statue at the louvre : s. mcdermott

t h e   l a w
o f   f a l l i n g   b o d i e s

b y   t h e o d o r e    b e s t


"it is in obscurity and confusion
that thought progresses"
- Alexandre Koyré

: i

Shod smithy begets harrowed womb,
Dissent of the brown axle
Whose remit reveres the godly board,
The cortex of that fallow boon
A furrowed far conceit beneath
The need of past and future thought.

Euclid’s plough persists against all
False notes of that inapt grey,
Being lost to the strung strain
Of clocks upon their pedestals;
It’s eternity that centres selves
With tongues of an abacist constrain.

Antiquity has said of time that
It is incapable of substance.
Is the world such, bound to many mirrors, that
I must bear the standard? What reluctance is here.
If hung by the formulae, new born to dotard,
Ascending, descending with an impoverished bent
For the crest, or by the fall, oh felix culpa!
I too would be surrendered to dreams!
This postulate would not be threatened
By the reveries of a beyond.
Kronos’ axiom spins above
With arms of unintelligible children;
Born, eaten, negligible as time.

The doctrine of natures cast aside,
My heart contains the sun
As fusion of thought for all thought
In love with Stockholm’s captor, perhaps.
Close to the massive light the verbal
Forms shape well the night in which we loom
So finely in the sack. Upanishad
Murmur of the world, and true,
Placenta torn as metaphor and foot upon the soil,
The binding loops of an every-world embrace
Though not yet made upon my birth for
I am revolution, and so well lost
That the pointed spray of my experience
Creates all that there is to be known.