introducing a new section; wherein i publish things i don't remember having written, but found on my comp, and further try to explain their existence.

What would your green knight do if he had met himself*

What would all of the trees do, in all of the world,
if they could walk to a town called Wormsley Glen**
and live side by side, like alarm clocks
set for odd hours of the night, repopulating without chance.

The things that grow around us hear us speak.***
In the same way that I look down at the sooty-eyed girls
who hang on you as those ‘young sluts,’ I know
the trees will outlive me and feel the same—

calling me a slut behind my back, maybe; growing in groves,
telephoning psychoanalysts at their summer homes
to meet with them in offices with plastic plants.*****
(The well my brother and I found
in Belize, had compartments for human hearts.******

How sick the man was who had built it, who thought
there was something to contain here.) Even the blind,
when opened to seeing, remark, “I see men,
but they look like trees, walking.” How frail we are.

How green. Do not even go into the village.*******


*reference to Gawain & the Green Knight, who Lucy thought was really awesome even though he killed people.
**VanInwagen's argument against a clockwork universe or the new hip slang, "intelligent design," uses the hypothetical town of Wormsley Glen, where those whose "alarms" are set for inconvenient waking hours are killed at work, and never seen in the second generation, where everyone's clock says 9 am.
***in a 1940s pulp, Stranger Than Science, my dad's favorite story was about a man who heard trees as they died at the loggers' hands.
*****Probably largely informed by images found in HBO's The Sopranos.
******This just happenned.
*******The quote in Mark that theologians believe is a mistake depicts Jesus mis-curing a hermetic blind man, such that he sees "men, but they look like trees, walking." Jesus then instructs the man not to commune with other men, not to go into the village. One interpretation has the incident working as an argument against urbanization, which works to heroicize the hermit.
********This was a poem I really wrote for my friend Lucy, after she had scared me.