Work-in-progress
“The metaphysical frailty and yet the robust there-ness of our being at all are at stake in acknowledging the porosity.“ Desmond, Intimate Universal, 213.
I rock on a rock
at the cove this evening.
High tide gulps the salt
grass, wave on wave on
wave. October mist. No moon
cuts the night’s cacoon.
I rock on granite.
The stone is old, I know it—
the sharp eschaton,
the last thing, the edge.
Eros or death? The cricket
sings in darkling trees.
The poem opens wtih the poet on the edge of human and natural worlds (insofar as they can–or should–be distinguished). It is evening, the traditional time of epiphanies. The relentless lapping waves attest this edge of reality, gulping, perhaps as if trying to fill their lungs because of exertion or as if drowning. THe reader then sees there is no moon in the sky. But the emptiness is full. THe night is growing like a butterfly in a cacoon. THe view then resets and we see the poet again on the rock, now described as granite, igneus hardness that calls to mind the end of time. Suddenly, hte poet responds to something–we do0 not yet know what–by musing that it may be eros or death–those two passageways of existence–and we are told it is a cricket that calls forth this response. The cricket is ‘singing’ yet this does not striek the reader as anthropomorphization because the image is so strange. THe cricket sings in the dark trees, perhaps calling to mind Socrates outside the city listening to the crickets, the reception of divine wisdom through mindful, delibarete, attentiveness to nature, that delicate balance of human and natural in which the human is most human aand most humane.