published September 2009
Barry Goldensohn has published five collections of poems. He is now assembling a New and Selected.
A Treatise on Ungovernment
by Barry Goldensohn
Que scais-je? —Montaigne
A white haired man in a rich cloth coat
paces gravely on the platform waiting
for the No.1 train, his hands
splay open with quiet eloquence
and he speaks to one absent to us
with the sound of a breeze through leaves.
What can not be understood can not be governed. —Plato
A young couple, faces nearly touching,
speak to one another in Bengali
and Bengali flavored English, giving the words
a new music, with faces lifted
from Indian paintings
into American clothes, on a New York
street corner, waiting for the light to change.
What good are roots if you cant take them with you. —Gertrude Stein
…a nation is the same people living in the same place. —L. Boom
As the train lurches through its dark curves
a young woman grasping the pole
swings towards me in my seat
and her large breasts sway in an ornate
loose knit white blouse and nearly brush my face
offering an intangible perfume.
“Rabbi, Rabbi,” she cried.
“Do not touch me.” —John, xx,16-17
He knows the city in intimate bits:
store windows, empty streets, a man
seated on a step in front of a store,
a woman in a window overlooking rooftops,
a couple settling in their red, plush seats
in formal clothes, before the theater crowd
presses in. An usherette against the wall.
Canonically conjugate variables are pairs of properties,
like position and momentum, energy and time, linked in such a way
that they can not both be measured at the same time. —W. Heisenberg
Accident. The torn boy dies, shattered, under
pressure bandages, pouring IV’s, morphine,
the paramedic knows if he were someone else,
a surgeon, somewhere else, the OR,
the boy mangled in the road would live.
Omniscience is a fantasy of total power. —Marx
The city is ungovernable. —J.V. Lindsay
Shaving the outer skin of his fingertips
with a plastic lady’s razor a black man
with a gray stubble beard and hair—
is he a safe cracker preparing to feel within
the lock a delicate shift, or a lover
getting to the most sensitive layer
for the most intimate caress? What
would he not discover with those fingers—
what rods, tumblers, oiled wards.
Knowledge is Power. —Bacon
With much knowledge there is much suffering. —Rublev
“To confirm the conspiracy they wanted,”
he said over his moonshine martini,
“the intelligence was crap and we
couldn’t move on it but we needed
to plant stories around the world so we confirmed
what we knew was crap, and all the newsmen
swallowed corrupt intelligence and the war.”
On s’engage puis on voit. —Napoleon
