Status Updates From The Seven Ages

Page 40

What are we without this?
Whirling in the dark universe,
alone, afraid, unable to influence fate —

What do we have really?
Sad tricks with ladders and shoes,
tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring
attempts to build character.
What do we have to appease the great forces?

…he was a fool, thinking
it could be controlled. He should have said
I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

At the top of the tree was what I wanted.
Fortunately I had read books:
I knew I was being tested.

perception of beauty, desire for knowledge.
And in the great minds, the two often configured as one.

This is the problem of silence:
one cannot test one’s ideas.
Because they are not ideas, they are the truth.

I’m my first dream the world appeared
the salt, the bitter, the forbidden, the sweet
In my second I descended

I was human, I couldn’t just see a thing
beast that I am

I had to touch, to contain it

I hid in the groves,

…

I even loved a few times in my disgusting human way

and like everyone I called that accomplishment
erotic freedom,
absurd as it seems

somewhere between rilke and heaney