Belonging: Poems

Aubade

Aubade For Joshua Mehigan These are the dawn thoughts of an atheist Vaguely embarrassed by what looks like grace: Though colors don’t objectively exist, And have no form, and occupy no space, So that the carpet’s sumptuous dyes must make Bold arabesques untrue as Santa Claus, And all Matisse’s pigments are a fake Fobbed off on us by intellectual laws, Though Esfahan and Fauve cannot survive The deconstructed physics of our seeing, Still we consent, and actively connive In their unreal adjustments to our being. So the thin rhetoric we use to cope With being so peculiarly here, Which cannot but be based on baseless hope And self-constructed images of fear, Serves to interpret what we are, although We hesitate to say that what it says Refers to anything that we could know Beyond the mind’s perpetual paraphrase.  You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. And sensing that no quiddity remains Outside the island sorceries of sense (Queen Circe’s simulacra in our brains That make and unmake all experience) Still, still we long for Light’s communion To pierce and flood our solitary gloom: Still I am grateful as the rising sun Picks out the solid colors of my room.  You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. ...