3 poems
Poet-Animal: An introduction to “Person”
Aristotle defines person as a “rational animal,” where animal is the genus, human-being the species, and rational the distinguishing hallmark that separates us from other animals. Aristotle does not mean by rational syllogistic – or exclusively philosophical – thinking. He means something more akin to what Aquinas described as the full return of consciousness to itself. In this return, ethical responsibility is born. Dante writes that those in hell have “lost the good of the intellect,” and yet they are full of all manner of thought. What do we loose when we find ourselves, at one or another time, in some kind of exclusive self-sealed hell? Aquinas would say that we have lost the full return of consciousness to itself, and so have lost a sense of moral responsibility both for ourselves and for others. In short, those in a self-sealed hell have lost what real communication offers us: reflective – and healing – depth.
But let me return to Aristotle's “rational animal.” Despite these qualifications I make on the meaning of rational, I can't help but think that we are the most irrational of creatures. Given the intractable acrimony of any private hell, or the wider hell of history that it mirrors, Aristotle's definition seems wrong, or at least deeply incomplete.
Turning from Aristotle, I choose to go rather with Joseph Braun's concept of “the poet-animal,” where poet is our distinguishing feature. The poet-animal is involved with what Nishida Kitaro called active-intuition: a feeling-intelligence that informs the full return of consciousness to itself. It is important to note that my use of poet here means all of us. Via Joseph Braun's name for us, I am trying to get at the spiritual core and depth of everyone, regardless of vocation. Being poet-animals, we are connected, creature-to-creature. The poet-animal creates through love's interchange.
I have published four books with Ahsahta Press, most recently ICON (2018). My work is frequently featured in New American Writing.
Person 1
for Joseph Braun
When not with living
voices speaking through me
I neither speak nor read. Interiority
is the eros
of language – deep beneath
the closed book-fact
If I see what you say is true
and if you see what I say is true
where, I ask, do we see it
To me Augustine's words
go toward the humble truth
that conversation presupposes
a living world
He breaks
the Cartesian seal
a thousand years before Descartes
These little fragile linking words are
what we are
If you see If I say. If
is a fissure that opens where hope is
the tinder –
I go off line
into the exigent bramble –
If Jasper Johns
laid his memory down
– blue-gray shade
canting as the landscape –
then I transpose upon him
his encaustic numbers
Translucent
strokes
ghost
the overlap
– it is not so much the numbers
but that they are painted
The gestures of his hand are letters
running through the one two three
We know the equations ...
but it is not the calculating cogito
first returns us to ourselves
Veracity the passion burning past. Memory:
an arc that hardly
knows itself. Person:
the prehension and
the final cause:
the vase that traces
the face twice
Enameled purple – the night
between profiles
My hands reach
from beneath
to try and hold. In the crux
in the crux there is
real fear I won't hold on
What is the is of this
brokenness?
Crimson vines like arms stretch out along the fence
then drape down and taper
to the paired roots – crossed ankles. A crucifixion:
blood marked with dark
October shadow
A crucifixion of language
where errors flare in eros
where exile is elixir. Christ
in every resurrection depiction
did not lose
his flamey wounds
Personhood
understood
in what burns through
Person 10
Having the tail-fin split
to make legs
was painful
beyond belief. She passed out,
came to
as human
but her tongue had been cut out
– intention severed from words
She mutely knew three kingdoms:
green bones of the kingdom below
where the sea-willow's
roots float up into chartreuse
pendant tendrils
The middle kingdom:
where lightning flashes on the flanks
of blue jagged ice – a tensed
Shellean question:
nature cutting grace
In the third kingdom
stars
were kin to her silence. Absence
of voice
kindling brightness
You no doubt know the story:
She came up to save her beloved from drowning
– the prince who could not know her
though he knew her beautiful limbs
and kissed her eyelids. Veracity:
shape before shape and
form before form (these words
do little good)
Water-lid
earth-lid
sky-lid
– the within of all
holy sensuality
Being mermaid she
needed to earn her soul
Of course nothing
could be more foolish
– Hans Christian must have known
we know this:
she was always and helplessly
human. Her pain not allayed
by imposed
metaphysical reward
– her dancing feet
would bleed and bleed
Soul is negative
capability – ache
of naked
intentionality
going out and out and out
to what love mutely
imagines
A lapse in language. Her hand
reaching through
She knows there is no other reward
She knew this when her face
first met the surface of the water
Person 16
for Raimon Panikkar
In the wet grass
early this morning
the dandelion head
with rayed seed
long blown
bears instead
one drop of water
dazzles where I stand
Such a thing
transfixed
sapphire
transfixes me
Given wholly
to wind and light it literally
pulses
No
one else
to witness
before the drop falls
“Although there is no
middle term
between A and not-A
there is
between Is and not-Is,”
grace being
in free fall
Pitch
and drop
between the heaven and the hell we inhabit
Mathematics won't solve it
Thought won't match it
– the neurons
tell us this much –
That which dies and
that which does not die
both live in the lucent Source
– so Dante
between Is and not Is
Taken into radiance
David Mutschlecner has published four books with Ahsahta Press, most recently ICON (2018). His work is frequently featured in New American Writing.