Conarium – the Gland That Was The Seat of the Soul

Conarium – the Gland That Was

     The Seat of the Soul

Icebergs behoove the soul

(both being self-made from elements least visible)

to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.

                                    Elizabeth Bishop

                                    The Imaginary Iceberg

Maybe here's where Descartes should come in,
feel himself thin and weary

create his Cogito and stop, if really

that’s the place to stop because is it? if

it’s been thought it’s caught in a trundle

of ‘it is’?  Ok, right, I know he suffers

us (men really, not women, not dogs,

because they don’t

have souls, either of them, and I’d wager

my own against the feather of Ma'at
and say neither

did he, nailing his Helena’s poodle to

the wall to draw back its skin, to see,
he said, if it had a soul
within, as if the soul were some

homunculus, little men (dogs?).  And what, pray,

stopped him from making his own

wife play a Saint Bartholomew? Was it

true his misogyny accosted his compassion?
I’m naïve I know, but not to the brink
of studied enough reason

to know even great masses

of ice succumb, they labor and birth above
us and all in the weight of water falling

and rising. And great pieces of them,
all the caught breath

of the world’s populations drifting

north on pure circumstance

when they did only to freeze and be

snowed in and blink, imagine, if it had

eyes, and lick its lips if it had a tongue—all this

mingled breath from the world’s entire
bestiary: but then too, 

invisible…and so if you can
imagine it, and it’s  just like

the philosopher said!: it’s done and here.  Cogito!!

And what if the title of Discourse
on Method it claims it’s all a fake— (he does
take it back

under his wing with the threat
of a heretic's hook and Galileo's house
arrest)

it will give us enough breath to pause,
won't it?  Still, isn’t that the purpose of names
and lables— to lead us

a bit, astray maybe, or into cliché
temptation—I mean—

what if it wasn’t called what it was? or

what if it was called what it was the way

Bishop’s “Imaginary Iceberg” is and it's just
as real as if it were right out my starboard

side window just as my ship’s turning,
because it’s true

when she says we’d rather have the iceberg

than the ship—it’s not all that complicated.  Does that
mean we'd rather have the soul
than the body?  The way we're tugged

and ruffed, pulled down from neck
to feet, stuffed and ultimately undone?
At the end of it all?

What do you see when you look out
the window in the rain?  Will you say
it depends on the time of day, and if it's dark

and I if I see myself looking back at me (unless
I'm so close to the glass, unless I've
cupped my eyes with my two hands

to shut out all the light I can) I will come
to know me the way Descarte knew himself

and too without having
to prove ... (because we all know the soul
is almost

weightless, no matter how much
we scrub and scrub at the hour
of our death)

And it's here that I have to ask you, even if

this isn’t the time to, isn’t it a kind
of blasphemy

to want to wash the windows in the rain?  I don’t know

why I want to know this right now, or maybe just ask

because there’s no real know, and it is

raining, and

it’s only the breath of a question—I mean,

the rain is real and the desire for clean

glass is real

but it is raining and what is it I need

to see anyway?  And shit, it's still

dark.  It’s the last few days of a June early
morning.  I think I like knowing
somewhere it’s starting

to snow, and that that snow is floating on

the ocean and making do with its brief

life, a flake made from nothing but a drop

of water and the faithful attendance
of the world's breath.  When we

come undone, when our skin’s pulled back,

when our spine’s against all that ice of a crowd's
infatuations and it’s nothing but thought, (here's
where you can inhale at last)

I want our substance to rise up

uncaught, but noticed: thought beautiful,

thought worth measuring, but not

with tools that will make or undo or ruin—not with tools

at all but the Naked kind or grace Descartes

wouldn’t deign to know but Bishop,

always looking into her own self, she who is
the ship and she who is all that's frozen only

to come up rising and come up high, high

up out of the water iceberg,
she her own self uncharted, going on, uncaptured,
uncaptained . . .