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On the Origins of Things
Everyone knows that the moon started out
as a renegade fragment of the sun, a solar
flare that fled that hellish furnace
and congealed into a flat frozen pond suspended
between the planets. But did you know
that anger began as music, played
too often and too loudly by drunken performers
at weddings and garden parties? Or that turtles
evolved from knuckles, ice from tears, and darkness
from misunderstanding? As for the dominant
thesis regarding the origin of love, I
abstain from comment, nor will I allow
myself to address the idea that dance
began as a kiss, that happiness was
an accidental import from Spain, that the ancient
game of jump-the-fire gave rise
to politics. But I will confess
that I began as an astronomer—a liking
for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things,
a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit—
and that my longing for you has not taken me
very far from that original desire
to inscribe a comet’s orbit around the walls
of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.
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Troy Jollimore’s poetry collections include Earthly Delights, Syllabus of Errors, which was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best poetry books of 2015, and Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also authored or edited four books of philosophy, including Love’s Vision and On Loyalty. He lives in Northern California, where he teaches philosophy.
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Jan Steen, The Dancing Couple. Oil on canvas,1663. National Gallery of Art
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