Huginn and Muninn

Culture, Poetry, The Life of the Mind

My friend, whom I’ve never really met
asked if I’d write a poem on David Stove,
philosopher. I don’t know much about
him, although I’ve heard he didn’t like
blacks very much, or ladies, or ravens
or Kant or Platonists or much at all.

Now, philosophy isn’t all
bad; it has its uses. But have you met
a Platonist you’d watch a Steelers-Ravens
division game with? You’d want to stove
his head in before halftime, like
you know he’d be that guy who’s on about

the sublimated homo stuff. About
the third commercial break, third beer, we’d all
make our excuses. Look, no one likes
to think about their likes. I’ve met
enough philosophers to know that Stove
had a point about the paradox of ravens,

or at least about the guys who think that ravens
are of formal interest. Of course, the thing about
these birds is that they use tools, but Stove
thought sociobiology was all
—and a priori—crap, although it met
his preference for induction. He’s sort of like

that friend of yours who says he really likes
the outdoors but can’t tell hawks from ravens,
and brings back wet firewood, who met
the need to shit outside with a rant about
how man is not an animal. You all
wanted to roast him on the camp stove.

Now, this is not to shit on David Stove.
I’m a contrarian myself. I like
a scholar who thinks his discipline is all
or mostly bunk. But the truth about ravens
is not that they are black, but that about
when man un-animaled himself, he met

something like himself in the birds, he met
thought and mind; all fathers sat about
the winter stove, making myths of ravens.

Ludwig Wittgenstein and David Hume Pinsent Consider a Purchase of Scandinavian Furniture

Poetry, The Life of the Mind

It was a lingering winter; all the streets
were melted ice and ash, and two young men
fresh from the matinee of Scriabin
stumbled home to stain their Cambridge sheets
and argue over tonal innovation:
Ludwig denied it; David found it quite
interesting as maths—to stop a fight
he turned the topic to a renovation
of their rooms; a year before, in Norway, they
had seen a form of rigorous design,
like a truth-function formed by Wittgenstein
himself—but neither one of them could say
quite what he meant; they passed into a silence
as necessary as it was immense.

An Angel of the Lord Appears to a Newspaper Columnist

Economy, Media, Poetry

Essentially agnostic, he believes
the moral universe is of a kind
with the bureaucratic and efficient mind.
His is all incentives and reprieves.
He likes the rich. The poor are mostly thieves.
His paradise is just a well-designed
forced savings scheme, a contract signed,
less what the soul deserves than what it achieves.
If, alone, an angel of God most high
appeared to him beside a shallow stream
while on his way, a man in form, but bright
and terrible, he wouldn’t strive; he’d try
to reason the miracle down to just a dream,
the honor modest, the pleasure real, but slight.

Peyton Manning Reflects upon the Fundamental Unknowability of a Universe Defined by Probability Alone

Poetry, Religion, Science, Sports

What I wanted was a quiet moment when
the faded but still present noise would fill
my conscious concentration, leaving my will
alone; arrayed within my vision, men
like motes moving in liquid, Brownian,
but, to a mind—if sensitized, if skilled—
though arbitrary, apprehensible.
All this—just this—is what I wanted; then
a random error—outcome of measurements
and observation, imprecision, luck,
and deviation, human failing, God—
occurred; the eye and ear are instruments,
each ultimately imprecise, and fuck!—
reveal all sense of order: lies and fraud.

A Spate of Unions

Poetry, War and Politics

That which wasn’t is becoming by
best estimations something we’ll achieve
within what I’m assured’s a reasonable time—
as soon as now, if I can be believed.
The past is past. The future is to come.
Mistakes, if they were made, and let me say,
I can conceive that they were made by some
impatient staffer, unpaid junior aide,
although of course I can’t with certainty
identify what they might be, because,
let me be clear, they were not made by me,
will nonetheless . . . where was I? Let me pause.
To those who’d make us choose between what may
and might never be done, I say, I say.

