Thoughts While Reading Aristotle’s Ethics at a Chinese Restaurant
in China Where I am Stared at.
He who sets
his mind to learn
sits down at
the edge of being
where there
is nothing there as yet
and matter
waits for a new pattern,
a teenage
girl at a tattoo parlor.
How can
shapeless matter
be a teenage
girl
at a tattoo
parlor?
And if there
is nothing there as yet
how can there
be matter there at all?
Questions I
hear asked me by the people.
Ilya Gutner
Ilya Gutner was born in the Soviet Union
in Moscow and grew up in New York. Was for a time a PhD student in Slavic
Studies at Brown but that soon ceased to be an option. