JOURNAL ENTRIES
Poems

If at All
     
     
      It isn’t simple.
      It is all very complicated. Nothing
      ever changes that, no degree of understanding
      or sophistication, the green hills and
      barren deserts by which we stumbled our way
      here bleeding and unabsolved, burdened
      with images: recalled later they explain
      nothing, fit no algorithm, give rise to
      no principle, and can only be expressed
      in words unredeeming; we
      store them up one by one then struggle
      to write these lines that some one or two
      may say what was meant, uncertain
      what it is, or if anyone can ever
      know. Nothing ever changes that—
      no amount of time or reason,
      no experience or wisdom: whatever
      we know, we know unknowingly,
      if at all.