Object, Objet D'Art Poem by Desmond Kon

I am not frost that forms crystals
in the clearing. It is on trees and twigs
on my toes too from the gaping mouth
of my old boots. I have no more tools

that make things more slippery
the way I like it. The tragedy of falling
of ever falling into the arms of him
is an object of faith. I’ve been stepped

on too, like frost, singular as his wish
its hidden faces. We are not blameless
never – but we are unmet kindness
sounds verbatim as if words, wrappers

simply solidified, blue under the ice.
There is now ice in my broken shoe.
Words should be cyan too, stony too
to keep still, my mind these few days.

It only reads like brushing and teeth.
It’s forgotten how to object to its own
sterile rhythms. Frost tells me to take in
this winter, the woods alone, and wait

to watch the water clear, that I may.




Author's note:

An earlier version of this poem, originally titled 'Objection', appeared in Distillery.

In his book, Heidegger and the Language of Poetry (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,1978) , David A. White remarks on how for Heidegger, the modern separation between philosophy and poetry is arguably progressive, as he vies for a reclamation of unity between thinking (Denken) and poetizing (Dichten) . In commenting on the first part of Heidegger’s Gelassenheit, a transcription of the eponymous 1955 public lecture to commemorate the 175th birthday of Swabian composer Conradin Kreutzer, White writes:

“Modern man, Heidegger says, is 'in flight from thinking.' It is true that there is thinking in abundance, if thinking means research to implement planned projects of one sort or another, but Heidegger contends that such thinking deals only with 'given conditions' for 'determined purposes.' Heidegger names this type of thinking 'calculative' (rechnende) and distinguishes it from 'reflective' (besinnliche) thinking…. Both types of thinking are necessary – here as elsewhere the letter of Heidegger’s argument is in no sense reactionary – but it is the second type, reflective thinking, which Heidegger has in mind when he claims that modern man is 'in flight' from thinking…. There is no practical end to reflective thinking; rather, its purpose is to achieve an understanding of how being is in itself and how it can be appropriated to fulfil practical ends. Thus, before the poet can initiate the calculative techniques integral to his activity as a poet, he must already have practiced what Heidegger has here named reflective thinking.”