River God

Those long ago laborers hauling fish
From the Nile, the Euphrates, the Huang Se,
Cursing and trembling by turns when the river
Over which the sun set
Offered no fish for their nets,
They thought the river was a god
Because It rose and fell, grew angry or lay peaceful,
Because of the blessings it bestowed and its curses,
Because it pursued revenge and gave love by turns,
Because it mirrored the universe.

And does it matter whether the river is a god
Or a metaphor fished from the far bank
By those who had no notion of metaphor?

I Should Probably Get Back to the Poems of David Kirby

The poems are really great
If you concentrate
And take in every word
And the meaning of every word
And the sound of every word
And the rhythm of every word
And if you connect every word to every other word
And all the lines to the other lines and listen
To the play of the lines against the sentences and the play
Of the lines and the sentences against the stanzas
Which are like fences with surprising holes in them
Through which you can watch the Babe hit one of his 714 or one of his 60
For absolutely nothing and be one of the silent spectators of a genuine moment of history
And if you pause at the pauses and run with the alliterations and skid with the
Enjambments around the sudden turns without losing your braces. Otherwise—
If you let your mind wander if you just meander through the thing
Like it’s a joke or a corn maze (a maize maze, amazing, amazing maize maze, amusing,
An amusing amazing maize maze—where was I?) that you’ll eventually wander out of
Whether you put any effort or interest in it or not, like a homework assignment
In a class you didn’t really want to take in the first place—well then,
Whose problem is that?

What is Left to Say

By Lisel Mueller
(1924 - )

The self steps out of the circle;
it stops wanting to be
the farmer, the wife, and the child.

It stops trying to please
by learning everyone's dialect;
it finds it can live, after all,
in a world of strangers.

It sends itself fewer flowers;
it stops preserving its tears in amber.

How splendidly arrogant it was
when it believed the gold-filled tomb
of language awaited its raids!
Now it frequents the junkyards
knowing all words are secondhand.

It has not chosen its poverty,
this new frugality.
It did not want to fall out of love
with itself. Young,
it celebrated itself
and richly sang itself,
seeing only itself
in the mirror of the world.

It cannot return. It assumes
its place in the universe of stars
that do not see it. Even the dead
no longer need it to be at peace.
Its function is to applaud.

On Winning or Losing in Battle

We like to say that battles are lost or won. Even our best respected historians provide the final score whenever they can. Some battles are ties; some have ambiguous outcomes. Most are won or lost. We have ways of determining such things. We like neat dichotomies, binary oppositions. It’s in the language, but it’s in the language because it’s in the being, our being. Win and lose are easy to understand.

The borderlines we put on battles are not arbitrary. But they’re not real either. They are conceptual. They could be put in other places, both the starting point then the first shot is fired and the end point when the last effective shot is fired are placed there for convenience, so we will be able to give a name to when the thing started and ended. The name is everything. It’s the folder that allows us to catalog the battle, that allows us to have had a battle at all. There is no knowledge without the name on the folder. But we all know too that the battle started long before the fighting and continued long after and may never have ended. We all know that the most decisive victories are provisional and momentary. Many conquered people have eventually won the war—or anyway have had moment in which the victory had shifted their way, had conquered the conqueror from beneath.

The Unconscious Is More than That

Freud was interested in the ego/id/superego trinity of the unconscious to the exclusion of anything else that might have been happening in the mind that the mind was unaware of. With great verbal dexterity he made sure that all facts could be hung on this increasingly articulated model. Girard does the same thing with his model of mimesis. Both systems are brilliant, and certainly contain some important correspondence to reality. But they are also cautionary tales about trying too hard to make a single insight conquer the whole territory.

Being animals human beings are always attempting to organize themselves into the “proper” social structure for human beings. Mapped in the genes (as it were) of all animals is the way that those animals are supposed to be organized. This is why middle school students are so notoriously hard to teach. Their bodies are telling them to form themselves into a nation. The kings are trying to emerge. Everyone is trying to align themselves with power, not the foreign invasive power of the teacher-class, but the real structure of the student-class. Rivalries emerge. School is contrary to nature.