ontology in a nutshell

THE MEANING OF EXISTENCE

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.


              Even this fool of a body
                 lives it in part, and would
                    have full dignity within it
                      but for the ignorant freedom
                        of my talking mind.














                                                         Les Murray
















































..

constant passings of the eternal

Motto for a sun dial                                                                   




I who by day am function of the light
Am constant and invariant by night.






                               J.V. Cunningham

what the world needs now

FOURTH STATION                                            








      (The Voice of a Child)








They say this is His Mother,
the people aged and tall.
Who stands upon the roadway
rejected by them all;
her eyes are on the crosses.

 Oh, why am I so small!
The heavy wood is pressing
the flesh that is her Son.
No word from her is wanted
whose cloak with dust is spun;
she may not cry in anguish.

 Weep, mothers, gazing on!
His searching eyes have found you
and sent their love to you;
but now the hill up yonder
demands His life anew.

 On tip-toe I was standing;
I saw your hand ascending
to bid a last adieu.








– Ruth Schaumann
Translated from the German: William Brell


















.....

not too much to ask

 
















                                                        LYING IN BED WITH A BOOK

The book on top, a lover
staring into my eyes.
The wind outside fails to turn
the pages of this book.
Coffee on a nightstand,
its surface unruffled
by the story of terror in war.
In a great stillness,
the pages under my moving fingers
roll a dessicated thunder
across my sky.
The tree in the bed,
the shade of a disembodied, leafing voice.
I dreamt once of grafting a book,
pulpy extremity of the body,
onto my wrist.
From buried and paginated
heart to hand, from hand to eye,
from eye to brain, from brain to
beating and unsignatured
heart—so goes the bed's song
of a circulating energy,
invisible dust devil
on the Great Plains of the quilt.
Beside the bed, a community of absences
stacked up, waiting to be heard.
Now the linden outside the window leans in,
begging me to read out loud.
When I'm done with each word,
it gets up off the page
and lies down beside me in the bed;
soon I am surrounded by burrowing
words, who fall asleep before I do
and leave me alone under covers
like words in a book myself.
Bury me with books,
all of them cracked wide open.
No satin, only the feel of this legible
dry skin under my cold fingers.
Be sure my head is propped a little,
next to a reading light

Philip Dacey     ( +  2016  )






I once heard this poet read a set of poems
about imagined conversations between Whitman and Hopkins
kind of a fascinating evening as I recall


















..

/

give peace a chance

    

          

THE OLD BROKEN -ARMED MAN

                                  FROM PROSPER -ANEW   

      

                                              by

                                        Po CHU-i

     

A frail and ancient man from Prosper-Anew, eighty-eight years
old, hair and eyebrows white as fresh snow: he makes his way

toward the inn's front gate, leaning on a great-great-grandson,
his left arm over the boy's shoulder, his right broken at his side.

If you ask this old man how many years his arm's been broken,
if you ask how it happened, an arm broken like that, he'll say:

When I was born at our village in the district of Prosper-Anew,
it was an age of sage rule, never a hint of wartime campaigns,

so I grew up listening to the flutes and songs of the Pear Garden,
knowing nothing at all about spears and flags, bows and arrows.

Suddenly, in the Heaven-Jewel reign, they began building armies,
and for every three men in every household, one was taken away,

taken and hurried away. And can you guess where they all went?
To Cloud-South, a march five months and ten thousand miles long,

a march everyone kept talking about: how you face the Black River
and malarial mists that rise and drift when pepper blossoms fall,

how great armies struggle to cross the river's seething floodwaters,
and before they make it across, two or three in ten are drowned.

North of home, south of home, wailing filled villages everywhere,
sons torn from fathers and mothers, husbands torn from wives,

for people knew what it meant to make war on southern tribes:
ten million soldiers are sent away, and not one comes back alive.

It was all so long ago. I was hardly even twenty-four back then,
but my name was listed on those rolls at the Department of War,

so in the depths of night, careful to keep my plan well-hidden,
I stole away, found a big rock, and hacked my arm till it broke.

Too lame to draw a bow or lift banners and flags into the wind,
I escaped: they didn't send me off to their war in Cloud-South.

It was far from painless, the bone shattered and muscles torn,
but I'd found a way to go back and settle quietly in my village.

Now sixty years have come and gone since I broke this arm:
I gave up a limb, it's true, but I'm still alive, still in one piece,

though even now, on cold dark nights full of wind and rain,
I'm sleepless all night long with pain and still awake at dawn.

Sleepless with pain but free of regrets,
for I'm the only man in my district who lived to enjoy old age.

If I hadn't done it, I'd have ended where the Black River begins,
a dead body, my spirit adrift and my bones abandoned there,

just one of ten thousand ghosts drifting above southern graves,
gazing toward their home, all grief-torn and bleating, bleating.

When such elders speak
how can we ignore them?

Haven't you heard
about Sung K'ai-fu, prime minister during the Open-Origin reign,
how he nurtured peace by refusing to reward frontier victories?

Haven't you heard
about Yang Kuo-chung, prime minister during the Heaven-Jewel,
how he launched frontier campaigns to flatter that emperor,

how the people were wild with anger before he won anything?
Just ask that old man from Prosper-Anew with a broken arm.
Just ask him, ask the old broken-armed man from Prosper-Anew.

..

..

..

..

..

..

..

  

nothing personal

              
             To a Steam Roller                                                          


The illustration
is nothing to you without the application.
You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down
into close conformity, and then walk back and forth
                                                                                   on them.


Sparkling chips of rock
are crushed down to the level of the parent block.
Were not "impersonal judgment in aesthetic
 matters, a metaphysical impossibility," you


might fairly achieve
it. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive
of one's attending upon you, but to question
the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.










                                     Marianne Moore
















.

toc toc toc toc

THE SLOW, STUPID METRONOME                                                                   






With decades behind, one still boorishly chases the dull candles

held by those somehow traipsing through the uncomplicated

life; one just an acknowledgment page away from calling it now

one page away from a done. Over it. So very over it

With a brisk rendering of complexity, shrill and shrugged

repeats of days and one is an unparented swiller and one’s tonic and
balm no longer enough. Soon there will be no verb. The countables

wreck their own units; static laughs; lit up and tweak-weary

Diplomacy taints the micropolitic. Countless hours, of course,

spark sluggish decades and one loses games one isn’t even aware of
There is this one thing that all things are made of, one says

and the dull-witted say,yes, this. 
One does not, should not. Still rhetoric eases

The peculiar sting of fact-unchecked quirk factor hymnals and yet, one

chases slow moving candles and one fattens and withers in season –

slow metronome. A slow, stupid metronome. Then, at some point,

there is no real verb but an unrelenting need to call it and to call it

in time, listlessly, to call one’s own over it






                                           Jon Paul Fiorentino


















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