The world you created,
If it moved you in the beginning,
If you saw it and approved,
Remains mysterious to me:

Who precedes light and darkness
Equally, but knows the light
From darkness and in themselves
Knows both

(Or was the darkness just a name
For what was never before the light?)

I wish if it were a depth
You could drain it and if a dew would drive it
Off as the morning shows
The surface for itself and makes it blush.

Commemorating Quine

No horse has nor could possess
Wings because the stuffs
Which compose them,
Their matter is too
Heavy and always will sink
Earthwards in spite of such white
Grace, thus perish the thought of a flying
Stallion; rather

It was not their matter but
Its configuration that barred
The addition of these superficies
Since nature never could heed
Vane counsel.

Who then first advised or devised it?
Who conceived it in the flesh
And blood -- from what loins,
Monstrous, did equines
Take wing?

It was the promiscuity
Of words that will not suffer
The world; it was the night of thought’s
Combinations, demesne of rock
And froth, kingdom of golden
Protuberance, so it seems, though its denizens
Readily shapeshift, slip
Into and from the familiar, casting
The shadows of experience
On dreams and hiding
The body in all rarefactions of form.

Love Poem

For E.M. Forster

If you were possible, you would be loved
Since I have seen you in resemblances
And thought of the idea
Whose shape is human form.
But if not you will remain
Divine -- for if the sun
Is not to be my light,
At least in dreams the moon
Illuminates the semblant
Symbol of the heart --
And idol to the mind.

Circles

Shapes should have their term: for instance Earth
Must trail its own rotundity and modulate the cycle of our days
With sun (the sun's -- the suns and other sattelites -- the same)
Into the year who knows the seasons (this is time's recursion --
Outgoing -- incoming) self and non-self in the self
(Outside the self -- the self outside the sense of self).

Ayn Sof

In the beginning though there was none no
Maker uttered apt words.

And it was not suddenly possible to see
Infinity.

There were clouds, of course,
Black clouds of dust, and a hum

Inaudible (matter’s minute machinations); love
Was not the axle around which all things

Turn and to which all
Return,

But a curious business began to move
In things.

That affair begun it has not finished
For thousands of thousands

(Of what?), and to this day
If you look at the wind you can see

How it scurries
Through the sunny leaves.