26. Son et lumière

Emotion : now = reason : then.

Pitonless, Hölderlin crept
toward the chasm, wing
less too, and smelt
ambrosia sure
ly but he thought
it sulfur and neat
ly tore his mind
in two or three.
At least he marked
a trail. What name
less Olduvai
assemblers fell
to madness, mute
and blind beside
the rocky path
to Sumer?
The alchemy
of bread and wine
escaped him. What
fluorescent dreams
could fill a starved
and cramping mind
insistently
achomping away
on untransmog
rified Chian
ti and quite dough
y pumpernick
el! He and they
must surely have
enjoyed a laugh
or two compar
ing notes while we
continued clam
bering up on their
crisply crumbling bones.

The patent office's still open.
Look! There comes James Watt--
or is it Brunelleschi--any way
it's he of the flapping fly
wheel, arunning. Let's peek
at the smudgy papers clutched
in his nail-bitten hand,
it of the whacking off recip
rocal movement. First the edge
where hastily written, we read:
here there be scientists
unaware of their fearsome Jaws
jaws. And triply underlined:
Ignore them at all costs. Look
where fraternizing got Einstein.
Toward the center a sketchy
drawing, lines shaky from sheer
centuries of doubt and omphalo
skeptic fear, but strangely
clearly labeled and even
as one tries to focus on
and figure out the thing itself
the millennially thirsty mind
laps up the curious labels:
light and sound, all caps,
then here and there with arrows
going every which-away:
emotion the engine, sound
the fuel, visualization the
carburetor, the heavenly hosts
themselves the stokers, the oilers,
the caboose riders, the brakemen,
and pure desire, pure desire,
the rails that meet but only
for the engineer at infinity.

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