Stink-foot, or A Statue of Philoctetes

This poem(s) and diatribe is dedicated to the still smoke-free Michael Andrew Kicey, who shares my name but only in the middle. It comes, of late, from an as yet unfinished sequence entitled, for the moment, "sonnets then." It's number 9:

9. stink-foot

his stinking foot, his festering wound—-ed pride
gets him into troubling shipwreck armies;
mythology and martyrdom he’s writ-
ing on his face and on his pedestal
of Doubtless-Carved-by-Good-Praxiteles
sometime in the second century B.C.

this statued Philoctetes’ tragedy
has one performance, never-ending, played
upon the harpies’ chord—-the harpsichord?
no: played on iridescent surfaces
of people’s eyes, like oil on puddles fract
among the sev’ral sequences of sun,
while all the eyes and noses mumble that
stink-foot reeks of antiseptic cleansers.

This poem has a companion piece, re: Diogenes of Sinope, that, given its clunkiness and persistent imperfection, I won't impose on you. But the poem that follows, a (very) loose adaptation of the Heart Sutra, I will. I have of late, as a means of avoiding "real" hermeneutic traditions like, say, the Christian one after Augustine or the philosophical one after dudes like Schleiermacher and Dilthey, become interested in various "esoteric" hermeneutic traditions: Mahayana, Waite's symbological method of tarot divination, Bacon's inductive "interpretationes," etc. What these less and more mystic traditions have in common is a certain faith in chance, that in the process of living with objects of interpretation in a disciplined but somewhat haphazard way, eventually something will "click" in the mind and lead one toward some general principle that unites disparate elements. The poem, "perficting," isn't really about that.

10. perficting

no wisdom, no attainment of—-because
no wisdom no attainment of, Guanyin
preferred perfiction’s total Wisdomness,
obstruction not of incidental Mind:

obstruction not, no fear of Mind—-because
obstruction not no fear of Mind, Guanyin
should pass imagination mystified
for misty Heart and heartier deceit:

this trap me in imagination conned
of self in solipsism, to arrogate
my ignorance as absolution of
my sinning error signs its namelessness

on pride, on beauty, on beatitude
so shallow it will long to kill itself.

There's something self-destructive about the allusive and the esoteric; it seems ill-defended against the ignorance (read "tendency to ignore") of others and their often persistent capability to see past what it is you want them to see. Perhaps that is the virtue of the esoteric and allusive: they don't have to be there if you don't want them to be.

Nicholaus Doctissimus

this day I would’ve preferred:
raindrops hazing a thin
mist on the surfaced grounds
beside the grass and cars,
so perfect to obscure
my clarity of vision.

preferred to this day: sun
and shine and studded lawns
of undergraduates
squinting in the daylight
unable to make out
when I become a doctor.

Homer, burlesqued

From the preface of the 1770 edition of Thomas Bridges' A Burlesque Translation of Homer, which came into existence, because "our author is of the opinion that the dignity of the Greek language has perverted the original design of Homer's Iliad." Having been privy of late to what passes for "scholarship" on Plato's Phaedrus, I couldn't agree more: the "dignity" of the Greek language generally seems to get in the way of people's reading it.

GOOD people, would you know the reason,
I write at this unlucky season,
When the whole nation is so poor,
That few can keep above one whore,
Except court-pimps and their employers,
With secretary's clerks and lawyers,
Whose d---d unconscionable fees
Maintain as many as they please;
Pope, we all know, to please the nation,
Publish'd an elegant translation,
But for all that, his lines mayn't please
The jocund tribe, so well as these;
For all capacities can't climb
To comprehend the true sublime;
And he that's reading now may be
Almost as dull a dog as me.