what I imagine is inventory in my world
Goals
To critically assess …
- Whether a product is in the medium or in the imagination
- What it means to be actual, but not possible
- How the world is what we share plus our private experiences
- To what extent we exist in the memory of others
- How metaphors can be part of our mental inventory
- Whether a tool is the sum its actual and possible uses
No Statue Sleeps
No statue sleeps in block of stone,
imagined in the mind alone.
Nor do sonnets abound already
among the pages of dictionary.
Poets create, they don’t discover,
which words to use and in what order.
Like eyes at night that deftly spot
familiar shapes, connect their dots.
Patterns are made by those who try;
else there’d be no zodiac sky.
Stone or page or constellation,
what they become takes imagination.
That imagined, while it persists,
is inventory among what exists.
What comes to mind is actual;
a real idea of what’s possible.
Possible worlds are imaginary,
creations of the visionary.
But our world is not possible
as much as it is actual.
The worlds within every novel
immerse us in the probable.
Ideas real and yet confined
not to stone, but to the mind.
What do you Think?
- “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Does it — or is stone just stone and David first existed in Michelangelo’s imagination?
- How can our world be actual, but not possible?
Notes from Paradise
Every evening I stretch hands across cedar boxes and imagine that, for a moment, their world un-pauses.
Free from beds of ash to run and roll, to bark and lick and lay beside.
I imagine their moments must feel eternal, not knowing the span since their last rising.
Maybe they wonder why some dogs lay still as statues. Lost caregivers not giving care to the lost.
Not knowing that touch crosses worlds, that they live in the hearts of their masters.
I talk to them, but they never answer. Busy at the moment, their immediate, with each other.
I wonder whether I am touched by a hand that visits my box each night.
A hand, for the now, animating my world ( and apparently yours ) with notes from Paradise.
What do you Think?
- Double surprise at the end. Maybe I am in a box and awakened by somebody touching it. Maybe you are in a box and awakened in my telling you this verse. So, why are these notes from Paradise?
- What becomes of us when there is nobody to remember?
Table Wobble
There’s a wobble in the table,
and I can’t get it fixed.
I put an ah-ha under there,
thinking that would do the trick.
But the wobble’s only worse,
though I see the reason why.
It’s imbalance in my verse,
so I added my-oh-my.
Two level legs diagonal,
it thumps where not intended.
Let me tuck your goodness-me
under either still suspended.
With a final that’ll-do,
the table’s horizontal.
It’s my rhythm that was off
and the carnage consonantal.