My latest, of which I'm very fond.  "Greasy spoon" is an Americanism for
a low-class cafe.  "Strafeblock" = punishment barracks.  Yves Tanguy =
Surrealist painter.  No other obscurities I see.  This is I think
different from my norm, or perhaps only a more intense example.  Any
thoughtful comment would be welcome. Fred


Betting on the Being


1

Once, long ago (you won't believe it),
I read Carnap,
*The Logical Construction of the World.*
This was after New Criticism;
and poststructuralism
already loomed like a tide of poison jellyfish;
so I really had no excuse.
Any more than for my covert
sneer in buses and waiting rooms
at people who weren't reading
*The Logical Construction of the World.*
No more excuse than my then girlfriend had
for me, or I for her.

Yet I remember Carnap's
*Logical Construction of the World.*
He posits an object - what?
I don't recall - a Bauhaus
armoire, part of a sideboard -
and says it has a color
or colors, composition, weight,
conductivity, etc. …
and all of these
could be measured, and
all their interactions
designated in
the unarguable language
of symbolic logic;
and when that corner of a room
was finished, one would go on to the next
till doubt was excised from the universe.

The idea appealed to me;
my own intentions
seemed parallel.
I may have misunderstood, and never finished
Carnap.



2

There is a possibility
that a world suited to me
would not be one I could live in.
I'm not referring to the need for pain,
"challenge," boredom,
toxicity in happiness -
I have my own thoughts
on that, which I will doubtless
expound.  No,
I mean only gravity, gamma rays,
air pressure, air and so on.

In a livid, depthless sky,
a kind of giant pear
extends its lower hemisphere
as strenuously groundward
as if all point or nourishment were there.
Perspective lines (which
cast doubt upon the nature of this nature)
are echoed in the entity's red hide,
skirting eyes or portholes
suggestive of intelligence inside.
It isn't the background
that extrudes this form, others -
they're too disparate;
this isn't the world of Tanguy
but of '50s sci-fi covers.
A kind of violet frost
appears on a kind of mountain.
Light moves from here to there
as if creating them.
One breath, one moment
would kill me; why do I think
everything here
is conscious, more than conscious -
that the significance
of which I always feel myself bereft
is drifting away with other
objects, stage left?



3

However endless it seems,
no corridor is endless.
If you were down for Cell 6
in the *Strafeblock at Dachau,
they dragged you thirty meters
and opened the door
and there you were.

But my corridor
is long and, gradually curving,
loses the pricey, metal-and-rubber vibe
of its early (?) reaches;
the light seems dim, air worse.  The cindered
flotsam gritting the floor may sift
from figures leaning or leaned against
the wall, like mummies here and there in the world.
Or on other worlds, for none
exactly resembles me:
though I take each by an arm, and turn
it round to question, only insect-eyes
or a long octopus pupil
or the bone knob that indicates
lyrical views in the high ultraviolet
stare.  I think they would like to respond,
but how, and to what avail
at this point?  The stained wall
is more attractive: slowly they yearn toward it;
sadly I let them go.
Beyond this sector, most of them are dead
and fewer humanoid.  It must have been
the conditions that killed them, mine.
Even the light -
milder and more considerate, one
would think, than that of lab or clinic:
fatal.  They complain.
There's an available space.
I lean and close my eyes.
A whisper trickles past my face;
it's a whisper-wall.
One learns this is not a corridor of power.



4

A major current scandal
involves pederast priests.
I talk with one of them.

It takes him a while
to realize that,
though I don't share his taste,

he can speak without cant,
then that it's possible
to speak without cant,

then to exhaust
his peculiar interest
and to sink below self

to the intellectual substrate
I inhabit,
where alone one can savor

certain topics.
"I often imagine that
the Incarnation was

too successful - that
Christ took on human
forgetfulness, denial,

dispersal of effort and
focus ... I
know this resembles

the heresy of multiple, failed
'Aeons' or messengers -
I believe there was One,

but the fact that doubt
can be raised validates doubt."
I leave him sitting

in the debased-romantic
circumstance he wants:
greasy spoon; night;

collar reflected
in greasy coffee;
waiting for the bill

to arrive at the hands
of someone a little older
than his norm.



5

If enough people live long enough
in a place, it becomes important,
however cramped their lives
or second-rate their culture.

And the petty architecture
and mores of that place
will shape the dream-palaces
of artists born there.

And if an artist
takes refuge in either
the cosmopolitanism of the market
or that of his dreams,

why, the rotting verandahs,
the cinderblock homes of
officials, the bare concrete slabs
of his capital, the lean-tos and dumps
will serve as an image
of hope

till, old and embittered
with fame or its lack,
political failure or, merely,
age, he
will claim to find
the scent of truth
in that provincial stench.

For my part, I walked
to work years ago
through a slum.  The city
around it was crowded and
rich; a slum must
be dense and intense to survive
the need of the rich for condos.  The only
legal retail was bars; the rest
was crack and low-rent sex-workers.  But
over the vomit, around
the dead and moaning stepped each day
three Vietnamese girls
on their way to school, where they somehow
evaded the ones who would rape them for reading,
found books to read and teachers
who taught them after hours
evading the knives of the others.
The girls were always
neat.  One expected
the Sunday human-interest parts
of the paper to discover them,
so that suburbanites
could find them a private school and pay tuition.
I don't know if they
escaped.  If they did,
it would mean little to a statistician.