Know-nothing. . .
y entre los que menos sabian
yo siempre supe un poco menos —Neruda
Among those who knew
what they were talking about,
I invariably knew less . . .
for years I was a dangerous
young man . . . .
In college, I put in the required hours
of confusion—
daydreaming, alas, not a curriculum choice.
I retained just enough
to receive my gentleman’s Cs
which kept me out of the jungles
of Vietnam,
for there was death
to dodge those days
in exams on
the Presocratics, in trigonometry,
in seminar debates about
beauty or the origins of meaning,
none of which were resolved
in classes where I hung on
by an abstruse thread, understanding
that sine, cosine, tangent—
coded arithmetical abstractions—
would in no way contribute
to my life . . . .
And a lifetime later
I’m proved right—
the geometry of the cliffs crumbling
into the sea
before my eyes as I continue to investigate
the square root of space
still filled with silence, something
I can attest to each morning
as I step out on the porch
with next to nothing
on my mind—
one page after another
of sea foam gloriously unfurling
for no reason into the air
where seagulls sing
their irregular hosannas
reaffirming that the sky still supports life . . . .
I walk aimlessly along
waiting for something
besides dust
to settle on a bench
from where I can continue my colloquy
through the tangled eucalyptus boughs
highlighting
one convoluted path of reason
after the next.
Stars spin away
unseen all day,
but come evening seem to be
in the same place . . .
I whistle after the birds
but they know
better than to pay me any mind,
and wing away
easily up the coast.
A 3-legged dog pees
on a neighbor’s dahlias
and hobbles happily back to his own yard,
restoring,
as best I can tell,
some balance in the world.
Christopher Buckley’s recent books are Agnostic (Lynx House, 2019), and The Pre-Eternity of the World (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2021). He has recently edited The Long Embrace: Contemporary Poets on the Long Poems of Philip Levine (Lynx House, 2020) and Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets—Interviews & Essays (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2021).
