Sport 3: Spring 1989
The Concept Of Mind
The Concept Of Mind
Where is it
and how big?
Does it have curved walls
or else particleboard compartments
with a dancehall for the past?
Is it like
a suspender belt?
Are its doors the eyes of a tree?
Has it room for resurrection pie?
All the maps have passed it by.
Is it like
a blue wren
or a body and a ball?
More the shape of a hectare of landscape,
largely humdrum run-of-the-mill
but with creekbed loams —
yet perhaps
it is more
like team spirit or the C. of E.
and hardly hydraulic at all,
so my thoughts don't call for wings
and won't fall.
But suppose
that modestly mousy mind
gave up on point of view,
what immodest expansion!
It would be
the whole bouquet
of Ego's red letter day,
page 104
demanding equality
with the huge mailorder catalogue:
all of those
leaf-thrashed greens
and hyperbolical oceans,
throng, brick, plain and grain.
What if they went fifty-fifty?
Mind on tiptoe
in the left-hand scale
and world like an old balloon
squeezed rubbery into the right
while Justice kept her eye on the needle
having herself a ball.
But anticyclonic
winds are gusting
and the scales aren't there at all,
or so I think in a dull blue-grey
when I get to think about thought.
How does it work, then,
flat, slant or vertical?
Mind is a close call.