"Descartes Saw Angels", a poem by Louis Gallo

I.
I have learned enough about sufficient, efficient,
deficient and duplicitous Reason to obliterate plenum
and revisit (return to?) tabula rasa
like my grandpa when he wore diapers
and forgot my name, his own name,
his wife’s name and his son’s.
The tedium of otiose memory.

II.
Except not like grandpa, no fuzzy treacle
of mind, no, nor like Sylvia, who could
only remember to eat when Sandy
in Carolina sautéed those yummy shrimps
doused in butter, olive oil and garlic.
I too devoured my share.
No, mine betokens a new ignorance,
a radical ignorance though not innocence.
No Hotel Splendide nor sweet-olived oblivion.

III.
At one time the entire pipsqueak universe
was dark because gravity imprisoned the photons.
But when it weakened,
Voila, a Fourth of July light show.
Fiat lux!
I like to think of ponderous time as male
and breezy, airy light as female
with chestnut hair and a killer wink,
a smile I died for many times.

So what of their mystic marriage?
Was it consummated—or is it
being consummated before our very eyes
as we, say, mow the lawn or drag
out the trash or scrub the toilet?
Do I hear howls of pleasure or pain?
When does one alchemize into the other?
Alleles, ah, this betokens that
and that betokens this and this, that—
the maraschino atop your whipped cream,
the figment in the figment.

IV.
I wouldn’t go that far,
I’d stick with the equator of both misery
and pleasure, good ole longitude
and its cross-sectional latitude,
the earthy yet also sublime crisscross
or Christ’s cross.  No photonic balsa wood
there, no Styrofoam, no gauzy albumen.
I saw this movie called The Crown of Thornes
and held the hand of a girl
whose jeans were stitched with brass rivets.
You can only go so far with dolorosa.
Afterwards we drank shot after shot of ambrosia
in a swanky dive on Annunciation Street,
the time I recited Jubilate Agno
to Mardi Gras crowds hooting in the street.

A suitcase of time.  That stitch in the fabric.
Watch out, dark matter everywhere, ninety something
percent of the universe.  I call it death.  I call it hell.
An infection.  The equations for negentropy and information
are identical.  Szilard.  The broadcasts of Howdy Doody
have probably reached the outskirts of Saturn by now—
but you’d better look that up.
When does the wide web of information exceed
the bytes of data in the universe, what then?

V.
Perhaps ignorance amounts to confusion, Babel,
discordant tongues of fire scorching the rain forest.
That static you see on your television screen,
that’s some ancient shit, remnants of the Big Bang,
what cosmologists now call a “fluctuation in the void.”
What?  Where is the void and why did it fluctuate?
An abracadabra?  See, the past happens right now,
forever, viva the Alamo.  Viva the extinct Hittites.
And there’s your answer, Mr. Heidegger.

VI.
Walt, you dog, you were right to ask, “Do I contradict myself?”
and answer your own question with, “Very well,
I contradict myself.”  And Emerson:  “[delete the foolish]
Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Or Freud:  “He who inquires into the meaning of life
is sick.  Or Dostoevsky, “Consciousness is a disease.”
One could go on of course but why bother?
The otherwise detestable theorists are probably right
to inform us that we are all characters
in our own insufferable texts.  As for fictional females—
Nausicaä, Beatrice (no, too young), Heloise, Laura,
Sophie Weston, Cathy Earnshaw, Emma Bovary,
Isabel Archer, Lady Brett, Jordan Baker . . .man,
I’d like to have a Ramos Gin Fizz with them
at the Napoleon House. 

VII.
I poke at the last meatball on my plate.
The other diners have finished their meals
and gone home; the waiters clean off the tables
with wet cloths; the cooks back in the kitchen
of Cosmo’s Diner clank pots and pans.
It’s almost closing time.
Another meatball, gray, convoluted and large
has somewhere along the line transcended itself
by effusing consciousness.
It too, conscious or not, is edible.
Where the interface?  How can a pork chop
or rib eye or filet mignon think?

