Anacreon’s Place

How much pain is there in the world?
Can you quantify it? Can you explain it?
What is there to be explained? Why does
one feel the need for an explanation?
Is it not like the crumbling of earth
at the edge of the precipice in the face
of a storm? The storm comes
lashing trees, washing out
roads, pushing boulders
off mountains,
changing the landscape
little by little.
Cataclysm by cataclysm.
Tempest in a teapot
becomes mysterium tremendum.

In the cave, a small voice whispers.

Finding a comfort level in craft is worrisome
because while the hourglass shattered spilling
sand grains everywhere and the wax melted
onto the paper in pleasing visual euphonies,
one wants to be called forth by storm, by flame,
by want, by God, and not to have it in the
back pocket or any pocket for that matter.
Because the art of requiem is not a portable
hole for just any poet to spit tobacco juice
in.

How much revelation can a woodchuck chuck,
the Earth being round, and Ezekiel splendid?

The cats at the gate mew easily,
spilling urns full of old ideas they
are tired of. As are we.

If Wallace Stevens had any clue about what
I’m seeing now he didn’t leave it for me but I
give him credit for superior philosophical insight
anyhow.

If I take this thing seriously I will
do this and that
and be that person and
send to that publisher or
show in that gallery.

Overall the process
tires me, grievously.
But I wander forward
interested because
this is life, and therefore
punctiliar feelings
punctuate my every
crossing a railroad track
in bedroom slippers.

The brush from a stern
pheasant across winter
sky adds dash to a spry
wit from last year’s black
hole finagled mango
cosm.

That we are not machines
I take to be axiomatic but
that I can continue to breathe
this toxic oxygen is without doubt impractical
- take for example the walrus, whose odes to the aurora
borealis consist of floppings about on the ice to
rend fish who wish to be left alone of course
as do we all but the walrus dives - or rather,
burrows, into the water to pursue them
elegantly, elephantine, and moving
mountains of water to do so.

This ungainly creature on the ice attains
divinity in its dive under the sea, for what
was misshappen and purposeless above becomes
pure precision, beauty, and evolution-driven
lethality on a par with, no superior to, any human
cobbled cruise missile.

I say this to say that I am not a machine.
Yes, I slip rather unacrobatically on the ice, and
am not fond of cracking said substance to split
into my dinner, or any atom.

But once I get into the water, watch me
become one with the spiral glyphs that
nourish and communicate, express and
extend me. Cybernesis is no addition to
what human being is - it Is the holon
of self. Cybernetics don’t add, baby,
they are. And the extensions of one
are tentacles of conventicles

of memes, dreams, schemes…