Tag Archives: meaning

I spoke in riddles

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I spoke in riddles
Indecipherable even to myself
Especially myself

All these words made real
Made manifest

In the beginning
–It said —
Was the word

Indefinable useless
A meaningless jumble of
Sound unless

That hunger not yours but mine
Is the meaning of all of it
Or the infinite cosmos
Of conscious beings

Until the face in the mirror
Sweeps past me into the distance
Unable at last
To recognize the original

I always thought I was some kind of Gypsy
Racing from edge to edge
Never stopping never asking
Weariness my goad and my goal

All will good or bad
Known and unknown
As deep and suspicious
As an autumn breeze in April

Where is it exactly you want to go?
Don’t you know all places are the same?
All contain your ghosts
The dead can’t help you
Any more than the living
You are yours alone

I lived riddles
Myself indecipherable
Especially myself

Physics

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Light streams in, cold as stars
At midnight
You feel the deepest humming
Of the universe
The unguessed throb of its
Unraveling

A star collapses
A photon flies into a black hole
A moon pulls itself apart
Planets spin and collide

And our lives stream outward
To unknown ends

Did they sing to us. too?

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Did they sing to us, too,
These poets of the young and wistful,
Of the just discovered?

Were we, too, so fast conjoined
In giddy possibility?

Are we now consigned to a coarser reality?
Because a thing becomes familiar
Must it become less beautiful?
Time is a joke poorly told.

An old color photograph,
Its blazing reds and excruciating blues
Reduced to jaundiced dim browns,

Still cuts deep
Through all fog and wishing,
Blinding in its fierceness.

The hell of it

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After nearly seven decades
I still own nothing
Am sure of nothing.

Some god has granted me
The grace of ignorance
To go with my compulsive curiosity.

That’s the hell of it, isn’t it?
An irony so relentless
As to be hilarious,

And we, laughing to split our sides,
Tumbling headlong into sweet oblivion,
Or not; no one living will ever know.

Ergo

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I think, I feel, therefore it seems
That the world turns only on

My constant spinning,
Only so far as my senses extend
My poor, mineral body, soft and pliable,
Prone to deflation;

That the universe exists solely
For my engagement, to be ingested
Piece by piece,
Or all a-gulp, wantonly;

That time is just the measure of
My preoccupation with one
Or another of my desires
Churned up in the small turmoil of being;

That all ends where I end,
And that all vastness is but an illusion
Of my impatient hunger,
That meaning stops here.

This, despite my earnest protests;
And all the infinite conscious beings
Of the infinite cosmos, too, protest
In vain.