Response to "Sunday Morning": A Dialectic

I.

No death, no resurrection.
Plain enough.
Our lives but dirty laundry
down a chute.

But if no resurrection,
then no death?
The arrows run one way.

Death is not the mother of beauty,
nor of anything,
not even a part of water,
the part that sings.

Lost in death is the primal relation:
two eyes, one head.
No beauty,
if no perception.

What matters as the truth of beauty
is, in fact, regard,
a receiving of what has been offered,
a proffered gift;

else why the trip to see a painting,
hear a poem,
bed a lover.

Beauty is effect.
Art is otherwise simply a mummy,
once born, twice dead,
wrapped up,
to await resurrection.

What's important is the joining of things.

II.

Turn then to the joining of things
otherwise bereft.

A smile, a song, a flower:
all drive down deep
via nerves
in the form of emotion.

Reaction may also be buried,
may be retrieved
and experienced over and over.

Such retrievals provide resurrection
before we’re dead
when death destroys all emotion,
takes away all pain,
clears shame,  
and destroys all beauty.

One life and one death equals zero, except...
except
for the memories left over for others.
Small comfort, I confess,
nonetheless, a lasting form of life.

III.

And whence comes the notion of beauty?
Deep in the self: that strange ability to savor
what we can't define;

the improbable: a smile, a flower
which may not recur,
but, curiously,
may be re-experienced:
to be sure, not the smile or flower itself,
but the emotion
experienced in response to a smile;
the restrained response
to the gift that itself has offered.

IV.

What then is beauty but transaction,
minimal in force,
that grabs and shakes moral teeth?  

A small explosion
of such force it can make us cry,
double up in shock;

a delightful pain
that lifts us out of ourselves
to another realm
where nothing ever moves, ever changes,
and can never die:

that place of immaculate truth
where Plato's Forms
remain unmoving, implacable;

where completed lives are referred
and where pure Mind
may contemplate the only true beauty we know:
the imperfect kind.