Am I able to say I would like to carry you to that
oblique lake overseas, where we can still imagine
“the early 19th Century twilight,” and from the
trestle see how a self-determining logic in the

form of rationally organized matter—the luster of
metal, a vanishing glimpse of the moon or the sun,
a smile—becomes conscious, self-conscious, through us;
a freedom emptied out into that time we were

rambling to and fro like the rivers, and the dust
blanketed inscriptions on pulp condoned from trees
planted with the depths and heights of the human
heart as such? Yet how can we picture abstractions

that we can not live in alone, but perhaps to
imagine, with this, a criss-cross movement of
subjective expressions, views, and attitudes where
I sacrifice myselfs and my topics alike to a faith

we know is unwarranted, a slant illustration of
what we’ve agreed to call truth; the shimmer
of a bunch of grapes by candlelight, its joys
and sorrows, its strivings, deeds, and fates.

* * *

And when I say “this” I mean this, philosophy,
or pottery, or e-mails and short tweets between us.
And when I say “us” I don’t just mean the two of us,
you and me, but humanity. Of course, the abstract

is always felt through the concrete, as, when our  
arms were touching, I felt what I am unable to say.

Reason is terrible,
                      when
its certainty of being
all reality has been
                     raised
to the level of truth,
and reason is
            consciously
            aware
of itself
as its own world,
and of the world
              as itself.

Robert Burns
Had side-burns
No Grecian Urns and Nightingales for he,
But a mug of ale, and frippery.

T. S. Elliot
Went to hell, I guess.

Robert Burns
Had side-burns
No Grecian Urns and Nightingales for he,
But a mug of ale, and frippery.

T. S. Elliot
Went to hell, I guess.

The birch’s white bark’s lines
Grow larger in the growing time
But darker when the leaves all go
And limbs are foreground for the snow.

Your tongue shaped air that passed your lips,
And tastes the air that enters in, in sips.
I wish my pen could let my words all go
And lick you, now, from tongue to toe.

My heart, unlike a rose,
rose like a bird, and flew
towards the reflected light
right into a window,
and falling seven stories down,
met the ground with a small thud,
a mangled pile of feathers, blood.

He came here, and said, in passing,
“The town meeting was adjourned
due to the tower.” The expanding
image of the tower, and the shadow

of the adjournment creped and dovetailed,
until dissolving perceptions at the periphery
changed into what remained of the familiar
and washed away in diminishing September

twilight tributaries of great modern rivers, now
adjured, now forgotten. But, despite adjudication
and adjustment, a question remained, became a
void in the forest, flattened its shadow, biding its time.