Philosopher In Condo
all rooms superfluous
except for the cave
where bookcases lean almost upside-down,
covers pressed
leathery wing to wing,
each the faintest squeak
of an arcane title
and
the philosopher hunches under a dim cone
to scrawl jagged autistic shibboleths
as randomish as
the dust motes which curl
to drift through the air.
his bathrobe dates to 19(something or other)
the terrycloth unraveled to
speak in many tongues
above Pendelton-wool shirt pockets.
a shabby-mad-genius chic.
his bed is a mattress sagged to
the floor, his pillows two encyclopedias
and a gift he gave to his daughter,
long discarded,
when she could barely say “teddy bear.”
now the daughter is ‘some age’ and has a
grandchild he sometimes likes to know,
if his toilet-seat thinker’s pose
becomes too tedious,
the cerebral weight of his thousands of books too heavy,
the ideas he seeks to crack too thick,
circling up to resist as intractable as
the scum on the porcelain
of the toilet bowl
and yet
emeritus life
has softened four decades of
implacable intellectual regimen,
so that now--just now--
for a fleet falter of a second,
his emotions
wonder what it would like to leap
out of concept,
what it would be like to see with eyes too misty for
Aristotle, Kant or Plato’s Theory of Forms?
somehow this rogue emotion seeped through,
between the ticker tape of theoretical formulations
ceaseless and anal in his perfectionist mind.
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2/20 ... changed a phrase
Based on a real person I knew well
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