What We Are
What we are? We say we want to become
what we are or what we have an intent to be.
We read the possibilities, or try.
We get to some. We think we know how to read.
We recognize a word, here and there,
a syllable: male, it says perhaps,
or female, talent - look what you could do -
or love, it says, love is what we mean.
Being at any cost: in the end, the cost
is terrible but so is the lure to us.
We see it move and shine and swallow it.
We say we are and this is what we are
as to say we should be and this is what to be
and this is how. But, oh, it isn't so.
Metonymy As An Approach To A Real World
Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
- which what?- something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.
Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that 'here' is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from say, the sea, a purity of space.
The Holding
Of lovers, one senses how, coupled, their joy is to think
their singleness, together, to find themselves;
how, holding each other, they think to hold
as well as themselves, the truth, reality.
We honor their wanting; what better could we want than that?
Or, more than honor, we feel what they feel.
If not for another sense, then this were all:
we sense that what they hold is not the truth.
The World
I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.