Tuesday, November 20, 2007

critique of pure reason.

it's snowing. i'm trying to read kant. it's difficult.
this is a poem by jane hirschfeld about it, sort of:

'Like one man milking a billy goat
another holding a sieve beneath it,'
Kant wrote, quoting an unnamed ancient.
It takes a moment to notice the sieve doesn’t matter.
In her nineties, a woman begins to sleepwalk.
One morning finding pudding and a washed pot,
another the opened drawers of her late husband’s dresser.
After a while, anything becomes familiar,
though the Yiddish jokes of Auschwitz
stumbled and failed outside the barbed wire.
Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,
as wit increases distance and compassion erodes it.
Let reason flow like water around a stone, the stone remains.
A dog catching a tennis ball lobbed into darkness
holds her breath silent, to keep the descent in her ears.
The goat stands patient for two millennia,
watching without judgment from behind his strange eyes.


jane hirschfeld
critique of pure reason

1 comment:

Anthony said...

What Kant were you trying to read? The Critique? Metaphysics of Morals?