Poem: Philosopher In Condo

 

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