How He Died

My friend reminded me, as we were having lunch
and I was forking a great big leaf of lettuce
into my awkward mouth on the first pleasant day
of spring after the longest winter on record,
that his brother had died.
“Oh, yes,” I said, “killed himself, wasn’t it?” Just then
 I imagined I saw Patty at another table,
Patty who left me with such longing.
But Patty would have been much older now
than the woman who pulled her hair behind her ear
in precisely the way that Patty always did. And my friend
was still talking. “How did he do it?” I said,
cutting the lettuce with my bread knife
into a more chewable size. Thinking back now
I believe there was some silence I did not notice.
The odor of hyacinths caught me
by surprise, pulling my eyes to the brick plaster planter
deep with soil by the walkway. My friend
decided he’d been secretly troubled for years.
 
Don’t you just hate berries in a salad?
 
                                                                     My friend’s
brother –something about a wife and a daughter
and an impulse too strong to resist but nonetheless
guiltily regretted, he stuttered.  And then
the woman turned around
to look for something in the red leather purse
she’d hung from the back of her chair.
I held up my hand to tell my friend
to pause. But I was right. It wasn’t Patty.
And I raised another spurt of lettuce toward my gaping mouth
and caught my friend’s eyes, staring back at me in pain
at how I’d left him hanging.

Autopoiesis

Poetry and biology, rules and chance, order and freedom, centrifugal and centripetal forces

The DNA passes on mechanically and varies unpredictably the genes (of all history)

The poet uses all language forms and varies programmatically, open to channel the visitations of chance.

The government’s laws. The need for courts. The invention of society and culture against the backdrop of tradition and principles.

This is the fundamental pervasive structure of being. This is the one God wanted.

The chance event in order, the bad poem, the genetic failure. Most poems are bad; most mutations are useless. People are ruined; they die stupidly.

Our lives rest on this principle; it is the principle of death as well as life.

He Said

What is contradiction if not the manifestation

of language's inability to encompass being?

He said

We are on the earth to love,

Whether we have been put here or not .

He said

That is our job.

That is our joy.

There is no contradiction.
The rest is gravy.

I said
What about self-actualization?
What about becoming?

He said
Until you are someone, you cannot love.
You can only need.