Plato's Cadillac

Is the wind a form of thought? Shelley thought so: The awful shadow of some unseen Power / Floats though unseen among us,  -  visiting /  This various world with as inconstant wing /  As summer winds that creep from flower to flower…”

I love the way the wind sculpts sandstone, its molds and ascensions, ruminations and changes. You can see how the wind thinks in stone. In the sand. In the water. In the trees and plains.

Clearly, when the air moves, there is something alive and invisible and huge in it, something crawling through the air, climbing into the sky, loving and abhorring our world simultaneously. Or so it would seem.

Seem is a large word. Seem is the seam of resemblance. Dissonance framed with the tools of intellect. Desire rolling through a sentence jingling its bells and nailing itself to the heart. Blood extends the murmurs of desire. Circulations of it belt our demand. Cincture the sense in staircase dots and round little sleeps full of albatross grace and chiaroscuro stilts.

Desire gives spirit the radical wings to move through the air and fondle the clouds.

The ocean bounds over the bulwark and smashes the pavement spreading its cold morality.

Poetry provides the salt for the algebra of fulmination. The weight of the body as it presses forward moving a pen making chronological sounds and doing its religious travel, sliding toward subjunctive realms of symphonic grammar, spouting obscurities of cotton and vividnesses of vague sensation. The philodendron is a philosophy of emergence. It ratifies the allegory of tense. Synesthesia pickled in brine.

We experience time through the filter of language. Our perceptions are structured by language. Time is conjugated into metals and broadloom.

The present is brass. The past is thread. The future is kerosene. The subjunctive is pearl.

The fictive realm is transcendental gold. Clouds freight the horizon with celestial moonshine.

Each word embodies a hybrid sensation. Images are spouts from which flow the syllables of a long bright scroll of palomino light. The engine chatters its summons of power. Necessity combines rocks with lyrical acceptance. Analysis murders a metaphor. The metaphor is buried in a simile like a corpse of alibis. I develop a greed for mimicry. We clasp one another and declare the day a totem of hypothetical wood. Our window anticipates Cubism. The scent of the wilderness is laden with pine and caramel. Baudelaire builds a birdhouse. It attracts auks, flickers, cockatoos, towhees, tumblers, ouzels, jackdaws, lovebirds and loons.

Meadow larks, swallows, juncos, hawks, and wren-tits.

Ringdoves, parakeets, pelicans, and hoopoes.

Dragons, pixies, zombies, ghosts, centaurs and flying skeletons.

When it comes to abstraction I believe in deep sea diving. It is the most efficient way to discover the true meaning of Plato’s cave. The muse teases these words until they mean something different. A new sentence rolls into the paragraph and mutates into a writhing dragon of sideboard garlic. It simmers. Bubbles. Smells of mountains and grottos. Plato walks out of his cave and rubs his eyes. He can’t believe what he says. It’s a brand new Cadillac.