Concerning the Soul

by Brett Rutherford

Because you dream
of parents gone,
dead siblings, the face
and voice and sayings
of a wise grandmother,

you imagine them alive
somewhere, solid, fine,
and feasting as never
they fed in a starved life,

 or as flimsy ghosts
in a tinsel harp heaven
where white-toast angels
attend them, all this

 in desperate wish
that you had a soul
and would travel with it
to the same beyond.

Wishing does not
make it so. The soul,
subtracted, is not the line
between a body
and a corpse.

The soul is a word
denoting no thing
existent in time
or space, an object
of language only.

No thing is
Nothing, and from Nothing
it is not permitted to say
that something comes.
Of Nothing, no substance,
quality or power adheres.

Note how a fool is made
by adding a capital letter
to lower-case nothing —
nothing, null, zero,
Nothing, ah sublime,
extant omnipotent —
as though to kick upstairs
the non-existent into
a respectable place.

Like floating reefs
or fatal Sirens,
beware the lure
of floating abstractions!

  

Dizzying Considerations

 

by Brett Rutherford

1

"Infinite" means only
"unimaginably large."
Infinite in number
cannot apply
to any existent thing,
for if it were,
it would crowd out
all other existing things,
filling the universe
with copies of itself,
cancelling me,
this poem,
and you who read.

2

Infinite in duration
by which we mean
a thing is eternal —

the arrogance
of meteor alone
in space, of smug
planets whose mass
has cleared their path
in endless dull orbit —

the first amoeba's
clear intent
to outlive every one
of his kind —

the urge of every tree
to grow forever
and devour the sun
that feeds it —

means only
that one becomes
"unimaginably old,"

until the sweep
of space and time,
the tug of gravity,
collapses all,

one bubble gone
among the many.

 

Fragments of Empedocles

 

FRAGMENTS OF EMPEDOCLES

 

Translated by Brett Rutherford

 

11

Fools, whose thoughts run fast and false,
who fancy that from Nothing, Something comes,
or that, with wave of hand, What Is, is Not,
as if a thing once seen, can be unseen.

 

12

From Nothingness a bring can never come;
if so, What Is could just as well be all destroyed,
by what Force by what name no one has heard —
for What Is rests forever where it sits.

The All contains no void, nor has it more
than what itself encompasses.

17

I will report a truth two-fold: I see
the One from Many come to be, and
as the One dissolves, the Many come again:
Earth and Fire, Water and the sky of Air;
and held apart from them, conflicting Force
in balance held, and Love upon them all,
in all her being everywhere the same.

Focus your mind on Love, sit not
like a novice astonished. She exists
inborn in every human cell and not
to be denied. Through her, the yearning comes
of created things for one another; through her
we call a well-done thing a beauty, and know
Delight or even love a thing for its own sake.