New Science

“New Science “Great poetry has three tasks: (1) to invent sublime myths which are suited to the popular understanding; (2) to excite to ecstasy so that poetry attains its purpose; and this purpose is (3) to teach the masses to act virtuously, just as the poets have taught themselves. The natural origin of this human institution gave rise to that invariable property, nobly expressed by Tacitus, that frightened people vainly ‘imagine a thing and at once believe it’, fingunt simul creduntque.” – Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). 

Divinity, divinari
To understand either what is hidden from men,
The future,
Or what is hidden within them,
Their conscience.

My science proceeds
Like geometry
From basic elements
Arises
Its own world
Of measurable quantities.

But the orders of human affairs
Are, axiomatically, more real
Than points, lines, surfaces,
And figures.

And so we can divine
This poetic wisdom
From the crude
Metaphysical tree

Out of which the branches stretch
The poetic sciences.
Down one side one finds
logic and its languages, fabulous and mute.
ethics and its heroes,
economical families, and
great cities of politics

On the other, physics,
the divine principles of all things,
and her daughters
cosmography, who could envision a universe of gods,
and astronomy
Whom herself begat,
time-reckoning chronology
and geography, who describe the world

Indeed

A family of certainty.
Wallowing in faeces
Naked and in faeces
Wallowing wallowing
Growing inborn into giants
Scat scattered
Across the earth

Brutish Wanderers
In the New World.

I hear the sun at night as it passes by the sea,
Which Neptune rides, while Cybele stretches on her lion.
And, see, I see the gods, objects of my wonder.

All things are full of Jupiter,
Small and light,
Eagle-carried into flight
Lightning bolts and thunder claps

Believable impossibilities
The bloody mad-eyes of vines
Lights of home
Fruit’s flesh and bone
Pitcher’s lip and saw tooth
The plants comb their beards with the ribbed tongue of the sea
A hand of poison chokes the river’s throat
Fir trees weep


Thunderstruck.