This poem is taken from PN Review 203, Volume 38 Number 3, January - February 2012.
The Poems
More Things
How level-headed our reductionists are:
the mother wildebeest defending her young
establishes, not that animals feel love,
but that all love is instinct, pure and simple.
Fed into a computer, Moby Dick gives up
the same dates - Pearl Harbor, JFK's murder -
encoded in the Bible, proof the results
are random, not that hidden meanings abound.
The more fanciful among them will allow
how alien spacecraft might have parted the Red Sea,
appeared as a pillar of cloud or fire,
condescended to speak to Moses, Ezekiel.
With Horatio they have positioned themselves
at the borders of the permissible world:
there they stand guard, their drawn swords shining like stars,
...
How level-headed our reductionists are:
the mother wildebeest defending her young
establishes, not that animals feel love,
but that all love is instinct, pure and simple.
Fed into a computer, Moby Dick gives up
the same dates - Pearl Harbor, JFK's murder -
encoded in the Bible, proof the results
are random, not that hidden meanings abound.
The more fanciful among them will allow
how alien spacecraft might have parted the Red Sea,
appeared as a pillar of cloud or fire,
condescended to speak to Moses, Ezekiel.
With Horatio they have positioned themselves
at the borders of the permissible world:
there they stand guard, their drawn swords shining like stars,
...
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