Do we scan the macro or the micro zones
for answers?  Do quarks play a role?
Cogito ergo sum.  Cogito ergo scum.
Sentio ergo cum.  Ghost in the machine?
Machine in the ghost?  The chimps
in 2001: A Space Odyssey
did behold those slabs, after all, which suggests
extraterrestrial.  Deus ex machina.
Ground control to Major Tom.

I fork the meatball, cold and dry now,
suck it into my mouth, chew a bit
and swallow.  Suddenly I have a vision.
Einstein’s brain—read Sir James Frazier
on the rationale of primitive cannibalism.
Take and eat for this is my body . . .

VIII.
Thirty thousand years ago, give or take,
I crossed over with about 1100 others
from Afrique to Asia Minor.
We were the new ones, you see, sapiens.
We forsook the serene grasslands
for terra incognita because we itched
with curiosity and bravado.
We encountered those others, brutes,
on the new continent and promptly
extinguished them—though not before
screwing their women.  Thus the genome.
Thus everyone on this planet now carries
a speck of Neanderthal DNA, everyone
except our African forbears whom we
left behind during the diaspora.

So what?  Not enough to squawk about.
Oh how swiftly we populated everywhere,
your native Americans the last to arrive.
Ever since it’s been warfare, annihilation, genocide, acquisition,
power, devastation of anything not like us (including us)—
the great noble giraffes, rhinos, gorillas, whales,
vanishing from history.  Even the sharks from
the liver oil of which we concoct Preparation-H.
Slay the bastards for relief of the bunghole.
We will never repent nor feel remorse, make amends.
Our god gave us dominion.  Why we love God.

IX:
And Gödel’s Theorem tells us that every self-contained
system leaks into a still higher system,
a sort of mathematical take on Aquinas.
Therefore, our own self-contained systems
of flesh, blood and bone also leak in fashion—
it’s called death.  Heaven, bardo, Valhalla,
Elysium Fields . . . we’re gung ho on the afterlife
we shudder to approach.
That blinding light at the end of the labyrinth.

Ask me, I’d say we got screwed—
ask me, I’ll say we want to stick around,
twirl like smiling fools at another St. Vitus square dance,
flirt some more with Aphrodite and Helen,
savor another pompano almandine at Galatoire’s,
swig more J. W. Dant, make love not war.
The future diminishes every Happy Birthday To You.
What’s in your wallet?  Bye bye, stubborn belly fat.
What are you supposed to do, drive three-quarters
of a car?  Hotel Trivago.  You’re in good hands
with Allstate.  Use Ajax, the foaming cleanser.
Good ole Dr. Tichenor’s, best antiseptic in town.

Oh, we try to stave it off, take measures, knead in
the lanolin, swallow krill oil and One-a-Day,
feast on anti-oxidants and poly-unsaturateds.
I saw the King Tut exhibit in Philadelphia.

X.
Consciousness is a swan song.
Something went haywire in the construct.
What if all life forms are vehicles
for the propagation of DNA,
which in itself is not even alive?
The strange, mystic double-helix
of perpetuation.  What’s the point?
Proliferation, over-population, infestation,
hives upon hives, catacombs like those
I visited in Mexico City, piles of skulls,
clavicles, femurs, hip bone connected . . .
They slid my grandmother’s coffin
into a vault in the wall of a mausoleum.
Countless vaults.  Necropolis.
I knew death had undone so many.
And death I think is a parenthesis.
Closing time.  Bye bye, stubborn belly fat.
Plunk your magic twanger, Froggie.
If Xerxes the Great did die
then so must you and I.
Screech the usual severe adieu.
I thought therefore I was.

(This poem first appeared in Pennsylvania Literary Journal; Cochran Vol 11 lss 3, (Fall 2019); 298-303, 332)