Then...
The most preposterous notions
no one may negate when
everyone* lies slain:
for then there will be no one to propose
that ants wear beige or octopi
play pat-a-cake.
Realists hold
the universe to be;
but THEN
neither of discourse,
nor discernible.
When Bohr and Einstein walked and talked
in Copenhagen, waving curious arms
at arch and haughty moon above, they asked,
"If nobody looked up, would moon be there?"
Einstein deployed his philosophic god,
Bohr begged to differ; and in the quantum
realm, he is being proved right time after time:
'no reality beyond inquiry.'
But don't we live in the classical world?
Newton smiles on the fairway, handing on
to Einstein in the rough, from whom no one,
not-a-one-yet, has seen that out-of-bounds!
So are we stuck in two minds, in two courts,
ourselves the stitches holding buckles on?
At field-edge of shorn wheat stubble,
by the wide-open field-gate entrance
parked, a camper van.
Out, shock-haired boy bobs, grinning bright,
and off down along the hedge to pee.
His mother peers out. Seeing me, she smiles,
puts hand to forehead, holding back the hair
curtain from her eyes and to block
the dazzle of a mellow sun.
Something swells up of tenderness:
the moment,
set against the rest of time, seems frail.
I see the chickweed flowering at my feet;
and then I'm moved to blurt out,
almost now in tears, "I love you so..."
most deeply man to woman
yet for my golden boy as well,
us three, our little family.
I wake and wonder who they were,
and who I was, and who I am indeed;
and why the hell (or heaven) I dreamed them up?
I had no names for them, nor I,
nor knew where we were headed.
..........................................
*Of course, by everyone, I mean all sentient life. If you are the kind of animist who believes in pan-sentience (of matter) then the whole argument is void to you.
Visible Now
Visible now, singing in the new-leaved thorn,
just below the gust-swayed tops, he looks at me.
I curl and loop a gentleness into my scrawl
as little wren, the tiniest I've seen
flits flea-like up and sits nearby three twigs away,
attentive to the fine phraseology,
before she drops like a pebble down, off.
A sparrow plonks himself on my black bin.
I'd thought the merry row next door was all
of tits and finches; now I know who's back
from the brink. The thorn's some kind of border:
off my blackbird flies and here's another,
bigger, lower-fluting, less complex in song.
I hope the contest lasts all summer long.
..
YOU ARE READING
Bare Shouldered
Poetry"The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this - in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again without wings and with all [the] horror of a bare shouldered Creature...
