Otherwise

I’ve been brooding on my brood: the poem
Whose reason is intelligence, and the intelligence
That reasons in the poem. Is this poem
Inevitably its intelligence, inevitably
The term of that intelligence,
Its origin and end, source
And teleology? Or is this reason
Eschatology of words?

I mean, could it have been otherwise?
Could this thought
Have been a mathematical truth
Or a diagram or an argument
Set in the grooves
Of a diagram’s certainty
And validity, sound?
Could the intelligence that builds the poem
Have been a truth?

But this poem was only a place where, for a moment, truth dwelt:
For truth resides everywhere and always but forever
Moving, and she returns only to that flash of eternity
Whose reason is the poem --
But could have been otherwise.