Any Enduring Answer Defeats the Purpose

Steve Orlen

If you watch them from the far side of the bar, you might think,
By the quick slashes of expostulation and the table-banging of reply,

That they’re arguing. The waitress guesses it’s football, or their wives.
The old gods hear the words good and evil, and pause in their roaming,

The way a retired plumber will stop at a construction site. This is
The Shanty Bar on Tuesday night. The two men sip their whiskey.

What interests them so fervently, besides taking the occasional
Bearing on their private lives? They’re revisiting the old values

With hammer and knife. Think of the serial murderer. Not the stalking,
Or the killing, but the long hours of reasoning. They’re calling on

The old imponderables, like the child, who, when first confronted
By the causa sui, demanded, “But what came before that before that

Before that?” This also interests the gods and moves them to recall
Their own obscure beginnings—a stream of light across the sky

Foretold by a child, a rock turned into an amulet at the burial ground
Of the mages—before they were hobbled with names

And yoked into temples. They’ve come out of their long retirement
Because they’re disappointed in the state of affairs. The good

Waste their time in dialectical argument, as though truth
Could be arrived at in dispute. The pious make excuses

In public, and ask forgiveness from man instead of God,
And are absolved because their sins are common and small.

Those possessed by rage kill a few, then blow their own heads off.
The evil are hunted down like dogs, and the judges ask

The most foolish of questions: Why? Where is Genghis Khan,
Whose warriors rode their little horses from Poland to the Yellow Sea

And murdered thousands to create a new center of the Universe?
Where is William Blake, that uninviting man

Who was a witness at the marriage of Heaven and Hell?
Will they break the cycle, these two amateurs? For whom

Any enduring answer is a defeat unless it leads to another question,
Or to the death of questions. Then what? Will they cut off

Each other’s heads and stumble around in that mushy dark,
Like miners searching out the last glint of gold?

Will a sudden apocalypse shake the table and send them forth
To hypothesize the fifth force, or like the hybrid of

The stupid, the greedy, and the mad, start a war that might end it all
By accident, and leave the gods to restage their own dramas?

At closing time, the two men put all such questions to bed,
For they are too human, all too human. Out in the street, the gods

Take note of those two monster-minds in whom they once put so much faith.
Wittgenstein leans against a car with his mouth sewn shut.

Nietzsche lies in the street, weeping and embracing a horse.
Confounded by it all, a man without a name

Smashes with a brick the window of the thrift shop next door,
Crawls in, lies down, curls up, closes his eyes, and waits

In his own streaming blood for the sound of sirens.

Steve Orlen (1942–2010) published seven volumes of poetry during his lifetime, including PEN International Award finalist The Elephant’s Child: New & Selected Poems 1978–2005 (Ausable Press, 2006), This Particular Eternity (2001), and Permission to Speak (1978). Orlen was awarded Poetry magazine’s George Dillon Memorial Award, as well as three National Endowment for the Arts grants, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a professor in the MFA Program at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and taught at the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College. He lived with his wife, the painter Gail Marcus-Orlen, in Tucson.

“Any Enduring Answer Defeats the Purpose” appears in our Summer 2009 issue.