: “snow like frosting on a cake” “rose so beautiful it don’t look real”) Isn’t there a clear example here Stone garden shown to me by Berkeley painter I never met A thousand books and somebody else’s boatride ROCKS (garden) EYE (nearly empty despite this clutter-image all the opposites cancelling out a CIRCULAR process:Frosting-snow) Or think of the monks who made it 4 hundred 50 years ago Lugged the boulders from the sea Swept to foam original gravelstone from sea (first saw it, even then, when finally they all looked up the instant AFTER it was made) And now all rocks are different and All the spaces in between (which includes about everything) The instant After it is made 3. I have been in many shapes before I attained congenial form All those years on the beach, lifetimes . . . When I was a boy I used to watch the Pelican: It always seemed his wings broke And he dropped, like scissors, in the sea . . . Night fire flicking the shale cliff Balls tight as a cat after the cold swim Her young snatch sandy . . . I have travelled I have made a circuit I have lived in 14 cities I have been a word in a book I have been a book originally Dychymig Dychymig:(riddle me a riddle) Waves and the sea. If you take away the sea Tell me what it is 4. Yesterday the weather was nice there were lots of people Today it rains, the only other figure is far up the beach (by the curve of his body I know he leans against the tug of his fishingline: there is no separation) Yesterday they gathered and broke gathered and broke like Feeding swallows dipped down to pick up something ran back to Show it And a young girl with jeans rolled to mid-thigh ran Splashing in the rain creek “They’re all so damned happy— why can’t they admit it?” Easy enough until a little rain shuts beaches down . . . Did it mean nothing to you Animal that turns this Planet to a smoky rock? Back among your quarrels How can I remind you of your gentleness? Jeans are washed Shells all lost or broken Driftwood sits in shadow boxes on a tracthouse wall Like swallows you were, gathering Like people I wish for . . . cannot even tell this to that fisherman 5. 3 of us in a boat the size of a bathtub   .   pitching in slow waves   .   fish poles over the side   .   oars We rounded a point of rock and entered a small cove Below us: fronds of kelp fish crustaceans eels Then us then rocks at the cliff’s base starfish (hundreds of them sunning themselves) final starfish on the highest rock then Cliff 4 feet up the cliff a flower grass further up more grass grass over the cliff’s edge branch of pine then Far up the sky a hawk Clutching to our chip we are jittering in a spectrum Hung in the film of this narrow band Green to our eyes only 6. On a trail not far from here Walking in meditation We entered a dark grove And I lost all separation in step with the Eucalyptus as the trail walked back beneath me Does it need to be that dark or is Darkness only its occasion Finding it by ourselves knowing Of course Somebody else was there before . . . I like playing that game Standing on a high rock looking way out over it all: “I think I’ll call it the Pacific” Wind water Wave rock Sea sand (there is no separation) Wind that wets my lips is salt Sea breaking within me balanced as the Sea that floods these rocks. Rock Returning to the sea, easily, as Sea once rose from it. It Is a sea rock (easily) I am Rocked by the sea

Is it peace, Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds On the dump? —Wallace Stevens Out of the cracks of cups and their handles, missing, the leaves unceremoniously tossed, unread, from a stubble of coffee ground ever more finely into these hollowed grounds, the first shift coaxes bulldozers to life, sphinxes to tease the riddled rubble into fresh pyramids of rot. A staleness warms enough to waft round the lord of all purveyed. His to count the hauls past the yawning gates of this New Giza into the Middle Kingdom’s Late Intermediate Period. There, to purify, to honor ourselves, we beg these offerings of refuse be cast out. To the archaeologist of the far-flung future, enough evidence in the inscriptions to identify most owners: spells scratched on the backs of envelopes to be read out before animal sacrifice, the milk, ground meat, beer, and soap joined in this hereafter with the feast’s remains. Over tomatoes splitting their sides, over a teacup stained with roses flattened into mosaic petal from petal, earthmovers move a little mountain and, having moved it, move on, overturning a diamond sprung from its ring, glitter to a magpie’s covetous eye. If the art of loneliness is landscape, armload by carload of black-bagged leaves, landfill contours its likeness.

It turns out there’s a difference between a detail and an image. If the dandelion on the sidewalk is mere detail, the dandelion inked on a friend’s bicep is an image because it moves when her body does, even when a shirt covers the little thorny black sun on a thin stalk. The same way that the bar code on the back of another friend’s neck is just a detail, until you hear that the row of numbers underneath are the numbers his grandfather got on his arm in a camp in Poland. Then it’s an image, something activated in the reader’s senses beyond mere fact. I know the difference doesn’t matter, except in poetry, where a coffin is just another coffin until someone at a funeral calls it a wooden overcoat, an image so heavy and warm at the same time that you forget it’s about death. At my uncle’s funeral, the coffin was so beautiful it was like the chandelier lighting the room where treaties are signed. It made me think of how loved he was. It made me think of Shoshone funerals, where everything the dead person owned was put into a bonfire, even the horse. In that last sentence, is the horse a detail or an image? I don’t really know. In my mind, a horse is never anywhere near a fire, and a detail is as luminous as an image. The trumpet vine on the sagging fence. The clothes in the fire. And each tattoo that I touch on your back: the three-part illustration of how to use chopsticks, the four-leaf clover, the clock face stopped at 12:05.

No ladders, no descending angels, no voice out of the whirlwind, no rending of the veil, or chariot in the sky—only water rising and falling in breathing springs and seeping up through limestone, aquifers filling and flowing over, russet stands of prairie grass and dark pupils of black-eyed Susans. Only the fixed and wandering stars: Orion rising sideways, Jupiter traversing the southwest like a great firefly, Venus trembling and faceted in the west—and the moon, appearing suddenly over your shoulder, brimming and ovoid, ripe with light, lifting slowly, deliberately, wobbling slightly, while far below, the faithful sea rises up and follows.

