The New Intelligence

After knowledge extinguished the last of the beautiful

fires our worship had failed to prolong, we walked

back home through pedestrian daylight, to a residence

humbler than the one left behind. A door without mystery,

a room without theme. For the hour that we spend

complacent at the window overlooking the garden,

we observe an arrangement in rust and gray-green,

a vagueness at the center whose slow, persistent

movements some sentence might explain if we had time

or strength for sentences. To admit that what falls

falls solitarily, lost in the permanent dusk of the particular.

That the mind that fear and disenchantment fatten

comes to boss the world around it, morbid as the damp-

fingered guest who rearranges the cheeses the minute the host

turns to fix her a cocktail. A disease of the will, the way

false birch branches arch and interlace from which

hands dangle last leaf-parchments and a very large array

of primitive bird-shapes. Their pasted feathers shake

in the aftermath of the nothing we will ever be content

to leave the way we found it. I love that about you.

I love that when I call you on the long drab days practicality

keeps one of us away from the other that I am calling

a person so beautiful to me that she has seen my awkwardness

on the actual sidewalk but she still answers anyway.

I say that when I fell you fell beside me and the concrete

refused to apologize. That a sparrow sat for a spell

on the windowsill today to communicate the new intelligence.

That the goal of objectivity depends upon one’s faith

in the accuracy of one’s perceptions, which is to say

a confidence in the purity of the perceiving instrument.

I won’t be dying after all, not now, but will go on living dizzily

hereafter in reality, half-deaf to reality, in the room

perfumed by the fire that our inextinguishable will begins.

Source: The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books, 2010)