SMALL VIEW, ii
Midsummer: we stood on a
dune above the North Sea,
talking of Caesar and
philosophy, naming the intangible
sandwiched between schools
of thought. Cogito ergo sum.
At Zaandfort, we admired the
slow hunger of glaciers on stone
and the ceaseless appetite
of the Rhine, carrying a payload
of what once was the secret
heart of mountains.
Not content with things
themselves,
we named small desires,
translated them into stone.
The smithy’s forge
transformed nameless dirt into iron,
stayed countless armies of
sand into glass palaces.
Things cannot stand for what
they are,
without moniker as if we
brought them into being
with our mad desire for
definition. To think is to name.
At the house of Descartes we
measured the ratio of shadow
to light and found it
wanting within our own darkness.
Throwing stones at the
shattered ego, an afterthought.
As Blake would say: to
seek eternity in a grain of sand...
But then, he saw God in an
apple tree when he was four
and newly come to the naming of things.
How did he know it was God
if there was not yet a name for it?
Was it verb or noun?
This
naming: And God said...
sheds no more light than the
man in the moon.
Yet we persist, we insist on
this naming,
yet overlook the way warbled
glass in the old house
imperfectly admits sunlight
into a room.
Should we turn the windows
upside down every 50 years?
Stand the rubric of time on
its ear in order to see clearly?
We could name it an aspect
of time, call it slumped glass,
explain it with the poetics
of physics: slow fluid
seeking gravity’s kiss,
admire rippled light cast onto skin,
a genesis of follicles and
dappled shadows on the floorboards,
or imagine an ancestral
memory of sea and sand and wind.
Appellation, cognomen, epithet.
We hammer and tong Latinate
structure
into verb or into noun as it
suits:
we designate it nom de
guerre, nom de plume,
we call it pseudonym, or
maybe nothing at all.
4/9/03
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