The Teacher, and: The Old Argentine Wandering

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• The Teacher, and: The Old Argentine Wandering
• Ethan Yan

The Teacher

(for Dr. Kraft)

Aquinas taught the things of the worldThrough the things of the sky and the blueInfinity of his reason, but not tangling

Like the river at the end of the mindThat taught the things of the skyThrough the apparitions of the sky.

And one must imagine that this river,A saraband of the sun and the starsTangling within itself, was a creation

Of all things, and of the craftsman, incarnate,Of all things, like the silent sepulcher distilledFrom the night, nothing inside but the river itself

And the kind, gray sun waking the planetsAcross the evergreen eternity of the river changingContinuously in a series approaching a final slate—

There, in the definition and space of the sepulcher,The sun, the river, and the grounding convergedTangling, forever changed in perception. [End Page 113]

The Old Argentine Wandering

Too much he has had with the world,For many snowbound nights those birds have hung,And many a night, bounded by the frost of the sky,

The birds galloped across the directionOf the valley, across the gliding night, withinThe glimmering of the glass beads,

But without the sight to see the birds,He had forever remained bound by night—Frozen by the bounding of the night,

Which is the bounding withinOf the supposed self, which, boundlessIn the perception of that same night,

Supposed a new threshold to things, crossingA total strait among the stars and orbiting notThe compass itself but the bound ideas. [End Page 114]

Ethan Yan Columbia, Maryland Copyright © 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press ...