Renaissance

Here's a poem I wrote while Jen took the kids to Ft. Wayne for her 3-day vacation that Kelly gave her. I took advantage of every moment I was home from work: working out, reading new books, biking through the park at night, smoking cigars, getting Papa John's pizza, watching the last two Harry Potters late into the night. I even accomplished a few chores to boot.

While sitting on the back porch smoking my stogies, I really settled deeply into thoughts about the meaning of my appearance in history and nature. The tops of the trees swaying in the wind, and the stars in the sky caused me to consider the wider world evolving beyond the narrow boundaries of my existence. There's so little I've known and become familiar with. So little. And yet, that small enclosure repeats to infinity it's patterns of hope, fear, excitement, and boredom. Even the unknown eventually becomes categorized as 'what I want' and 'what I don't want', and by fantasy and imagination I fool myself that I've become aquanted with those things I've never experienced. My world begins to bear the imprint of my own face. Ad infinitum. Then something so small shatters the illusion, reminds me that there's so much joy, and new types and tenors of it, along with new dangers, sorrows, and beauties, that my finite mind never came close to conjuring up on its own. I believe that the world we know is the world we partly produce (Kant), that everything that happens to us happens through us (Sartre), that there is no absolute division between subject and object (Buddha); but the Original somehow breaks us out of our own prisons and our slipshod, childish, building block worlds. Lego representations of life gives way to the crushing wilds of reality. Sometimes we love it, and sometimes we hate it. The other night, while writing this poem, I loved it.

Renaissance

The land is mute.

Nothing breaks its wasted, windblown surface.

We have depleted our plot,

Found all the gold

Then chucked it back again to keep things interesting.

We’ve worn ruts to the ‘best we know’

And grooved them deep.

We’ve reoriented the sky,

Double-, triple-coated it with our excuses,

Stretched and teased it

With the pale powers of our imagination.

Our suns are threadbare from our constant handling.

Thank God we don’t know what to do with our moons

Or we’d have named the man in it

Some fashionable name like Harper, or Liam, or Carter,

Handed him a shovel and pick,

And given him a job working in our mines.

It would be weird at first.

Each unearthed gem cuts a thousand ways,

Concealing a thousand more faces;

But one day the glass goes black,

Or worse—is just a mirror and not a window.

Then stars are merely specks of light in my routine sky,

Not pitching blazing-fresh planets;

They constellate my stories only,

My strifes,

My re-dreamed dreams.

My idols have finally parroted my voice.

Then a cricket chirps a different note

Or an unknown window glimmers warmly in the night,

Or a stranger walks by, looks you in the eye,

Says, “I am not you”;

And life is new, and dangerous,

And beautiful

Again.

There might not be any other earth

Than the earth I scuff with my feet,

But the rain will wash it out again,

And fear is fertile soil.

The present is a womb,

And the clay can surprise us yet,

Birthing new eyes to new souls.

Our native dirt is rich,

And I learn the universe

Again.

-March 18, 2012