"Keep your right hand to the wall"

we came in?”

This desert is cold
er than I expected. Its skies
are black, like carious teeth,
decayed by disuse.
The oddest vegetation,
resisting reduction to mere poetry,
dogs my steps.
I see the footprints
in the red sand
of those who went before me –
many men, even some of the humblest,
others, princes of the mind.
This track is a highway,
earth packed firm by many, many questions
and perhaps some answers
but tonight it is empty.
I don’t plan to follow this highway.
By definition it must end somewhere
other than here. But I want to discover
if I can live under these dementing skies.

The moon sputtered
muttered
hummed
said to me:
“Regard the ants.
They are your antithesis.
They live and die, and gather nonetheless.
The ant accepts his fate
(probably because he does not know another).”
I should have been a pair of groping feelers
mindlessly charging forward.
Instead, I feel.
I feel every slow breath,
every crippling wound,
every grit of the teeth
that this world has to offer.
I must feel everything –
I feel cheated otherwise.

“See the cat,”
She said, “his universe
is not the universe of the ant-hill.”
Understanding the world
is to reduce it to the human,
man stamping it with his seal.
I cannot grasp these palindromic memories.
Were I to trace them with my finger,
I should not know any more.
I can touch, and judge that they exist,
but there ends my knowledge –
The rest is mere construction.
I sketch the aspects,
but aspects cannot be added up;
It is water through my fingers.
Truths but no truth;
description that is sure
teaches me nothing,
and hypotheses that teach
are not sure.
Socrates: “Know thyself!”

A stranger to myself.
A stranger to the world.
These acrid moments
hang heavy above us all.
This climate is intolerable,
I must move on.

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem.”
To let the blood that weighs us down,
to break the one link that binds us to this suffocating desert,
holds us under this resolute sky –
that is a glorious thing.
Surely the ant would rather be crushed today
under my boot, rather than live another day
(and another and another and all the ‘anothers’)
going thus, paying off the debt
that was his birthright,
until the predator or the elements claimed him
(I wonder, do ants die of old age?)
I follow Bolivar.
Like Theseus, I know the way out.
But my string isn’t tied to the door-handle,
it’s tied to the rafters.
A short drop and a sudden stop –
flashers and floaters,
sparks, and rushes to the head.
The decaying sky would chuckle at that.

“Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off.”
The problem is thus: we fell into the habit of living
long before we developed the habit of thinking.
Men, too, secrete the inhuman.
Faced with this meaningless pantomime –
Man’s own inhumanity –
I wonder why he is alive.
The Eternal Footman
will stake his claim eventually.
But I haven’t seen his twilight kingdom,
my faith in death is as hollow
as a Straw Man in a field,
as a smile at a second-cousin’s birthday,
as an agnostic’s prayers in church.
Besides, this aching, sighing, bleeding earth
once lost is lost forever.
At the moment of crisis there is no time
for decisions and revisions,
and not a minute to reverse.

The scowling sky, those funny plants,
the relentless wind –
I hadn’t noticed it before.
It’s subtle, like the whine of a mosquito,
like a headache
brought on by too little sleep,
or like that feeling one has in the instant
before being impaled through the chest –
this thought-beaten highway
has reached its crossroads.
Here thought hesitates –
This red road
stretches out so effortlessly,
the unsettlingly surprising
quiet achiever. Each route
arcs
out of sight and mind,
days and steps spinning into millennia.
Hands shake,
like a small child’s, holding something
much too heavy for him.
“Herein” (as the Bard would say) “lies the rub:”
the trouble is not finding the way out of this desert,
but choosing a border to cross.

There are truths but no truth,
save one: “Ignorance is bliss.”

“Isn’t this where