poem (“What is Metaphysics”) in honor of April

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What is Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the door to a courtroom
that you walk through to find Aquinas

beside a massage table. And he proceeds
to wash your feet although they are clean.

It is a fly’s wing. The silver branching
on the wing’s vellum. As discussed before

it is the eye prior to its loss of sight. But
also all the staring white and sightless eyes.

In a children’s illustrated Pilgrim’s Progress
Christian walks through the darkened valley

and the skulls and femurs kick up in piles
on either side his path. In this picture meta-

physics is nothing. It has shaken hands with
allegory and left. The City of Destruction

shimmers in the heat like a mirage and fades
while metaphysics, solid as a chalkboard,

scratches away at the simplest number, 1.

Capital Commentary Politics & Poetry Article

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The wonderful Aaron Belz (read Aaron’s poems HERE) asked me to write a piece on politics and poetry—and unfortunately/fortunately/inevitably I was in the middle of Milton and Plato readings for my final semester at Georgetown, and he got Another Kind of Rhetoric as a result.

So feel free to pop over to the Capital Commentary and have a read. And keep reading. Lots of great thoughts there.

 

-hv

“In Reference to Stars” at the Saint Katherine Review

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It’s true! And the Saint Katherine Review volume 2, issue 1 could not have been more beautiful. L’enfant models it below:

Also, for all you cyber-readers, the poem!

In Reference to Stars

On May 16 Night Sky #2 by Vija Celmins, on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art, was vandalized by one of the museum’s own security guards, who used a key to cut a gouge down the painting’s middle, damaging it beyond repair.

I. Psychological Report: Timur Serebrykov

There are rumors that as a child he ran with keys.

Serebrykov denies these accusations.

Also his dislike for Star Wars’ screens;

His fear of celestial bodies arrowing light;

Dreams where every star throws down its spear.

II. Defense

In his face in passing was the space of stars:

One thousand one hundred sixty-two point five

inches of light, riot, peace and eternity.

Before these who can stand, anyone stand?

Like guarding a perimeter of uranium;

the substance leaking its properties

in spatial disregard, touching his body

in ways that might tear the mind in two. Perhaps.

III. Court Order

Put him where he will not see the stars,

where he will learn to love their deity

in absence. Tell him he is a circle, let

his only books be Emerson, Thoreau.

No Blake—he is not stable enough to read

that poet whose head is lit inside like stars.

Enroll him in a painting class, ask him

to give us back the bleakness of the holy.