all a symbol’s ever done for us is reductive

 

You can tutor impotently observing the decline of your empire

in students crushed by obscure ambiguity, or validate on your own

the wild structure of a leafing oak. There are no other options.

Understanding is not a table. I leave the house of my own freewill

 

& pass into history proper. Disavowing an apostle’s terrible awareness

of emerging universals, disowning inevitable recurrence, done with

what sinks in the sea, rotten by scholarship, scornful as an arrow,

I am a friend of Aristotle, but am a greater friend of undeserved grace

 

turning an icicle’s frantic inertness into an example of ontology.