Parmenides: On Budding Being

deviant art by vezeta


PARMENIDES: ON BUDDING BEING


Overtaken from the Greekish
though he was not Greek
not that at all, all
words are in a different language
from what the man speaks
the woman speaks,
there is no native language,
Parmenides says his language was horses
a white horse and a black
horse on the ecliptic,
subject and verb his horses were
you need them
stallion and mare
to make a proposition
dyadic not dualist
he says they carried me
as far as my heart had it
in me to desire
because the heart needs
what is not here
to turn it into
what is here and goes and returns
for my heart was
not a palace but a path
for what does any heart desire
but to be gone?
What can a heart know of standing still?
It is the one that never stops,
one of the horses,
and placeless the desire
already we are
are on the way

(To be is to be gone)
Now let us suppose the teacher said
that every word means only now –
like a telephoto lens compressing depth
language squeezes time
language itself
knows nothing of the intervening years –
be speaking now innocent of history
because two horses cannot carry one man
there must have been a vehicle
contrivance in which on which, as if a maiden
arrayed for the wedding or a warrior
carried dying home, they carried him
to the appointment,
enthymeme in the argument,
for all our SUVs we do not know
the car in which he rode,
although we’re always seeing
Krishna the charioteer
or Athena the charioteer
riding before us saying What you see as me
is what you are
we forget the chariot in which we ride,
o woe is me if I forget the Chariot
(for the name of the chariot is my name)
left out, it rusts in the rain,
we call that time, or villainy.
The history.
I have heard men talk about this text of his
so I am ignorant of most of what it means
because what it means
is mostly what it meant
to those who came on it
before me
(but he said the horses were both mares,
he said that equal love would carry us,
Lilith and Eve brought Adam to the castle
where the silence around them they named God
and when it did not answer supposed ‘his’ wrath)

for the text cannot read its readers
cannot self-inscribe their reading
resorbing the gestures of their understanding
and so it comes, virgin at last, to the lap.
Blameless you read, but not much boon
since you can know only what it says
on this day in September
when the secret spring begins
the secret hands that milk the winter.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2005