Work-in-progress
People don’t like you
if you’re fucked up: blind, lame,
troubled: they look a-
way. Old girl friends, gone.
Solitude’s companionship,
the other you—true.
The birds, the neighbor’s
cat, watching the birds, looks at
you as you walk by.
To the cove, then. Move
from your own to the ducks’ deep
mind reflected there.
The poem moves the reader from the disregard endured by someone not matching the profile of normalcy expected and enforced by those holding and exercising univocal power to the recognition shared by a fellow inhabitant of the poet’s places and times regardless of status to a generous release of the poet’s self-consciousness as he releases his own sense of status in exchange for recognising his creatureliness alongside other creatures no matter what other humans have decided about their names or places in the world.
The poet’s commend to himself signals a self-transcending. This impels the poet through his own questing to a giving over of himself to oneness with fellow beings. This is symbolized in part by the image of consciousness (the ducks’ deep mind) yet this giving of self goes beyond — or below– mind since it embraces both ‘mind’ and its ‘reflection’ in a place at once contingent and finite (there) and hyperbolic (its location ‘there’ is not exactly spatial—where is there?–nor limited to a particular instant, yet it is not nothing either; it leads poet adn reader into the source of being itself.