Unpolished And Uncut Stones From “Rocks On Rocks” – #2

If you figure that science
deals with thought and understanding

and religion
deals with the spirit and morality, then

only art adds something hard,
some tangible reality

to these issues. I mean,
along with their emotions, artists

worry about their canvas
and film stock and manuscripts and

marble quality
and acoustics – hands-on art issues – while

other frameworks
for understanding life limit themselves to

heady thinking and hot air talk.
These issues in the framework

of art embody themselves
in a nuts-and-bolts kind of way.

Real art – not socialite art
or fill-in-the-blanks commercial

art – lays down a kind of
yellow brick road. Only this yellow

brick road doesn’t end
at some fantasy green city. Art lays

down a yellow brick road
that goes from the person’s self through all

the dark woods and misadventures
that lead to reality.

*

Plants grow upward, and, less obviously,
plants grow toward a light.

Differentiated cells of a plant,
each doing its own

business, more or less alone,
perform this phototropism.

The tissuey cellulose
of human events grows, too, and

history grows in its own direction,
to its own tropic.

We differentiated ones
muddle through our business, more

or less alone,
living this less-than-obvious tropism.

History – this milkweed,
this beanstalk – germinates, grows, seeds, dies.


* * *