Already seeking a foundational bedrock in the golden age
A gaspingly impatient hominid
clinging to a sea-wave battered rock,
just an isolated promontory jutting
into the vast and wine-dark vacancy
while the dense filaments of some
watery creature underneath lashes him
with spray and brine and the un-fastening
power of the depths. But you, Odysseus,
flinging the ductile filament out into
the void of your own making, as it were,
trying to hook something or someone—
to catch a persona over which to hang
your precious séance of a self, a dose
of substantializing serum from the vats
of space where no autobiographies arise,
only a cinerarium of watchful spider-eyes
turned on themselves and spinning an-
other gossamer tale while reeling toward
an elusive home with all its beckoning fires
and buried axe heads in ancestral soil.
Reality check
After a brew of wild orchids
everything was forgotten.
We lived together for a year,
copulating like hot kernels
on a hearth. Afterwards the dense
crystals of our habitual wants
sorted themselves like skips
and slides on playground sand,
then disappeared in our door’s
shadow while we struggled to
retain an optimism without
illusion amid walls of shining
marble and wide streets where
people gathered for passionate
debates about the meaning of life,
like the surrealists at their urinal,
flirting with oppressive creeds
in the manifestoes of their dreams.
The Ploiești raids
Why believe in old and semi-beautied Bucharest?
Or the Ploesti fields in their drear-drilling labor,
sucking up the oil under planes, subject to obliteration,
the erasure from materiality, so many years ago?
The booming phosphorescence irradiating the night
skies conferred a flaring confidence that something
would still remain on the generally unturbulent
and semi-solid dirt that turned within its globe.
What need was there for god to save us from the shaking
shards, the intolerable bursts resounding on the ground,
so long as there was firmity, its usual semblance
underneath our feet. We ran among the screaming
and irrefutable certainty of other bodies moving
in the din, as real as the already dead behind us.
We had no doubts in matter and what it could do
for us—or to. The seven days with their grand finger’s
touch were pulverized among the trembled surging
of our blood, feeling the world’s undeniable enormity—
and it was good.
Ataraxia
An undisturbed state of mind and feeling
held to be ideal by ancient philosophers.
Those old pyrrhonists, their tough lizard
elbows brushing against the tent posts
of the marketplace, or living in a tub
near the dead bones of the sea
to practice quadruple remedies,
formularies against fear, battering
proud stoics with the five tropes
of anti-knowledge (infinite regressions
on their way to unprovable initial affirmations
via the eclectic gardens of discordance),
when all they really wanted was a posit
of happiness, the quietude of a school
like any other, free of dogmatic vex
and unsinged by Heraclitean fire
in the interstices of the wide Cyclades,
which stopped drifting long ago,
birthing beings with the blank poise
of inner logos, a wide scoop of serenity
in every tenor of their marbled face.
Naked singularities in the 70’s
Even then there were black holes,
the gravity fields shoving their matter
inwards and downwards like a loose sphincter
while the pressure of radiance pushed up
and the star furnaces sputtered and gave out—
something imploded, something belched.
Zen Master So-En-So told a tale
of hungry giants with demented minds
that ate up cities, mountains, tracts
of dark ferrite as they rose from the deep
to battle the sky gods, then collapsed,
their masses squished like soft, enormous
bugs that wake one morning from bad dreams.
To be a little crazy is not enough, he said.
You must become completely crazy.