Sunday Drive

Cloudless afternoon –

the Mennonite girls

drive carriages down

gravel byways,

laughing under

black bonnets.

All but one

lean and wave

as we blow past.

On an iron pole

in a man-made pond,

a belted kingfisher

cocks his big-

headed profile

against the sun.

The lime headstones

in Cosper’s graveyard

illegible, our fingers

pick up granules

like salt from

their smooth faces.

Back on the course,

before a third put,

pausing for a jet’s

deafening passage

to fade, I hear

the wind vectors’

whipcrack, see

the ball breaking

toward the hole.

Quanta

Perpetuum mobile, we

could know nothing of movement

except that it was movement.

Could we know nothing of men?

The rose was more fully a rose

as we were so unroselike,

stripped of leaf and petal.

Hiroshima, the Battle of Tokyo,

the nightmare and the night,

lesser infinities burgeoning

under one two many suns;

the splay and meld of violence

dealt by stiff-fingered science.

The bomb boomed ego, ordering

order poorly understood and

the universe trembled in a drop

of black water imprisoning god.

Perhaps I shall know god

if I am not a god myself.

Perhaps all gods are god

moving toward or away;

I won’t know him to be god

if I move only as he moves,

so we see him everywhere.

Our eyes in the mirror never

see themselves move, close, blink,

see nothing but a stare, or wink.

That was then.

Now we can know

nothing that we have not changed

by attempting to know it and

put ourselves again at center

of the goddamned universe.

The eye touches the world silver.

Where we can’t see we exult

to find we can’t know place and

velocity simultaneously; we

watch light act now like hate

and now like love, and calmly

declare our kingdom is a horse.

We pluck up the rose but think

the thought the only rose real,

confusing indeterminacy of god

with thinking thinking thinking.

What we know is index

for what we can only imagine:

number is dimension;

numbers variably interact;

dimensions variably interact

depending on the whore’s orgasm,

the equatorially marooned Nootkan

reading my mind like thinking.

So without all this, the mind’s

construction of this poem, this

poem has nothing to say and nor,

we extrapolate, would rose or mirror;

so number, because it accounts

for nothing but itself and

therefore can’t be questioned,

is nature second to second nature.

In the subatomic realm pontiffs

witness paradox and say

it cannot be unless I think it

and so I think it so.

I think the chair; thank god

for me, thinks the chair.

I think god; he has better

things to do. He thinks me:

the ear of a lion of gold,

the light at heart of an icicle,

seed of what I’m not and might be,

a rose in the mirror.