The beginning of wisdom is to know
that we don’t know. How sweet it is.
To retire from the object and spend
one’s long, leisure-filled days
curiously puttering around
the subject. Your patron saint,
the Greek with the frog’s face, taught it:
honesty, the primary point
and supreme pleasure: to drift
in the ever-strange stream of the mind
hunched on a lily pad, watching.
What virtue is more attractive
than candor? Who isn’t charmed
by the most trivial detail
of a life told just as it happens,
no apologies, no pretense,
and a child-bright fascination
with the mystery of the self,
that that which (as it were) is—
eternal
limitless
empty
—locks itself
in a cell, in
two cells, four, a million,
to be molded by time and space
into another kind of
identity: supple, tentative,
compassionate, loud-voiced, a bald
half-Jewish Frenchman who at first
liked radishes; then didn’t; then wound up
liking them after all.