The Ghent Review Volume1, Number 1, summer 2016 | Page 46

If so who be my parent?
Fact: no child is fatherless.
Of what terrible union am I the child, the wilful off-spring?
Fact: out of the two issues the one.
Father – who shall I call father?
Fact: or only in the mothering sea find solace?
-We are back at poetry – as I expected.
We are entering terrible lands.
-Poetry as an ideal, not as a practice?
-Now you are too Greek again.
First the separation, then the joining, then the issue.
-And your example is…?
-None that would bear too much scrutiny.
-Your statements are cancelling each other.
-When negations cross what can the result be other than what I have
stated?
-You might make a poem of that.
-He might but I suspect that the practice would not equal the ideal.
-And the result would be…
-That nihilism known as pure thought.
-O save us from such sainthood! We have that damnation in abundance!

In abundance he said. Like an old father unto a congregation. Absurd
priests – why do I walk among them? why should I lend my credence to their
suppositions? Superstitions of the tribe yet they have not wandered – no fire
or cloud before them.
Yet at gilded animals do they…And I to be the one to break the stones?