dd
Sean Farragher
Penumbral Filaments of the Sun
I love acting. It is so much more real than life. - Oscar Wilde
1. Apparently Real
What we observe when we read the sun
beside the blindness which would be the result
are penumbral filaments which by brightness
block the actual surface of the sun
and what exists as Galileo predicted: a gas
considering the limited power of his telescope
should be written up as the most important
change in the history of intellectual thought --
that is if you believe that thought can be
considered and compared like tomatoes.
The filaments are much more: patterns
of photographic dots appear like
streams of worms or mitochondrion
explored under microscope.
Look at the crack in an egg painted
with gold under an electron microscope:
cities, landscapes, and an alien world
seethe from the art of its fracture:
earthquakes, splits in tectonic plates
the "end of the world"
as we know it, apparently real,
almost pregnant with obviously
more than the mind can conspire.
These "facts" are five years old,
and what we don't know staggers us
neither drunk nor sober wandering
that yellow line or following the pencil
flashlight of a cop looking for madness
so he could prove what can be evaluated
in the blood, or you think so? Do you
know how every chemical reaction can
be affected by strangers, chemicals, a
minority race in the middle of gray.
You can stop laughing. No one can
measure truth or the gray by eye
or by electronic measurement.
There is no infinity only finite so
the mind reads stop now before
you walk the shoreline with birds
shouting at them to talk to you,
which would be perhaps more
pleasurable than lying about
science or history. It is all
experimental as poetry, but
those who figure with computers
believe it all has truth inside.
We are all actors, and we think
we are sublime when we fake
it and turn it up, and yes, I write
to make the music darker and
the paintings more luminous.
Few can logically know more than
what appears to be the matter of space,
mass, time, and your finger prints
on the camera lens distort perspective,
and that apparent, approximate copy
of what the eye registers in the mind.
2.
Nothing we do has end or beginning.
We start in the middle to reach first
and last word with increments
apparently sly moving to unveil mist
as steel, or the photosphere of the sun
and its electrically driven solar flares
of plasma neon over an iron carbonate
solid surface. What we breathe is sunlight.
The sun is hardcore and its metallic surface
under its clouds shows that actual plasma,
which is or is not a predictable hypothesis
of how we measure what is apparently real
when everyone agrees that the observation
of the actual changes it, turns into less
than a movie of fire and its terror, life.
round I, poem 30, 3 May 2006
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| Sean Farragher is founder and publisher of Great River Press, which publishes poetry and fiction e-books. Two e-books are forthcoming in summer 2006. Great River Press also publishes BLAST, a poetry and fiction e-zine. Sean's personal Web site seanfarragher.com
contains selections from his thirty-five years of writing poetry and
prose. He is also the father of the poet, Kathleen Farragher, who just
earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana.
email: greatriverpress@gmail.com |
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