For Jay Hopler
The philosophers I love believed in things
they didn’t want to convert to; the isolation
of the thought, of the shattering idea,
lonelied them into a truth that would tremble too much
were it carried from desk to window,
its outermost manifestations too loosened,
too far specified to seem much other than frailty now.
And what I think they feared,
or what I fear when tempted to tell you
of something I saw, how it moved in me this way or that,
what relief, what chiding need
for a little sturdy peace this sight allowed, or that touch,
and of what, or with whom, is that such confiding
could draw down the paradox
that although it has no mass, light does strike.
What we don’t say
is bright as metal bells. And were
my friend still alive, I’d want to make
a meal for him, something not all that skilled, but not all
that terrible, lit with forefire and the lateness of the hour.
The giant peony erupting its skull from the center
of the table would gather in us an enormity
of conviction so thorough, we’d want to carry it elsewhere,
the risk of its complete disheveling, its dropping open,
requiring us to resist the second thought that wants so badly
to follow the first, that conviction
itself pulls behind it a mender’s cart—, mustn’t it?
Better just to look at what the ludicrous
spring had done, not saying much of it,
speaking instead of anything else, certainly least of all
trying to outlive it
by saying there will be more—not now, but come next spring.
This poem appears in the May 2025 print edition.
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