Solve for X. X re-
mains X sometimes. In which case,
write a good poem.
Not all X’s are
problems to be solved. That face
on the morning bus,
the peaceful lift of
the eyebrows: forever look.
Call it transcendence.
Call it impossi-
ble. On the crowded bus it
calls you, an angel.
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Author: Tom D'Evelyn
Tom D'Evelyn is a private editor and writing tutor in Cranston RI and, thanks to the web, across the US and in the UK. He can be reached at tom.develyn@comcast.net. D'Evelyn has a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. Before retiring he held positions at The Christian Science Monitor, Harvard University Press, Boston University and Brown University. He ran a literary agency for ten years, publishing books by Leonard Nathan and Arthur Quinn, among others. Before moving to Portland OR he was managing editor at Single Island Press, Portsmouth NH. He blogs at http://tdevelyn.com and other sites.
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This is a perceptive and moving reflection on mystery, the mystery of the person. It starts by taking the reader through the seemingly-univocal logic of equivalence and then opens us to see how human beings are not logical puzzles or other math problkems but irreducible and overflowing person–maybe we think of the Greek personae, the stage-masks with their exaggerated features perceptible to the audience even far away–characters who of course do and feel and think and interact but all of this is never ‘just’ itself but in being exquisitely valable, even in anger or pain, is more. The bus becomes for the reader and poet both uniquely irreducible in its this-ness and mundane there-ness nad excessive. It is not a coincidence that the bus is passing through and so the reader may resee hte univcoal logic of equivalence in the light of passing through here and hereafter.
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Love your insights into the ‘passing through’! As William Desmond might say, the bus is out between, our porosity to the divine. Who would have thought!
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Beautiful poem, a gift to the reader who’s right there, along for the ride.
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