Sigeion

Don’t you love it when people
Feel insulted on behalf
Of the artists and mystics

By science or something like
The correspondence theory
Of truth? Why, then, Dickinson

And Keats, Michelangelo,
Juliana of Norwich,
Not to mention William Blake

And all his engraved angels
Would be rendered meaningless!
Meaning’s an absurd lighthouse

Raised on some howling outcrop
Of a drowned coast cloaked in fogs.
There it bellows mournfully

And sweeps its baleful spotlight.
If it happens on a boat
It floods the boat with meaning

Briefly, before gliding on.
The boat—dark, light, and then dark
Again, may take advantage

Of glimpsing information,
But it never owned the light.
Sea’s mostly empty, most nights.