The walk through Doc Hunsberger's property,Paul de Man. "Heidegger Reconsidered (1964)." Critical Writings: 1953-1978. Ed. and introduced by Lindsay Waters. Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 104.
where I walked so many times in years gone by,
when we lived at 27 Glen Farms Drive.Honeysuckle aroma.
Wild cherries ripe.
White and black mulberries ripe.
Frogs fecund and leaping in the pond.
Mosquitoes aggressive.
Bird song strident.
Weeds in the field of corn.
Farmers at a distance harvesting hay.Why do they sting me so?
What vividness is this that gallops
out of my memory into the light of today?
And why and what is it that I need to ask?There is no room for doubt
of mulberries ripe
and red cherries plucked.
They are inoculated against the waves
of reinscripting that break my brow.
Why would I think they would ever
be anything but fresh,
even when skewered as images on paper?--Because, fishy eyes retort,
they are not crushed on the fingertips
or redolent of anything but ink
in this scripted evocation of them.Does will have anything to do with this?
What if I want these syllables to slip
with juice and paint my mouth with dew?
I seem to have joined the angels, numberless,
reported at last sighting to be dancing
in very small places in irrelevant swoops."Cherry" if I want it to
will stop the clock and appetite
and let me sink in reveries more real
than the handle of an axe.To write the dilemma down
perpetuates the Greeks
and all those gone for thousands of years.
And in that texting lies my linkage,
the patrimony/matrimony in my veins,
the veins of my body
and the veins of my brain,
magical gift/curse wrought however bravely
and however long ago amidst the behemoths.They sacrified animals
in order to be free of them.
They knew that something scissored themselves
out of the wilderness;
they had an inkling it was that
which has the light to see
itself in tears and smiles.Paul de Man said: "To put this very crudely,
it means that we are human to the extent
that we are able to understand our own
subjectivity by transforming it
into language and, ultimately, by seeing
it exactly as it is, in the pure language
of true philosophy."Heidegger, de Man said, "speaks of death
in order to establish a crucial distinction
between two ways of knowing: the inauthentic, evasive
manner in which we generally 'know'
of our mortality as something that happens
only now to others and not yet to ourselves
and the authentic knowledge of ourselves as finite
and therefore essentially temporal creatures."Something critical is speaking
silences from a moment long ago,
when duality broke and found me struck in light,
satori. I wonder if
we ever get control of it,
this illuminating limitation.The fascination, at least, never ends.
Sisyphean ultimately we may need to be,
forever picking up what fell--rocks,
cherries ripe--and taking them up
again, to the end of time,
in whatever zone of the real we occupy
and think we occupy.
******