536 Philosophy poems

Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which to good Men is an Abomination. Our Smith of late most wonderfully swore, That whilst he breathed he would drink no more; But since, I know his Meaning, for I think He meant he would not breath whilst he did drink.

Man’s rich with little, were his Judgment true, Nature is frugal, and her Wants are few; Those few Wants answer’d, bring sincere Delights, But Fools create themselves new Appetites. Fancy and Pride seek Things at vast Expence, Which relish not to Reason nor to Sense Like Cats in Airpumps, to subsist we strive On Joys too thin to keep the Soul alive.

Yea, gold is son of Zeus: no rust Its timeless light can stain; The worm that brings man's flesh to dust Assaults its strength in vain: More gold than gold the love I sing, A hard, inviolable thing. Men say the passions should grow old With waning years; my heart Is incorruptible as gold, 'Tis my immortal part: Nor is there any god can lay On love the finger of decay.

Yellow goblins and a god I can swallow: Eyes in the evergreens under ice. Interior monologue and some voice. Weary fears, the usual trials and a place to surmise blessedness.

Tell the truth I told me                                When I couldn’t speak. Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship                Or a child Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer In the 1930s                                       Toward the iron lung of polio. According to the census I am unmarried                And unchurched. The woman in the field dressed only in the sun. Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of  ice. I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible. For whom left am I first? We have come to terms with our Self Like a marmoset getting out of  her Great Ape suit.

Sulky what-ifs. Sulky what-ifs. They bumblefuck the metastuff. Diffidence their stock in trade. Cozy hell — cozy, hell. They make a mockery of irony. They hold Special Olympics in wit. What was Shakespeare’s blood pressure? Vertical river, cloister of thunder, Bleeds the ship’s fell sail. God comes in for a landing. He lowers God’s landing gear. He raises holy spoilers, lowers the sacred ailerons. He imagines Reality. Tried everything in life? Sulky what-ifs are dumbstruck. Drumsticks. Their spiritual actuality is empirical. What if uppity angels? What if there really were rules? What if those angels melted in the rain? If reality is an illusion, wouldn’t it stand to reason That illusions are real? A lot of dumb questions. Impingement of external objects or conditions upon the body Palpitate apostasy. The oppressed must free the oppressors to free themselves, see? The soul is euphemism for the body. What does willing mean? Do you sense my sense? Am I fashionable? Objective as an angel in the rain? Screaming from a safe place? Nine smocked doctors, three unmasked. One has left his face sewn to the pillow. One holds a lace fan like a hand of cards she studies, Considering the risks. She is the loveliest doctor. Her doctor-father scolds her right there in front of all the other doctors. They are aghast. They kneel and don carnival hats with feathers. I don’t think they are really doctors. The trees are real. They are green kachinas. Dark rooms of wind are installed in the house of barbarism. The norm is always incorrect. If what?

if you like let the body feel all its own evolution inside, opening flagella & feathers & fingers door by door, a ragged neuron dangling like a participle to hear a bare sound on the path, find a red-eye-hole rabbit, fat of the bulbous stalk pecked out to the core so you can bore back to the salamander you once were straggling under the skin grope toward the protozoa snagging on the rise toward placental knowing who developed eyes for you agape in open waters the worm that made a kidney-like chamber burrows in directing your heart leftward in nodal cascade, slow at your hagfish spine who will bury your bones investigate a redwood rain or tap the garnet of your heartwood, bark, put your flat needles on dry ice to inquire after your tree family, father or mother in the fairy-ring next to you, find you are most closely related to grass your hexaploid breathing pores gently closing at night, when did you begin your coexistence with flowering plants from which arose the bee before the African honey badger but after the dark protoplanetary disk of dust grains surrounding the sun become the earth you had no nouns, did you

to end with nothing is something Suvan Geer or to rephrase a popular Billy Preston song, “somethin’ from nothin’ is somethin’” I everyone loves the disappearing coin. a bird pulled from an empty hat. the comfort of trusting a magician’s hands. when we know we’ll get some- thing from what he takes away. II the student’s assignment— concentrate on nothing for fifteen minutes a day. she tries to empty her head but can’t figure out how. after all, she doesn’t know what nothing sounds or looks like, and the teacher won’t give the slightest clue. yet she’s got a good hunch the exercise might quiet all that shriek and clatter trapped between her ears. so like a good pupil, she devotes an entire year searching for nothing. some days she’s as still as a stone, but can’t escape the distractions of river and wind, footsteps approaching, birds calling in the trees overhead. or closing her eyes, she’ll focus on a cloudless blue sky. pillows and planes and purple sunsets keep interrupting. she silently repeats words like ocean or why, chants sounds that dwell low in her throat like maah and uhmm. at year’s end her teacher asks if she’s found nothing. she tells him she’s found everything but nothing. he smiles,you’recloser than you think

