Pre-Socratics

Surely mankind’s greatest invention is the sentence.

—John Banville

Since Aristophanes and Socrates

Are talking poetry—with the gods’ blessing—

With a whisper about a parchment—call

It a ‘sur-fact’, a secret, or maybe

A surface—just a simple white canvas,

Really, a talented tabula rasa,

A prime mover—prima facie—the desert.

Say poetry is like that too, just before—

Before the spacial silence like

—like, it’s like the desert—

And then when rain begins—a kind of Brain

Rain—it draws the oil up, surfaces it,

So it’s slick, the mind is, his daemon. Still…

*

The lamps are lit, so Socrates can see

That Aristophanes is pouring his

Particular oil into open ears,

Into everyone’s evening ears and eyes.

And Aristophanes goes for the joke too.

He farts. Real funny. He farts and pretends

It’s a hiccup out the wrong end. Stand on

Your head, why don’t you, Aristophanes?

…For its Aristophanes

Who is about to give an encomium

To Eros. Too sophisticated

To offer praise for a dead god, he

Will spin a tale of sun and earth and moon,

Of round bodies and moieties in search

Of themselves—this same Aristophanes

Is stinking up the stage right now…

Descant in Song

1.

Say frost kills flowers, kills

The roots, freezes the stem, stamen, stills all

The heliotropic dancing that a stop

Action camera might show, and so much more,

So that you can trace each petal,

As if it were an everyday flower,

As common as sunflowers are, ancient

As sunlight surely must be in descant

And song—frozen in flowers hence, hence the

Solemnity—the sun’s solemnity.

And hence our first thesis: that man is, as

It were, clapped into jail by his consciousness.

Essays, The first series. Self Reliance.

Waldo Emerson, who further notes—

The eye was placed where one ray should fall,

That it might testify of that particular ray.

Indeed. That piercing light, en passant,

Is parsed to model consciousness. You know,

The spectrum focused in the glass, the light

Starts to disperse, grows dim, exits,

Continues to exist… Ho hum… gets old.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. 

And there is no excuse. Photosynthesis

Be damned as tiny blades take snips of sun

—That piercing light!—

Before the night comes back, as it always does,

To freeze the planet’s plants, its flowering.

Prisoners then to light the conscious mind.

Noise Jar

1

There is much death in the water:

The wax figures are drifting near the beach,

Jellyfish-like, chrysalis-like armor;

Unknown in number and nearly

Transparent in the tidal surf; the so called

Vestigial tentacles should be

Reclassified as potential weapons—

For there is too much death in the water:

State Fair

Suppose we crown our symphony,

Hecate’s Symphony—‘On the

Genuine In Art’—with some

Old growth sour apples, grandma

Style. Suppose we pronounce the day dead

At dawn, kaput, finis, finished.

Rain all day, my friends, a wash out.

Suppose we market some saliva soap,

—Eh?—sell it as ‘The French Kiss’,

Salubrious Soft Skin—and then,

Suppose we issue a solemn nihil obstat:

Fat Fannies Permitted on Fair Grounds—

Only. That should keep the church ladies

Satisfied. And then suppose we spark

A tryst between you and me—

Not for Eros this time, and not for love

Of God—or for the love of Pete—

For Christ sakes—in fact it’s not

For anything, simple or solemn.

Simply put and solemnly said,

Suppose we propose a nihil obstat

Of and for everything… everything

Under the big top, that is. Thus:

“What is death in the circus?

That depends on if it is spring.

Then, if elephants are there,

mon pere, we are not completely lost.”

From ‘Three Philosophical Poets’

This thought from George Santayana:

If a short passage is poetical because it is pregnant with suggestion of a few things, which stretches our attention and makes us rapt and serious, how much more poetical ought a vision which was pregnant with all we care for? Focus a little experience, give some scope and depth to your feeling, and it grows imaginative; give it more scope and more depth, focus all experience within it, make it a philosopher’s vision of the world and it will grow imaginative in a superlative degree, and be supremely poetical. The difficulty, after having the experience to symbolize, lies only in having the imagination to hold and suspend it in thought; and further to give this thought such verbal expression that others may be able to decipher, and to be stirred by it as by the wind of suggestion sweeping the whole forest of their memories.

A vision which is pregnant with all we care for…

The Pictures He Paints

1.

