Poeta Doctus

Sometimes, whether sincerely or out of hubris, one comes to believe they’ve got a grip on things, and so it seemed, more or less, to me. But, recently, reading Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death and an overview of the late Mark Fisher’s life and work, reflecting how, when I was around ten years old, the world was being maneuvered into its (apparent) Neoliberal (dis)order (a view of things probably already belated) and beginning a perceptible acceleration into what has come to be called the Anthropocene, I feel, now, there is nowhere to stand, nowhere at a standstill, that vertigo and fear just under the heart that starts at a sudden drop.

Of course, unknowingly, I’d grappled with these matters before. “At Red River’s Εdge”, the first poem of my first book (Grand Gnostic Central) attempts to resolve, with all the virtues and vices of a youthful work, this nigh metaphysical  flow of things (or, as I thought of it at the time, “dissemination”), while the last poem of the book (“Tonight, the world is simple and plain…”), it appears to me now, approaches the same concern, but from a different angle.

 

At Red River’s Edge

 

I shed scales and

blood the slow water

at the river’s edge, the fish

gutted on some warming rock.

A wondering after

origins and wellsprings

rises with my standing

and squinting into the glare

of light broken upstream

at my vision’s limit.

What source spills

up this river?—

numberless puddles brimming

over as rain falls

to fill them, clear

water writhing

over slick dark rock

too hard to carve

a lasting path in,

waves of rainwater

draining in rippling sheets

off flat rock walling

a gleaming highway,

or running in rivulets

charging a careening stream

from a sudden height

in an opening spray of sparks

that scatter against one

mountain’s steep

lower rises. Upward,

glaciers moan and turn

themselves to fluid under

their own weight

for the sake of motion.

Lighter ice and snow

drop, overheavy

overhang, giving

the glitter of crystals

to the lift of winds

and the long swerve of descent

to dew on darting speargrass

leaves or on the grains

of the smallest antmounds

mining the glint

of sand mixed in the topmost soil

of swelling foothills.

Clouds shadow the climb

of rock, condensing

and losing themselves

in the strain

to come to nothing

but clearest light.

Everywhere, countless sources urge

one flow that fills

perfectly any particular

gap in every ground

in its scrambling run

to that ease of gravity

proper to the sea.  This river

one route before me

and beyond me on

either side, never ebbing,

only ever changing course

to another.  I follow

some black bark carried free

on flashing rises of the current,

sometimes edging a shore, sometimes stilled

in the turning of

a darker random

swirl, but always

spiraling out again

to give with the slow measure

of the ocean’s deepest founding swells

or float on the light

lift of waves

and the chance of the wind

into some child’s quick

excitement in the seadrift.

 

“Tonight, the world is simple and plain….”

 

Tonight, the world is simple and plain.

The earth is round and the sky two domes

Enclosing us, excluding nothing.

 

The stars are all arranged in such a way

As to suggest an endless emptiness

Or heavens full of foreign deities.

 

And choosing to choose neither we lose

Ourselves, desiring only an end

To this plane enclosed around itself

 

That keeps us coming to ourselves again.