The Platonist

First beyond the tumult there is one,
This flux of visions and refractions,
Which we call the light:
The light in crystal, which we see
Is genesis for all beauty.
Like for music, like for art
The secret patterns which the heart
Observes, for these it yearns --
And so the Medes made silk,
The Greeks their urns. If you doubt
That beauty finds her shape
Between the accidents of verse
And in the play of paint, reflect
That these are deeper intimations
Of an order in our meditations, and though
As Hesiod would have it, Chaos made
The sky, the earth, the mountains, and the waves,
Still the patterns in the globe, the constellated sum
Is our eternal destiny, the Beautiful, the One.

There is the self, I see, and I resolve
The multiple earth into a floating star
That crests the waves of flux
But still is drowned. When I touch
I know the feeling in myself, but of the feeling
I do not know. You speak
With neoclassical restraint,
Resolve the world in a gem, and all the light
That glitters blinds my eyes;
You leave me in a darkness, and if I think
That I could reach towards what I'm not,
I grasp, like mighty giants at the entrance,
Everything they do not know. Forgive me
If my style is obscure, since I have much to learn.

The one is in the self, the self is one
Who grasps the one and drags it
Into the lucidity of time, just as the rhyme
Connects the feeling sound of double lines;
We see the verse a single whole, that,
Like the soul, connects the varied and the strange --

-- Into a unified harangue. Give me no more verse
That rhymes, but tilted style, slightly; the rhyme
Stilts syntax, certain words and only certain words
Allow the easy flux, the rhyming poem
Becomes a shoddy simulacrum of the truth,
A summersault around the real, a tight-rope walk
Across a line of fluff. My opinions, I know,
Are rude, but if we are to seriously discuss
The Beautiful, this thing you call the One, then let
A dissonance embark your words, and if they ring
At all, then clear, a dulcet sound -- a dialogue, a sprout
That we can nurture, trench, and grow,
Whose plush leaves, like Jack's beanstalk,
Will tend together towards the sky.