From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow.
—Yehuda Amichai, tr. by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell
Call in a Socrates from the streets
to probe and test and resist
so we might learn what’s keepable
by knowing what can’t be kept.
Call him in, the smart bastard.
I’m sure there must be minds
open enough to be lit anew,
yet I’m thinking there must be others
who might worry almost intelligently
that things can grow
out of certain certainties. Call in
a sophist then, someone like myself,
who’d maintain for as long
as he could that he was right too.
Some truths are better than others,
which means, of course, some are worse.
Seems time to call in from the vast nowhere
some great adjudicator, some poet
who will arrive to hear both sides.
I have no agenda, he lies,
and proceeds to ask,
How many dead flowers
is anyone’s certainty worth to him?
I’ve already closed my mind,
and, before he goes on, I say I’d sacrifice
not one flower but an entire garden
for what I think I know— a statement
outrageous, gut-driven, pure sophistry,
without proof, beyond proving.