A Return From the Illusionary Supersensible Realm

A RETURN FROM THE ILLUSORY SUPERSENSIBLE REALM
(SIMPLICITY) TO THE EXISTENT SENSIBLE REALM (COMPLEXITY)


The photo, black-white: Nietzsche, his friend,
pretend-
Ing
To be oxen, goats, donkeys, stallions, or
Some
Beast of burden and blunders, the pre-
Tension indeterminate, open, no closure,
As indeterminate
As an Enlightenment end-stopped, closed,
Clear and distinct couplet account
Of general nature,
But Nietzsche and his friend’s pretense
Seemed a prelude to an assertion
That Socrates was a great erotic
As the two posed to be the transportations
For Lou Andreas Salome
Who gripped a snake-tongue-shaped whip.

But before from impatience the beginning
With this ink that will bring solace to solitude,
The impulse to simplicity and the plain style
Must be subdued, for simplicity and the plain
Style reduce reality, the essents, to a fiction
And a fantasy, so the human race can continue
To speak a language of lies by asserting
Signifiers without a signified. All simplicity
Is a reduction of the actual and a deception.

So I start with her eyes, eyes, black-white,
In photograph,
And write
About the halos of hazel eyes, with specks
Under the pupil
Of raw sienna mixed one part
With two parts, white, and eyes that change colors
As the eyes hear
A nightingale singing unseen
Behind a cluster of cerise roses.

-

Duane Locke

Posted over on The Sound of Poetry Review