Experiential Philosophy

Descartes was not a philosopher,
but a chair with one arm
around me and another
under my legs,
carrying the puny selfhood
I crawled from at 18
on knees and elbows.
You can live in the ring of mist
around the leaning Chinese peak
if a hung-up life’s enough.
Ah, the consolation of
philosophy.

Spinoza was the man
I’d have married
if I’d moved to Salinas,
worked in a Woolworth’s,
lived over a bar, not “matriculated,”
written.  Smiled at the gentle.
To know who you are
is to be complete.  “Your mother
tried to protect you.”

Rationality is fearless,
mysticism a corolla of the sun,
a parley with the soul,
hot gold and warm honey
in the melancholy beehive.

Each substance has attributes,
i.e., the cat’s meow:  is

proof enough of my existence;
existence proof that paralysis
is a few pages of the history,
that history is just a word and
“now,” this one, I said, here,
is a liberation, if observed new.

Sarah Sarai has published poems in The Mississippi Review, Terrain, Main Street Rag, The Minnesota Review, The Threepenny Review, Eleven Eleven and others. Her poetry collection, The Future Is Happy, will be out this year from BlazeVOX.