Maybe it doesn’t matter, but this chair—
black curlicues of iron, ice cream-parlor
perfect with its plastic seat and legs
right out of Paris in the Gilded Age—
reminds me of the one and only chair
that Plato dreamed of in his abstract heaven,
lofty and original and pure,
where every single noun is past declension,
where all men are Man, and Wolf is feral
to the nth degree, where Oak knows nothing
of November’s claim upon its leaves,
its dainty little hands aquiver in
a blue, long-winded Breeze at noon forever,
while the Brook runs by with saucy stories
of the life upriver lively on its tongue,
as if bright gossip were the only end
of light and water, pebbles and white sand.
So all these things set out before me—
peppercorns and napkins, spoons, white bowls—
exist as versions of their final selves
(refracted in the dark receding mirrors,
a mise-en-abîme of checkered tablecloths
and sundry guests with lavish sundaes),
and each new spoon or peppercorn or bowl
or whatnot idles in its mere potential,
wondering if any bold recension
will effect the change to end all change.
Yet I sometimes wonder if we have the right
to postulate an ultimate revision
of each blessed thing, ignoring how
each object seems quite settled in its way,
not obviously hoping to progress
to some new state. One might as well propose
that everything delights in what it is,
its thingy presence, or at least accepts
what has been given and ignores our pompous,
motherly demand for something more.
Duns Scotus was, of course, appalled
that finer objects in the world’s demesne
should have to be subjected to such pressure;
we ought to understand that sheer discreteness
is a good itself, the great sage thought,
conceiving of a neatly fretted world
where each leaf shimmers on each separate tree
without regard to anyone’s conception
of a Tree or Leaf, each discontinuously
blazing forth like these black chairs, these bowls
and peppercorns and napkins, plastic spoons.
I probably would like a world like that,
where pebbles in the local gargling brook
aspired to nothing but their gargling selves,
where every flower was its own condition,
brittle and as bright as day could manage
but no more or less, and where each creature
was a thing apart, an entity composed
yet still composing, with successive states
discretely happy without longing toward
some final version in some perfect sky.
That notion of creation satisfies
our need to love what’s here, to value time’s
sweet local nimbus as a holy thing,
but only for a while. We begin too soon
to long for something we can barely scry,
to read for essences in what’s been given
and resent the sense of time as present
and not past as well, the loss of future
as a light toward which all things grow.
The self that I admit each day in passing
(if I may divert this to myself)
is a paltry fellow, prone to narrowness
and self-regard, unwilling to add
charity most times to faith and hope,
and even faith has mostly to go begging
in a little heart that can’t expand
without exception and which rarely opens
to the world at large. The self I live with
is too mean to show, so lives disguised
in raiments of good fellowship and niceness,
decency and truth. He’s proudly crafty
in the way he works, a fond dissembler
who has done more harm than anyone
would guess who didn’t know, though I dismiss
him in my better moments and go off alone,
imagining that vision in my head
of his Big Brother up in Plato’s sky,
a sort of guardian or souped-up angel
who regards me fondly from afar
and faintly through the milky glass of heaven
offers me a glimmer of fresh hope,
a finer version of the self I show,
a last recension I may only know
by lofting thither some appointed day.
Right now, I’m happy to believe that once
released from guilt and pressures to conform
or change my mind, free of all petty notions
of position, pride, or valor, I’ll find myself
at peace beside all others in their final draft,
the absolute in hand that I have glimpsed
in offhand moments in unlikely places
(such as this dim parlor with its ice cream
chairs and tacky tables and recessive mirrors
that track a semblance of the man I am).
I’m happy to believe that every object
may well have a chance to change its name,
to clarify its essence and become
more like itself than nature will allow
in these rough drafts, these early versions
of that fabled state, the life to come.