Those ratty kids. Those names they put him through—

Like Little Boy, and Tiny Alpha Man,

Like Dog Head, like Krakatoa—my son,

He’s a volcano? They’re comparing him

To a volcano?—well, he saw it through,

And I guess he did see the explosion…

But you don’t know what you look like,

Do you?—or how tall you are, or big…

2.

…Until those photographs came out in Life—

With captions like:  A Giant, The Pictures

He Paints, Prometheus.  A cover story,

His body, log-like, gaunt. The whole country

Saw them. The world.  And it hurt him too, I saw

It in his eyes. He’d thought it was to be

About his painting, not a ghost story,

Not a freaky giant.  These days they’re famous,

These pictures, taken by a famous photographer,

But at the time, we didn’t know that or care

About it. This woman comes out, sits on

The porch with her camera, and takes

A few ‘shots’ of Harvey, and the next thing

You know, he’s in Life. Harvey was serious

About his painting. He had a few shows

Before he died.  He even sold a few portraits.

Harvey was seven foot three inches tall,

A giant man, with a six year olds’ thoughts

And mind. Even so, even as a kid,

He knew about Prometheus, he knew

A god lived in his soul, the ghost of a god…

Imagine that.

Collier

1.

It has to be something like this. ‘A’

(He has no name as yet) is telling this

Preposterous lie to the womenfolk.

It’s also a proprietary lie,

Which means, although he senses disbelief,

He does not know the truth as yet, just lies—

But you’ve already guessed this part, right?—

Maybe he can’t, maybe he doesn’t even want

To know the truth—still, standing there, too late

To change his mind, he makes a bad decision

And tells the story like it was Collier

Who was lying, not ‘A’—Collier, the foil,

Collier, the character. To wit:

Quest Topos

1.

Suppose two monks are searching for a river, for

A certain bridge. Suppose they think this bridge

Is magical, that it will change the water

Into salt—transform the river into salt-like tears—

And thereby let the monks enter the sacred lands

That lie ‘beyond horizons’. Just suppose this.

2.

Of course, they have adventures on the way.

Some stuff right out of Harryhausen—like a fire

Exhaling dragon, two two-headed vipers, and

Arachnids carrying poison spears that spin

Webs out of burning sulfur…Then they cry:

Childe Roland to the dark tower came!

3.

Because they do come to a river, and…

It’s wide and calm and shallow. No big deal.

Why, they could wade across right here,

Be done with it, the quest complete, a piece

Of cake. The monks are puzzled. This is too easy.

Not part of the quest topos. And no bridge.

Too Much Music

1.

I don’t know, you just can’t beat a good parade—

And John Philip Sousa, either.  Either

The Colonel Bogey March, or Stars and Stripes

Forever—or—do both! A row of drums,

A row of trumpets, fifes and flutes, my fav

The glockenspiel, the cymbals, saxophones,

Sousaphones, of course. Then—then—the Mayor’s car,

The fire department, police cars, girl scouts,

Boy Scouts, the K of C—fucking A—even the

4 H Club wants in!  Still, it’s a strange, strange

Prolegomenon to silence, this parade.

Like, it could be an ancient battle of

The bands, like that Charles Ives’ thing where

These two bands march along Main Street, you know,

And pass each other playing all the tunes

They can imagine…and imagine they do it

Every day, music for everybody,

24/ 7. Some imagination, right?

But silence used to speak louder than that.

Turn off the lights, my dear. It’s time for bed.

The music of the spheres is greater still.

Calliope Grieves

1.

The crowd looks up. It seems so rude. Spotlights

Search through the audience. He looks okay,

This ‘professor’, as he comes to the mike.

The tux looks new. Think James Mason here, not

Brando. Oleaginous, perhaps, but not

The first ‘overly sophisticated’

Curriculum Vitae to dance for us.

A-one, a-two, a-one, two three—

Got that? Go…

I’m running. Like the god is darkness and

The lights go out. A kind of stunned silence,

As one and all whisper: that’s it? That end,

It sounded like poetry. But way too short

And minimalist, minimalist in

Extremis, we all think. In the worst way:

‘Borges, Pessoa, Kierkegaard,’ he’d said.

‘All of them giants and all of them dead.’

And then the lights went out. And running feet.