Six of One

Of course, it may well be that the mind is of finite

Capacity as it is of finite space, so that

There comes a time when it will not hold any more

And whatever facts, figures, and nagging thoughts

We continue to cram into it, what with night-school

And the learning of something new every day,

Must be balanced, must be given room enough,

And that this is what the meticulous mechanism

Of memory and its forgetfulness is for.

In this event, all the subconscious area left over,

The millions of brain cells swarming and hiving,

Buzzing like bees under summer sun, occupies itself

With things that can’t quite be called thoughts,

Things like emotions, like interminable boredom,

Sitting vast in the mind but too vacuous to be

An idea, instead just a gesture, or a sort of sense,

And therefore is the piece of mind given to thought

A mere fraction of the whole, more like a baseball,

Probably, than a melon, i.e. we haven’t really

Come all that far since the days of the dinosaur,

Terrible lizard. It would stand to reason, then,

That the precious little bundle of nerves is crucial,

That increments of intelligence make worlds of difference,

But in truth our own discrepancies don’t matter much,

Since the professor may be absent-minded, the idiot

May be a savant, and since many of us are dumb-lucky

Or too smart for our own good. Thus, although no one

Seriously believes it of himself, all of us are born

Equal to one another more than we know and equal

To little else, neither the love of women, held

In the tremulous hands like something fragile, nor

The love of language, words turned on the tongue;

And thus the poem arises out of a chance accumulation,

Out of a mind that perhaps achieved optimum content

Months or even years ago, say one morning in winter

When the sky was so blue and steam rose off the ocean

Into the other element of air.