The New Intelligence

After knowledge extinguished the last of the beautiful

fires our worship had failed to prolong, we walked

back home through pedestrian daylight, to a residence

 

humbler than the one left behind. A door without mystery,

a room without theme. For the hour that we spend

complacent at the window overlooking the garden,

 

we observe an arrangement in rust and gray-green,

a vagueness at the center whose slow, persistent

movements some sentence might explain if we had time

 

or strength for sentences. To admit that what falls

falls solitarily, lost in the permanent dusk of the particular.

That the mind that fear and disenchantment fatten

 

comes to boss the world around it, morbid as the damp-

fingered guest who rearranges the cheeses the minute the host

turns to fix her a cocktail. A disease of the will, the way

 

false birch branches arch and interlace from which

hands dangle last leaf-parchments and a very large array

of primitive bird-shapes. Their pasted feathers shake

 

in the aftermath of the nothing we will ever be content

to leave the way we found it. I love that about you.

I love that when I call you on the long drab days practicality

 

keeps one of us away from the other that I am calling

a person so beautiful to me that she has seen my awkwardness

on the actual sidewalk but she still answers anyway.

 

I say that when I fell you fell beside me and the concrete

refused to apologize. That a sparrow sat for a spell

on the windowsill today to communicate the new intelligence.

 

That the goal of objectivity depends upon one’s faith

in the accuracy of one’s perceptions, which is to say

a confidence in the purity of the perceiving instrument.

 

I won’t be dying after all, not now, but will go on living dizzily

hereafter in reality, half-deaf to reality, in the room

perfumed by the fire that our inextinguishable will begins.

Yellow: Deems knowledge as the destructor of beauty, straying away from the worship of an implied god in favor of science and modernity.

Lime: Science naturally takes away some of the color in life; as things begin to make sense, they lose their magic and begin to adopt a duller tone.

Orange: Ironic given the vagueness of his language and references.

Red: Usually I see the mind being fed by art or learning, strange seeing it being fed by fear and disenchantment

Aqua: Simile lightens the mood of the piece while simultaneously commenting on the disgusting nature of the human mindset

Purple: Who does 'you' reference? 

Pink: Alliteration causes reader to slow down and digest

Blue: Potentially calling back to the fire at the beginning of the piece

    Timothy Donnelly provides deeply engaging contemporary commentary while at the same time keeping a light-hearted metaphorical approach to stave off the depressive feelings commonly associated with poetry. I don't fully understand this poem, but after hearing an interview with him I was able to better appreciate the connection he makes between depth and simplicity. Donnelly's approach towards science and corporate America provides a refreshing perspective not often seen in poetry. #teachlivingpoets