Down by Drake’s Bay, while watching ravens climb,
And glide, and dive headlong, finally to spiral
Interlocked, tumbling, it’s as though naked being —
Kernel of all those things we knew, in childhood,
Things easily attained — reproaches me,
World being transparent, as light strikes grains of sand.
*
All might be justified, on our finding a theorem,
Employing axioms of common sense
And postulates of Euclid's Elements,
To demonstrate that there’s no mystery,
At noon, going any deeper than the quiet
Surface of water, where cinnamon teal
Dip heads, across the pond, beside cattails.
*
But knowing myself I’d have to hesitate,
As at a strange frontier, rather than face
The wave gathering scattered gold in time.
*
A garter snake warms itself in the shade,
In one lozenge of sunlight, and moves on.
*
Let there be some truth I haven't betrayed.
For Jane Hurst, near Limantour Beach
3 comments:
A note: Aporia is a Greek philosophical term, meaning a sort of impasse in a dialectical argument. It may also mean an insoluble contradiction or paradox in in a text's meanings or, as a figure of speech, it may signal that the speaker appears to be in doubt, or purports to be in doubt, about a question. The word derives from roots
meaning cannot be carried across.
Jamie,
I wonder if one attempted solution to aporia has been metaphor, whose roots mean to carry across or transfer. That might be one way for a poet to see it.
Sometimes things just are.
And sometimes we just have to live, instead of thinking about living.
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