Epistemology

Everyone in that

house

was asleep—

save me

downstairs, standing

in a doorway

where my host said

she used a piano wire

right about, oh

  here

tapped the lintel

between kitchen and hallway:

must have used a spike nail

to bear her weight.

Yes–

but I felt no roughness to the plaster.

Well, he explained, that

was sixty years ago

Yes but—

and one night I was downstairs

reading. All of a sudden:

horrid crashing

upstairs, bookshelves falling

one against another, so I rush

up and find everything

undisturbed.

And? 

Made my skin crawl.

 

   All this I recalled  

in what light there was and felt the plaster

once again, my mind turning on a word:

     epistemology

  allowing epistemology

to float there, swinging

back

and forth

on the neck

of a shadow,

traveling one way

then another;

like a Grecian

bucksaw

working its way down

through a windfall

in speculation’s forest:

epistemology

all those serrate syllables!

with Aristotle tugging

at one end and Plato

at the other, tugging back,

the pair of them producing

 a dogged sound

yet soothing in its regularity

there amid

the weird

thingy-things

drifting

so aimlessly up

and down in the half

light

of that eternal

dusk.

 

Then

 

Plato hears something

and stops. He

abandons his post

to enter the hemlocks

and climb a black hill

among the stars.

 

But Aristotle, my man,

keeps going

working that insatiable word

with its empty handle

at the other end

always

retreating as

he reaches

and reaching

as he retreats.

Jennifer Marysia Landretti writes poetry and essays. Her themes are nature, place, and spirit–and in recent years, gender, which has served as a vector to explore the latter three.