Have been reading (or struggling to read) Plato's Timaeus, which is really a companion volume to Hamlet's Mill, mentioned here recently. Written in 300 something B.C., it holds, delicately, a borderland between myth & science, poetry & reason... wonderful to hear the ironic paragraph of this person, living almost 2500 years ago, when he differentiates between his own cosmology (built on astronomy & a fairly reasonable defense of the "argument-from-design" : ie. there are living things & dead things; things either move themselves or are moved passively by some other force; living things, as opposed to dead matter, are self-motivated (they move around by their own will); the freedom of self-movement is "life" or "soul"; since the most complex things in the universe have life or soul, then the self-movement of the universe must be propelled by Soul! I love it) & the traditional "gods" of myth - those same gods & myth-stories which Santillana & Dechend (Hamlet's M.) pretty convincingly (to me, anyway) explain, are also symbolic formulations for star-observations & time-measurements - only from an earlier era!

Anyway, all this seems pretty distant from some of the daylight proper concerns of poetry, which have to do with social justice and human values & how these must be defended NOW...

Struggling in my own way to move along, sometimes going forward in writing you have to go backward, to things you've left behind & forgotten. I tend to write a lot, & then find old ms. lying around... this sequence from a couple years ago sort of startled me with its own star-obsessions... so I'm going to post some of it, though some of you may have seen it before on a list-serve, sorry. It's a sequence called Shakespeare's Head, which is a building in Providence, & as you can tell, it's also a sequel to an early sequence (called India Point, another Providence locale).

from Shakespeare's Head

 
1

 
Snow muffles Providence in soft light.
Orpheus-Hobo shuffles through the streets
beneath immaculate rooftops, slanted
toward the drifting sky.  He is late

 
for the wedding.  In his pocket, a gold band
lifted from the sidewalk (in Fox Point,
on Washington's birthday).  In his heart
an image of a toy city - Atlantis, Golden Land.

 
He'll hold it toward you, shivering -
America in miniature, a tiny Ironsides
reflected in a bourbon bottle - shades
passing through fixed stare (his offering).

 
So needy excess issues (crystalline)
just as fireworks spring a constellation.

 
                 *

 
There is no better world for contemplation.
No butter-word for such a battered nation.

 
Only extravagant hobo longing
reaches past fright-monuments
and furniture of Nineveh (arrogant
roar, ablaze with dominion, fading);

 
only the eyes of Jonah will behold
a green star hanging over gardens
buried in slanting dunes, oblivion
(...distant, pining, as of old).

 
The bottle toy will sleep in his hand
until a starry shade stoops down again
to shape a nest for Everyman - and
bring a skyborne Jubilee to land.

 
               12.6.02

Happy Flag Day