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Leviathan
by George Oppen

Truth also is the pursuit of it:
Like happiness, and it will not stand.

Even the verse begins to eat away
In the acid. Pursuit, pursuit;

A wind moves a little,
Moving in a circle, very cold.

How shall we say?
In ordinary discourse—

We must talk now. I am no longer sure of the words,
The clockwork of the world. What is inexplicable

Is the ‘preponderance of objects,’ The sky lights
Daily with that predominance

And we have become the present.

We must talk now. Fear
is fear. But we abandon one another.”

After the blossoming I hang.
The encyclical that has come
through the branches
instructs us to root, to become
the design encapsulated within.

Flesh helping stone turn tree.

I do not want to hold life
at my extremities, see it prepare
itself for my own perpetuation.
I want to touch and be touched
by things similar in this world.

I want to know a few secular days
of perfection. Late in this one great season
the diffused morning light
hides the horizon of sea. Everything
the color of slate, a soft tablet
to press a philosophy to.

”
— “The Confession of an Apricot,” Carl Adamshick

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“If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.”
— Malcolm X

The older I get, the more principled I become. Set in my ways. Stubborn.

Used to be when I was younger, I could go with the flow, be the flow, be that open, wavy thing which is kind of nice because you never know where you’d wind up. But something sets as you get older. Your eyes become clearer, your resolve– firmer. You know who you are, what you stand for, what you don’t stand for. You become the rock in the flow, eroding as it winds by. Still a rock. Still in the flow.

It hurts to be set, to see clearly, to stand up.

To not fall down.