Where earth and sea hone
one another along their edge,
they go to remember or learn
anew if they had forgotten all
how receptive and easy to meet
for water subtle and white sand
can be—by making themselves
and their sunlit bodies parallel
to how bright and acute minds are
toward otherwise unreachable or
elusive, nay unfathomable truths,
finding old bits of lost happiness
thus in their unwearied listening
to love murmur passed by breeze.
There is no such thing as a blank slate
as there is no such thing as a blank
canvas and as there is no such thing
as a truly blank eye unless it is dead.
For, in front of all that patent void
supposed emptiness, and utter
nothingness, and even there
right inside, a spirit stays alive,
and ever some mind is at work
which, like Penelope of old,
either weaves or tears off
its veiling shrouds—setting up
the necessity of those moments
that turn fates and time around.
Recounting Socrates’ myth of Er,
Plato says that souls of the damned
are deafened most where the exit
from Hell is closest and at hand,
and so deaf to music’s finest points
they stay affixed to torture and death
in true harmonies’ abysmal disconnect
while love which can’t be love at all
unless it’s love of the beautiful and good,
kalokagathos, that makes better, even whole,
those who turn themselves into its temple
and home—rising out of the blue within.
But doesn’t such one love’s stir, shiver,
and soar come and roll like drunken
tenderness, being there always, and yet
never reached, till it churns us into elixir
of which only something of the immortal
already, that something that was before,
and if before, then somehow always too,
can ever partake, share, taste, and know?
