Oliver Rice
WE IN OUR SHIELDING AURAS ARRIVING
WHERE WE HAD NOT QUITE INTENDED
I'm checking on what's in the world.
What's left.
—Susan Sontag
The role of the educated intellect
is to remain critical of all popular
passions.
—William James
Neuroscience has been quite busy.
The nuclear arsenals proliferate.
The streets comply with miscellaneous persons.
Technology is taking original sin
out to farther and farther stars.
Anthropology gropes along the back streets.
Time has neither conscience nor caution.
Asia is reawakening.
How idiomatic are the fallacies.
---
The tempo in the cerebrum, they say,
is eight to twelve electrical cycles a second,
brisk for our excursions into the actualities,
the ambiguities in which we are immersed,
we who incur fantasies of many cities,
who earnestly probe all emergent myths,
mottos of the golden ages,
disquietudes of the statues,
who are baffled by the night spirits,
who meanwhile must evade old idolatries
and the syndromes of our time,
---
the blue Aegean visible
through the olive trees and the pines,
the doorways gazing impassively
upon what is thought to be happening,
the ballerinas with infinite planes entranced.
Oliver Rice has received the Theodore Roethke Prize, twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and twice featured on Poetry Daily. His poems have been published widely in the United States, as well as in Canada, England, Austria, Turkey, and India. His book, On Consenting to Be a Man, will come out from Cyberwit, a diversified publishing house in the cultural capital, Allahabad, India, and will be available soon on Amazon.
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