World like a coat, silver clasps, ermine lined, warm with the dead inside, rolling around in the red center—I thought everything had a purpose—this was back when I still drank—and wasn’t I a special traveler, nestled in that pocket amongst the butterscotch candies, the matchbooks? Unessential but accounted for, a steady thing to touch. World like a morning glory, withered every evening, world like a bristling dog, terrified of thunder—I can’t believe how I believed, or how that belief assumed a shape around my body, taking on the imprint of my heat, gaining solidity. When anyone questioned me, I held it forth, let them touch the sleeve—I needed nothing. World like an egret, still and white on the highway divider, world like a regret typed out and then erased—I cannot hold you any closer without everyone seeing, I cannot hold you at all, it seems, your evergreens, your curling potato vine; it’s all too much much, and I a bit of goosedown, a thistle fluff, naked and hatless, unaccounted for and extra, the world like a world like a world.

1. I know that language is within the world and that, at the same time, the world is within language. I know we are at the border between language and the world. 2. I don’t like phrases such as “nothing new under the sun” or “it’s all been said already.” I know that at every moment we could affirm: “everything is always new under the sun” or “almost nothing has yet been said of what could be said.” 3. I know that there’s no true coherence except in apparent incoherence. Every object clothes itself in chaos. To take shape, every thought must manage its own vagueness. 4. Among the obvious: I know that every human activity consists, one way or another, of battling death. 5. I know that time is bound up with space. Time is the shadow of space. Space the shadow of time. I know that we live in the shadow of a shadow and that it returns to the light. 6. I know that I know nothing about love. 7. I know that I live not in the world, but in the shadow of the world. I know that I go through the world the way an insect goes through its entire life in the shadow of a bank. 8. I know that nothing is simple. Or more, that what’s simple is never truly, never completely, so. I know that everything adds up and that every element of this total depends on the whole. 9. I know that everything around me is nothing but a mass of contingency. I know that every word props itself up on an immense architecture of contingency. 10. I know that thunder comes after lightning and sometimes, in my dreams, thunder precedes lightning. I know that to see its opposite simultaneously with every phenomenon you must widen your eyes. 11. I know that whoever finds himself loses himself a little. 12. I know that I love a woman enormously, but I don’t know which one. 13. I know that to talk is to walk a path with emptiness to the right and emptiness to the left. I know that nothing can grasp this path with two ends. I know that writing is talking in frozen time. 14. I know that the word “table” is like a thousand tables. That a phrase is like a thousand thousand phrases. And that thinking is a match for water sports. 15. I know that every authentic poet is in decay. 16. To read isn’t necessarily to analyze, is not necessarily “to understand.” At the swimming pool, we don’t ask the swimmer the composition of the water, the number and distribution of swimmers, or why he’s picked this date to go swimming. We don’t ask him to describe, in mid-crawl, the architecture or acoustics of the place, or to explain a bird trapped under its roof, or to do a better imitation of the progress of some Olympic seal. We don’t ask him to memorize opening hours or screw himself up by whistling from the bench throughout an entire race in butterfly stroke. No. Finally, we don’t ask him, before each dive, to bring up some secret meaning from the very bottom of the pool. No. We let swimmers swim. We let swimmers swim. And the swimming pools fill up. 17. I know that I live and think inside a storehouse of books. Some recent, new, remarkable books, but in the great majority books which are decayed, moldy, have turned to the lightest heaps of dust. Only their metal frames and some fine particles of knowledge remain, unusable. Light from a few windows crosses the storehouse unimpeded. 18. Having found some daguerreotypes on the floor of an attic—portraits eroded by time and light—I know that forgetting is something enormous, that forgetting is our highest destiny. 19. I know that God doesn’t exist. That’s written everywhere in the storehouse—it can be made out through the portholes, too. I know that after death there’s nothing but death. 20. I know that, seen from the border between language and the world, the universe is in increasing entropy. But I no longer know what it is if I climb to the top of a tree (one of these trees on the border between language and the world), from where you can see far into language and far into the world at the same time. 21. Because I have scaled a tree, I know that beyond language is a huge plain, with dark flowers and little mazy footpaths.