And once again that field of neutral light,
Those same few vessels subtly rearranged
Across the surface of a table,
The pots and bottles, vases, with a slight
Adjustment to enable
Their plain relations to be re-estranged.

This was the hard problem: to see behind
The facile complications of event,
The gauderies of day that drew
Attention to their shimmer, and remind
The mind to slow and view
What lies below the shining incident.

How could such simple objects know so much?
This web of everything that is the case
Is nothing, we are told, but matter,
Dissolving ever downwards from the clutch
Of common sense to scatter
Among the primal flecks of time and space,

While round their tables the philosophers
Knock heads and strike the board to break the seal
That locks their own hard problem: how
A subject that can know itself occurs,
What process could endow
Mere matter with the power to wake and feel.

Nothing’s more abstract than reality,
These surfaces propped up against the day
To hold the light. For years and years
He looked and modelled them so faithfully
They might well move to tears
One who, like them, is facing the right way.

What do I know but my experience?
Watching these pastel, dusty tubes and blocks
On a table top, I see the sun
Move down a wall with intimate suspense,
A shadow that’s begun
A progress even slower than the clock’s,

Or, giving in to fancy, may devise
A small town clustered far out on a plain
Where, seated in a room, someone
Is gazing from a window, in whose eyes
The shadow and the sun
Are shifting their abstractions once again.

CONTENTS: JULY–AUGUST 2011