Beyond Reason

How is it?—that we come to believe so much
relies on thinking? Sure, the philosophers gaze
into the night sky. Those noble few who are

not star-struck but star-thinkers, delving upward,
and inward and deeper than other thinkers
until their thoughts pull them to the deepest

nether-regions where epiphany and cataclysm resound
synonymously with soft-dull-thuds. Down
where the ships lay, where the multitudes of Black Sea

towns lay, covered by water which lacks reason—
water that insists on existing anyway.
When each self-important thinker passes,

their bodies burned in a glorious fire or boxed
up like gifts lowered slowly into the dark
earth, their thoughts go with them

or remain in books that decay or are replaced
with new books of new thoughts of dead thinkers
who gazed up at the stars and cried out to pass on

their self-important ideas. Meanwhile, the buoyant
clouds drag their bloated bellies from here to there,
dropping payloads like nature’s bombardiers—

neither thinking nor celebrating the grand idea
of their noble work. They are the doing of it—the reality
of what remains when the thinking is done. Even

the “great philosophers” cannot match their complexity
or simplicity—nor persist in any meaningful way
before clouds that so easily blot out the sky.