As to whether there persists—enlighten me—
a dialectic: labour into desire.
Forgive my small vocabulary that tries
and abides your patience. What a wonder’s
man the philosopher set on his throne.
What a wonder he is, and how
abysmal. I would not have you say
I speak ungratefully; or that there’s self
going spare in our unsparing tribute.
Arbeitsknecht by adoption, I never
slam down advice, even to shake the building.
Perhaps (but not likely) I may be still
a whizz at ordinary language and you
mishear things.
No, put this way: cancel, expunge, annul,
self-reference. Philosophy keeps up
embarrassment and expense. I’d quit us
of further scars had these now been incurred.
You’re magisterial in judgement’s gorge
where the rocks are at all angles and the stream
huggers its way through:
let’s flip with self-projection’s paper boat.
Language not revealing to the elect
only; and wild descenders pierced by good.
So few of us absolved when what we write
sets us to rights on some scam-scale of justice.
You’re magisterial in your own conviction.
And a clown with it, and a judge of clowns.
a glass harmonica at my good ear.
The alien’s close to home, the changeling’s not
too much a prodigy or wastrel; lovers
and children not inimical by rote.
Something here even so. Our well dug-in
language pitches us as it finds—
I tell myself
don’t wreck a good phrase simply to boost sense—
granted its dark places, the fabled burden;
its loops and extraordinary progressions,
its mere conundrums forms and rites of discourse;
its bleak littoral swept by bursts of sunlight;
its earthen genius auditing the spheres.
