OPEN LETTER TO A CLOSED MIND

I make too much of it, this matter of books

and talk and silences, but every sun

I stand less sure of what I ought to know

and find my way to them to find my way.

Wisdom’s rabbit races just far enough

ahead to keep the chase invitingly close

but never done, and all I really know

is what occurs to me right here as right.

Moments of truth come anywhere at once.

Facing the jewelry of bottles twiced

by mirrors fanned behind a downtown bar

in Minneapolis, I understood a verse

from Crane’s The Wine Menagerie without

intending it. The meaning simply came,

like that—like one of God’s gratuities

that come before we are prepared. Of all

I ever worked to learn, those things are best

that came without my earning them.

I should have said without deserving them.

In Minneapolis a deeper thinker

surely would have called all truth a gift,

but it was hot, and I forgot. Later,

when students let me tell them what I knew,

I saw that all we keep of truth is what

we give away, that holocausts can sleep

like revolutions in the smallest flints,

that any river can reflect the sun.

I have a student’s fear that truth is fun

to seek but death to keep. Heroes and saints

are those who freed the thoughts of God by pen

or tongue and made them last like Parthenons.

I bleed the lambs of glory for those few

who said that time must wait their christening.

In the presence of their absence, words take flesh,

and God wakes fires that can rock the skull

and blaze the eye with revelation.

Download PDF