A New Boyfriend Is a Wonder of the Ancient World or Something

Poetry

I would compare you to the ruins of
a lost civilization, even though
you’re not yet twenty-four. The thing is, love
unceasingly surprises; what you know
is never what you know. It’s like, in Rome
what was for many blocks an ordinary
street then turns a bend and, whoa, you’ve come
upon another Rome. The mercenary
past will soldier for imagination,
which is love’s antiquity, its own
preceding architectural creation—
an archaeology that’s dreamed alone
until some ancient god, now bored, creates
from the dream a city, boyfriend, fortune, dates.

Walking with My Dog this Last Thanksgiving in Uniontown, Pennsylvania

Poetry

It may have been the last time that I’d ever
visit the house where I had lived between
eleven years old and something like eighteen.
Beyond the housing plan, the ridges never
seemed a better metaphor or measure
for the inability of things to mean
anything but what they literally mean.
My dog engaged in some houndish endeavor.
There was a hawk. There was a goldfinch, green
with winter. Mom and Dad have bought a place
in the city. I can still remember when
my brother, who is dead, and I would race
through the woods behind the yard. The woods have seen
nothing. The trees are trees and not young men.

The Enterprise of Late, State Capitalism Constructs a Sort of Cathedral

Poetry

Construct it out of prayers that you can’t quite
recall with full fidelity; you heard
some rabbi once, and distantly; the words
may not have been in English. Then you’ll write
instructions made of Morse-encoded light
machine-translated into songs by birds
and pleasure-whines of dogs discovering turds.
Then patent, IPO, and copyright.
Like god, it is a conjugation
of the verb, to be, irregular and yet
entirely essential, absolute,
humanity in whole its congregation,
a thing unbounded as an Aleph set.
Oh, frozen? Turn the power off. Reboot.

A Functionary of the National Security Agency Encounters the Holy Spirit at His Work

Books and Literature, Poetry

Priest, confessor, bureaucrat, alone
in a warehouse full of ordinary dreams,
aspirations and unexpurgated streams
of consciousness, all context, lacking tone
or affect, notices a bird has flown
in through a window, perched among the beams,
black-beaked and tiny, singing, it seems
semi-demiurgic, though a known
and common type, taxonomized and quite
familiar; still, indoors, becomes a kind
of miracle, unseen except by this
thin-wristed man beneath fluorescent light,
glorious excess born of a bored mind,
transubstantiated into bliss.

Ilium

Culture, Poetry

Patroclus, how could you? I’ll never forgive you
for dying. Don’t you remember how we tricked together,
up and down the Aegean? In every port
a dim and inexpensive bar where boys
bought drinks for any sailor dropping in
to warm his sandaled feet by the fire. They were
so beautiful Paris would have left Helen standing there
on that bare Spartan beach and sailed back off
to find them instead. Now you’re dead. Agamemnon
and our Greek soldiers are hurling their smooth bodies
against the Trojans’ spears for that woman. One
woman! The love between men and women is madness.
How can I go on fighting when you’ve left me to sleep
alone in this tent? Did they mean nothing to you,
the kisses I showered on your unblemished thighs?

You let war carry you down into that shaded kingdom
where the dead go on living without us and without me
now that the boatman’s accepted your rusty coin,
ferried you to the other side of the Lethe. Tomorrow
or very soon thereafter, if you press your ear
to the vaults of Hades’ underworldly colony,
you’ll hear my footsteps stop in the bright world
above. Probably the love between men and boys
is madness too. Forgive me, I’m going to turn
my mother’s mistake to the archers. I am no hero.

The wine-dark sea can flood and swallow up
every boy from Crete to the Dardanelles.
The rosy-fingered dawn can park itself
in Apollo’s garage. Tell Hades I’m not Theseus;
I won’t break his chains. If I can find you
in his dayless, nightless kingdom, I swear to stay
dead, to love death and let it keep me.