Craquelure

It’s almost always deciduous
Winter among the arboreal
Figures of branching phenomena.

The sentence-trees of grammarians,
Family trees of genealogies,
Even Darwin’s twiggy tree of life

Are all bare. To labor over leaves,
In addition to sheer tedium
Would imply a kind of fruition,

A completion of the incomplete
Branching that inspired the metaphor.
Nerve-cell synapses would be better,

But they were discovered late and made
Figurative trees themselves—dendrites
The medical Latin for branches.

Fractures would take us far from the trees
And lose the organic suggestion
Of preordained unfolding in growth.

Speciation splits like craquelure.
Ancestry’s a series of ruptures.
Sentences are shatterproof windshields

Stove in just enough to be lacy
With complex patterns tracing impacts
From whatever crashed into the mind.

And Knowing’s No Solution

There’s a tension between wanting

To know the meaning of something

And wanting to experience

The meaningless thing in itself.

When a poem’s vocabulary

Is rich with names and allusions

Suggesting precise acquaintance

With local flora and fauna,

Relishing exact species’ names

And geographical details,

The reveling’s in the language—

The more anchored in specifics,

The more the poem conjures real things,

The more library poem it is—

Not irony, parallel—

Use the rich structure of language

To emphasize, by mimicry,

The richer structure of the world.

But then there’s the contrary urge,

Which creates its own paradox.

Whitman tires of astronomy

To look in silence at the stars.

Dickinson picks an unnamed flower

Irked when, a monster with a glass

Computes the stamens in a breath,

And has her in a ‘Class.’

Who wants dry names as substitutes

For the perfect thing in itself?

But then, there’s only the pointing.

Whitman ends with the stars, nothing

More specific of stars to say.

Dickinson’s most vivid image,

In that poem, is not the nameless

Flower but the monster with a glass.

Language draws richness from language,

Not from the richness of the world.

The Darwin Flower

An anecdote can become
A parable, if you choose.
Supposedly, Charles Darwin,

As a schoolboy, came to class
One day with a garden flower
And the mistaken notion

That his mother had told him
If he stared at the center
Long enough, it would tell him

Its name. He and his friends stared
With great concentration, but
The flower, for its part, stayed mum.

The mistake seems to have been
Confusion from a lesson
On the Linnaean system,

In which one counts the stamens
To know the type of the flower.
The system contains the name.

So much for the anecdote.
Now bring the system to bear
To create a parable.

The world’s as full of riches
As a tangled bank of flowers,
But the flowers have no meaning

And will never speak their names.
The world’s as full of meaning
As human naming makes it.

The naming’s not inherent
Except to human systems.
A flower is full of meaning

Made of your names and stories,
And you can add more meanings—
Fables of flower origins,

Mythologies of martyrs
And demigods explaining
A flower’s blood red or snow white,

Or order your myths by traits
And sexual strategies
In a story of one God’s

Elaborate creation,
Any magnifying glass
Will help you peer and confirm.

Oh, there’s an infinity
Of meanings that could attend
To any wildflower. It’s just

That the flower itself will not
Speak any of them to you.
Flowers have other things to do.

It’s All Middle Anyway

Is it a dial, though?
Continuous range?
Do pain and pleasure,
Peace and suffering

Fill out a smooth scale,
Calibrated cline?
It’s not the minor
Question that it seems.

Equanimity
As eudaimonic
Target for mystics
And philosophers

Depends on balance.
There’s nothing golden
About a mean if
It doesn’t exist.

Feelings alternate,
Sure, conditions change.
Intense suffering
Is far from pleasure,

But that doesn’t mean
They’re scaled opposites,
That they correspond,
That there’s a midpoint.

The lure of balance
Is that it seems not
Greedy but modest,
Possible, cogent,

While hedonism
Is obviously
Unsustainable.
But what if it’s not?