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Onta

No ceremony for the initiation into facts—
Only patience that is not time. The fist
Of the mind grows roots and greens into a fern.
The fern of the mind suffers a solar age
And becomes what it suffers—the sun is not
A star, but a flower. A voice in the eternal
Honey says, What is needed is to think with the flower
Of the mind. Suffer is a word meaning many words—
Endure, experience. The flower endures the sun
By eating it. I only say I when no other word
Will do. What is the world is the world, what is
Not is not. That is the nectar thought. A hive
Or is it a cloud, knowledge gathering darkly above,
Hiding lightning, hiding stings. When the air
Clenches its fist and strikes a blow the sky is clear
Again. More clear than it’s ever been. The day-shy
Stars peek out behind the blinding veil, so very faint,
The snail’s glistening path draws her singular line
West behind the mountains, and already, it’s true,
The eye on its delicate horn trembles up in the east,
That snail, the moon. The humble mind hums.
Gnosis knows. There are no words. Just a tune.

Beachy-Quick is the author six books of poetry and the translator of Mountain—Wind—Oak: The Poems of Sappho, forthcoming in 2023 from Tupelo Press, as well as The Thinking Root: The Poetry of Early Greek Philosophy, forthcoming in 2023 from Milkweed Press.

About Dan Beachy-Quick

Themes

About this Poem

“The title of the poem gives away its source—that Ancient Greek word for being, the things which actually exist, the present, reality, truth. I’ve been translating the earliest Greek philosophers, and this poem works through their thinking, little notes made for memory in case I should forget these fundamental beauties of the world, a small work against oblivion.”
—Dan Beachy-Quick

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More by this poet

Portrait (After Arcimboldo)

I made this self all by myself
I drove this nail into the wall myself
I stained the wood’s grain I planed the wood myself
I wrote the book on the shelf I made myself

The very fact is the face of the made thing
A fact is that it’s hard to see the face from within the thing
I want to say the face is a thinking thing
But the fact is that a face only thinks it is a thinking thing

Dan Beachy-Quick

2018

Memory-Wax, Knowledge-Bird

^{—for R.C. Quick}

I saw him in the summers when the leaves were green.
Down by the lake where ivy covered the ground. Where
The dogwood’s new pale moon flowers browned
At the edge by brittle June. I saw him then
Fishing for lake trout throwing the sunfish too bony
Back. The sun moved across the sky, around the earth,

Dan Beachy-Quick

2018

Arcadian

I could not stop my hands clapping. I clapped
And clapped. I clapped as in the dirt the bird collapsed,
As worms grew wings, I clapped.

A man stood in a river balancing
A grape on his lips. His tears fell in the current
Swept them away. He kept performing

His trick: grape hovering over the hole
Of his open mouth and never dropping in.
I clapped and I could not stop

My hands from wanting to cover my mouth
But they would not. They clapped
And I listened to them clap—a noise

Dan Beachy-Quick

2018

Poems

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Onta

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