Day 10.

For today’s prompt, write a different perspective poem. There are a few ways a poet can tackle this one. First, write a poem from a different physical perspective–like from the top of a building or at the bottom of a hole or in the trunk of a car. Another possibility is to write from a different person’s (or animal’s or object’s) perspective–a tactic that has interesting results in fiction (think Grendel or Wicked). If you have an even different perspective on this than me, feel free to roll with it.

"The body is both transcendent and immanent. It is the "third term" between subject and object. I know that transcendent things exist because I can touch them, see them, hear them. But most importantly, I never know things in their totality, but always from an embodied perspective. Because I am a body, I can only see things from a certain perspective, and yet, because I am a body, I can also experience the thing as being more than that partial perspective. The thing exists "in itself" because it resists my knowing it with total certainty." Merleau-Ponty.

A fascination with "house."
Four walls are enough
because four walls are too many.


I can't run around it fast enough.
I see one side (and maybe or maybe not the life inside,
and what dimension there is that - into past and breadth of self
a person there, perhaps, sitting?)


Or I see two sides,
and am on my way
one way or the other.
Not fast enough.
I can see three if I am already
lifted, lifted so I can see more.


Even so, seeing hundreds of houses, stretching
the length of the delta
(and then, no, not the lives inside -
and what dimension there, of multitudes
of wants and habits, sweaters and tables, 
apples and bottles and butter and tears,
backs of drawers where secrets are hidden?)
I cannot see the fourth surfaces even then,
nor the fifth,
nor the sixth.


Not fast enough. 
I can not get around the house, simple house,
small, fast enough to swallow it,
in my perception, whole, as it is.


Only light is that fast.
And space there before light
and where there is no light.


You are allowed to see
- see the house that stands there, real - 
but never all, never the side you just left
or go to now or leave to the haze of atmosphere.


In this denial are things.  All things.


Picasso tried to help us see all dimensions at once.
But he lied.
And he knew it.


We still look at one side of a painting
and its important falsehood.
But it is the back of the painting 
that makes it real,
that makes it hard to get,
a work of genius,
hard to understand.