John Koethe

The poem of the mind starts with a question,



But which one?  It fears the “loss of problems”



Wittgenstein feared, it finds its pleasure in the



Trance that suddenly comes over one, the dawning



Of a new romance, the promise offered one last time.



Come here, it seems to say (a plea addressed to no one),



Come with me down this course.  No one answers



Of course, because the way is solitary and the end



Uncertain, but it doesn’t matter in the end.  Like someone



Walking in his sleep who dreams of walking in his sleep,



It gradually becomes the thing that it envisions, simultaneously   



Inhabiting and moving towards an unknown destination.



You think you’ve read it all before, and of course you have,



For the poem of the mind is inexhaustible.  It never ends,



As the mind never ends, yet sometimes disappears from view



Before emerging in a new form, one resembling the old form



As one day resembles another, or the mild afternoon light 



Resembles that of its first morning, the site of its first illusion.



It treasures its illusions, for they’re what it is and where it lives:



Wandering through the gallery of lost illusions, it pauses



Before one or two, before the catastrophe of reality intrudes—



Bone smashed on asphalt, gunshot blowing out the head—



And then continues on.  It isn’t a question of belief or disbelief,



But of a freedom from belief, an acquiescence in appearance.



To be satisfied with appearance is to be perpetually unsatisfied



A small voice says, and yet its reservation goes unheeded.



Who could actually live that way?  How else? goes the reply.



I’m just like you, if you don’t ask me what that means.



The poem of the mind portrays an almost vacant mind



Whose thoughts remain unfinished, like the unfinished paintings



Hanging on the studio wall above the blood-splattered floor.



When does it turn, the way a sonnet turns?  When do questions



Take on a grammar of their own, answering themselves



Day after day, until the inwardness becomes as unbearable



As an encroaching blindness?  This is what eternal life must be:



To live completely in the present, locked in a self-absorption



So intense its end is unimaginable, where nothing can be real



Outside its own arena of awareness, like the shot it can’t hear,



The crash it can’t feel.  Feelings are supposed to be its heart,



But they’re imaginary feelings, based on an imaginary life.



It posits an indifferent life behind the real one, an indifferent



World that wanes and waxes as a whole, yet never really



Changes: happy for a day, and then unhappy on the next,



But what’s the difference?  Parts are real too, and even



Fragments have to come to something in the end.  At length



It starts to settle and subside: the morning light is gradual



In the window, as the contours of a vague presence



That wasn’t there before emerge.  Here you are,



It says to itself.  I’m glad you’ve finally come home.



The impulse that engendered its convulsive exercise



Pulls back and takes a breath, recasting its answer



In the form of a new question, as the poem of the mind



Returns at last to its beginning, and is satisfied.