Quantum physics has become philosophical ipecac
people take a spoonful
and throw up half-digested metaphysics.
Casual passers-by see this splatter
and mistake it for abstract expressionist science
or simply science.
Who can resist?
Now they give us superstrings
adding resonance to the marvelous
images of the infinite hive
which contradicts the now.
To hear a symphony an organism must cradle the notes
collecting each one
with atomic fingers
storing them in a vault of light
without walls
molecular hands opening again and again to receive more.
Bind those hands now
the magician misdirects
unconnected sounds and silences
a death and resurrection show
the escape artist escapes
and leads you through a trap door
to the past
or the future,
two scantily clad assistants
whom the magician
locks steamer trunks
going nowhere
we never forget them,
they continue to reappear
while the orchestra plays,
building our suspense.
Every note is a hero
traveling the sacred round
separation, initiation,
return.
Stop a violin string at any instant and what do you get?
A paradox for Zeno if he had an ear.
And that quantum cat?
Death-Life
Love-Death
Bitter-Sweet
Mind-Breath.
The form you think you can touch,
the vibrating string,
the purring cat,
the Big Bang that happened
precisely in the center of your heart,
a potential for form released like arrows
from cells respiring
a potential that came from the lyre of the sun
another locus of the Bang.
I cannot isolate an object in space
in words, I cannot isolate an emotion
a thought, it all happened
now-not-now.
I play the superstrings of the lyre
I fire the arrows of infinite distance
moving nothing
everything
moving.
Every poet knows this.
(Beauty is truth . . .)
A strange residue of silence
precipitated by climactic encounters
poisoned his romantic notions
the way weapons of chemical warfare
kill cancerous tumors
draining energy from cardinal organs.
He looked at her lying
naked, sleeping,
her mouth agape
he replayed the scenes
and gradually
they transformed him.
The banquet of intimacy progressed
from naked pencil marks of a cupiscent mind
to golden nude portraits glowing . . .
not a fabulous posterior to grab at the hips
no idealizations described with cliche,
just clear sensations
revealed by light and curve,
a perfect body perfectly concrete
infinite and insubstantial
touched with eyes, hands, and lips
responsive at every point of contact
every overlap of otherness
exploring itself.
The undulations of language
washed him, washed over
him, in situations and events
like beads in a double-knotted mala,
mantras, seed sounds,
an orderly germination,
rhythms from every season,
like spirits walking by chance
attaching themselves loosely to objects and powers
symbols and vibrations,
their feet know lightness
they make marks as in wet cement
the stone books of our age
the statues of Ozymandias that will yet crumble to dust,
and the song those children sing: The nectar of the gods
is vinegar,
Your life is written with a broomstick in the sand,
the tide is coming soon.
Sweet small deaths,
trembling in the candle light,
the curves, the whispers,
the erotic wake.
Almost everyday he thinks to himself
“Poor Keats . . . poor everyone . . .
Truth does not exist---
there is only poetry . . .
our only shelter,
the only thing to stand in,
nude, naked,
comprehensively exposed.”
Appendix:
“It is no wonder that when therapies strip man down to his naked aloneness, to the real nature of experience and the problem of life, they slip into some kind of metaphysic of power and justification from beyond.” –Ernest Becker