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.