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

When I learned I could own a piece of The World I got my chequebook out. Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. My wife's bright eye affirmed it. As do the soothing neutral tones and classic-contemporary decor of our professionally designed apartments, private verandahs before which the globe, endlessly and effortlessly circumnavigated, slips by, allowing residents no end of exotic ports, a new destination every few days to explore with a depth we hadn't thought possible. It's not how things are on The World that is mystical, not the market and deli, proximity of masseuse and sommelier, not the gym, our favourite restaurant, our other favourite restaurant, the yacht club, the library, the golf pro, the pool, but that it exists at all, a limited whole, a logic and a feeling. What looks like freedom is, in fact, the perfection of a plan, and property a stocktaking laid against us in a measure. The difference between a thing thought, and done. One can ignore neither the practical applications nor the philosophical significance of our onboard jewelry emporium, its $12 million inventory, natural yellow diamonds from South Africa no one needs, thus satisfying the criteria for beauty. Without which there is no life of the mind. What we share, though, transcends ownership, our self-improvement guaranteed by the itineraries, licensed experts who prepare us for each new harbour and beyond, deliver us into the hands of native companions on The World's perpetual course. The visual field has no limits. And the eye— the eye devours. Polar bears, musk oxen, rare thick-billed murre. We golfed on the tundra and from The World were airlifted to pristine snowfields, clifftops where we dined alfresco above frozen seas. The World is the entirety. The largest ship ever to traverse the Northwest Passage. How the silent energy coursed between us. Fundamental rules had changed. Except, with time, it seems a sort of accident— natural objects combined in states of affairs, their internal properties. Accusatory randomness and proliferation of types, brutal quantity literally brought to our doors. Or past them, as if on the OLED high-def screen of our circumstances, which hides more than it reveals. For what we see could be other than it is. Whatever we're able to describe at all could be other than it is. Such assaults on our finer feelings require an appeal to order, to the exercise of discipline a private Jacuzzi represents, from which one might peacefully enjoy the singular euphoria of the Panama Canal or long-awaited departure from fetid Venice. There is some truth in solipsism, but I fear I'm doing it wrong, standing at the rail for ceremonial cast-offs thunderously accessorized with Vangelis or "Non, je ne regrette rien," made irritable by appreciative comments about the light. In Reykjavík or Cape Town, it's the same. Familiarity without intimacy is the cost of privacy, security of a thread count so extravagant its extent can no longer be detected. Even at capacity, The World is eerily empty: its crew of highly trained specialists in housekeeping, maintenance, beauty, and cuisine—the heart and soul of the endeavour—are largely unseen and likely where the fun is. We sit at the captain's table but don't know him. He's Italian. I think on my Clarksville boyhood long before EPS, ROE— retractable clothesline sunk in concrete, modest backyard a staging ground for potential we felt infinite to the degree our parents knew it wasn't. The unknown is where we played. And while fulfilment of a premeditated outcome confers a nearly spiritual comfort of indifference to the time of year, a paradise of fruits always in season, the span of choice defines its limit, which cannot be exceeded. The sea rolls over, props on an elbow, and now is heard the small sound of a daydream running softly aground. Dissatisfaction, in a Danish sense. On prevailing winds a scent of compromise; for one tires of the spacewalk outside what is the case. Beyond immediate luxuries lives speculation and the tragic impression one is yet to be born. It could be when all pursuits have been satisfied, life's problems will remain untouched. But doubt exists only where questions exist. The World satisfies its own conditions. It argues for itself. Herein lies an answer.

Even in a palace, life may be led well! So spake the imperial sage, purest of men, Marcus Aurelius. But the stifling den Of common life, where, crowded up pell-mell, Our freedom for a little bread we sell, And drudge under some foolish master's ken Who rates us if we peer outside our pen— Match'd with a palace, is not this a hell? Even in a palace! On his truth sincere, Who spoke these words, no shadow ever came; And when my ill-school'd spirit is aflame Some nobler, ampler stage of life to win, I'll stop, and say: "There were no succour here! The aids to noble life are all within."

My soul is not itself, A loud jargogle invades the plague of contingency. Of course, I often delicate in a state of confusion, Especially when I wildly corrade detritus with illusion. Many collages create mayhem, but these days folks Giggle and kench, hosting bitter tears in their eyes. No one seeks the mockery or scorn of ludibrious games. Our ailing world is dedicated to erase sanguinolency. Hence the decline of bloodshed in our current wars. Drones, our best-to-date grade A, silent, unmanned aerial vehicles, our sleek UAVs, aces of launch and leave, Save lives. SAVE LIVES. Hip, hip, hooray, yippee!? Remote control: surf the Web, site define In its prime: eye on the screen, eye in the sky. Get it down cold in comfy seats at safe old Creech. Skill the scan, learn the drill and clinch their cease. The shift is done, a setting sun, and home To ground round patties on the grill, a jog with the dog, A kiss for kids, drowsy, and wiped, hitting the sheets, Plus shades down for a fuck, a hug, and a good night's sleep. We've navigated a boundless longinquity. Life is luculent. War is kind.

No crooked leg, no bleared eye, No part deformed out of kind, Nor yet so ugly half can be As is the inward suspicious mind.

This World’s an Inn, all Travellers are we; And this World’s Goods th’Accommodations be. Our Life is nothing but a Winter’s Day; Some only break their Fast, and so away. Others stay Dinner, and depart full fed. The deepest Age but sups and goes to bed. He’s most in Debt that lingers out the Day; Who dies betimes has less and less to pay.