The figured wheel rolls through shopping malls and prisons
Over farms, small and immense, and the rotten little downtowns,
Covered with symbols, it mills everything alive and grinds
The remains of the dead in the cemeteries,
in unmarked graves and oceans . . . .
Robert Pinsky, “The Figured Wheel”Let’s say Pinsky is correct that all is “Figured and
Pre-figured in the nothing-transfiguring wheel” and
We end up just flattened dead matter, and it’s true that
Often in late exhausting afternoons I
Feel that flat wheel rolling over me, whether it’s
Unadorned or festooned with all sorts of
Stickers from the scrapbooks of the whole of
History or merely from my own enormous
Vanity, The Wheel, Pinsky says, also rolls over
Cows in India and over all sorts of living
And unliving things, and over the poet Pinsky himself and
His parents and his kids too; alright, let’s say it’s true, but
This is where you, or let me say your pulsing
Hand, comes in: the wheel that drags me down then
Lifts me up, and from there, over the crushed earth,
Above the creatures all pummeled into dust,
I see the utterly heart-breaking beauty of the
Perishing always-receiving-extreme-unction parish
That is our world, and what does the wheel or Pinsky know of
Your pulsing hand across my chest in the night, and
Call me sentimental, call me transcendental, but the ever-
Rolling wheel is fucking stupid after all, dumb
To the ecstasies of our dying ends, ignorant of the
‘Oh my God your skin is soft’ anything-but-symbolic
Last moment before its mute killing comes down and grinds
Us into what it thinks is nothingness, stupid
Wheel that will not stop, all the while lifting us to our
Paradise, which the wheel itself knows nothing of.
Sex at the End of the World
Dream vision: a literary device in which a dream or vision is recounted as having revealed knowledge or a truth that is not available to the dreamer or visionary in a normal waking state . . . . In both its ancient and medieval form, the dream vision is often felt to be of divine origin.Asleep in our bed last night I dreamt a dream:
It was the end of the world and people everywhere were fucking,
Around the globe they were coupling, in elevators
And in churches, in buses, in museums, on manicured lawns,
At interstate rest stops and in busted-up alleyways,
In penny arcades and in monumental city halls.
Police patrolled the streets to keep the peace,
Though in time they found they had no need to,
And so in pairs our boys in blue, they were fucking too.
Some couples coupled cloistered in very tiny spaces,
Others in the open air, on curbs, even
On the center line of avenues: that we didn’t do.
We chose the second story of an ancient stone Tuscan home,
Whose glass-blown casement windows we had flung wide open,
And while we fucked in our fleshly, passionate hurrying way
A lovely Florentine breeze swept through the room,
And we heard others, in other rooms, loudly panting,
Moaning, some howling even, loving their worlds away.
When I awoke the planet was winding down,
And I whispered to you the words of an old 60’s song,
“Oh my God your skin is soft, I love your face,”
And then there was the rapidly evaporating memory
(Which I did write down!) of our pumping away
As the clock of the apocalypse ticked down,
And in what shred of time was left to us
I remember whispering while we fucked:
What better thing is there to do, righteous, good, and true,
At this our world’s end, than making love to you.
All the Reasons in the WorldAnd doubtless it is dangerous to love
This somersault of seasons;
But I am weary of
The winter way of loving things for reasons.
Richard Wilbur, “Winter Spring”
The measure of love
Is to love without measure.
Saint AugustineNegative capability, Keats called it,
The power to get beyond
The nagging need to insist upon
Anything with reasoned certainty.
I tire of reasons:
Love doesn’t argue you into feeling
One thing or another,
What some someone demands you to feel.
All the reasons in the world
Cannot tell you what you ought to feel:
Ought being definitely a bad, wintry way
To begin or end anything.
I want you, that’s all I know
Or need to know:
Kiss me
Is the closest I can come to any reason.
Love dissolves the self,
Delighting in the other:
Touching you, I become you.
No reason. No measure.
Love, our love, requires no exegesis,
No explanation: it simply manifests here we come,
And now, here we are.
Utter incarnation.
How can I possibly explain
The dawn, your green eyes opening
To this our world, your naked cool legs
Warming mine?
Is it any wonder, then,
That every night
I die,
Emptying myself into you?
Bionote
Marc Manganaro is an author, former English professor, and university administrator. His works include books published by Princeton University Press and Yale University Press, and he has published in journals such as The Missouri Review, Public Culture, and The Yale Journal of Criticism. He is a former recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and some years ago served as Editor of The Carolina Quarterly. A native of Nebraska, he currently resides in New Orleans.
