! ! What Is Your Substance...? Poem by Michael Shepherd

What’s your ‘substance’, Aristotle, pray? -
that in your book On Metaphysics, you
should feel the need to look at ‘being’ more
than Plato said of soul? How ‘know thyself’?

You focus your so glorious mind, O sage,
on what confronts us in our human state;
hoping that from there, all will disclose
itself; and so you seek to formulate:

in Book Four, Chapter Two, acutely list
four ways, four meanings, of the Greek as used;
to us, they’re more apparent grammar-wise:
‘being’ as noun, verb, adverb, adjective…

you ultimately choose the languaged thing:
nouned as existence, substance - ‘ousia’;

no wonder Shakespeare took you up on that;
asking as he did, God’s self in human form
what were the essence of that insubstantial
substance that the world’s whole being holds:

and out from all these cloudy worlds of thought -
it’s ‘constancy’ in godly human heart..

I wonder, Aristotle, if Will’s search
to see the One that’s constant in the All
would satisfy your subtle Grecian mind?

or, in Creation’s grammar as it lives,
do active verbs precede substantive nouns?
And do we know our godly self more true,
as constant in ourselves, in Being Now?

*

[For Pete, who asked]