Terms
The affects and the qualia
are more than I can manage,
I who strive
just to keep the light brown socks
and the dark brown socks apart.
Talk about aporia.
When I took tests in school
I tried to leave a question blank,
often Number 3,
as a matter of principle,
a tribute to the unknown,
to silence, to the voice
of modesty, that more scribbling
could not cover up the empty space.
However many times
I look up analeptic or sublate
I have to go back and look again.
Then there are the simple words
I thought I understood,
the words I thought were simple
but are no longer what they seemed.
So I have learned, too late,
that any word can be misread –
absence, crisis, gap, locate, other,
room, space, boundary, moment,
and all the other words
for all I know having turned
themselves into terms of art,
breadcrumbs by which
anyone can trace the route
of an idea across a forest floor.
Now all the talk
is increasingly of memes and spots,
of navigating and interrogating,
and daily life has become a spectacle.
Just look at my mismatched socks
as I stand here speechless.
Among the Atoms
A few handfuls of ashes
would be my guess,
some of it in clumps
as if the rain had seeped in,
and then a few chips of bone,
as when raking a flowerbed
turning over the small rocks
that go on making their way
up through the soil.
Phosphorus, calcium, zinc.
Oxygen. Hydrogen. Iron.
I think of them all
as glowing in the dark,
the dark that sweeps out
across the universe.
Their particles are bubbling
as in a bright cauldron.
Or now a restlessness
stirs through them and they
twitch in their long sleep.
Sometimes they turn over
and reach for one another.
“Particle” is, after all,
such a strange word.
A diminutive of “part,”
the least little thing
we can speak or imagine,
the least thing that is
anything at all,
yet it holds inside itself
a measure of reality
so powerful that when
it explodes it is like
a bit of bread
placed on a tongue.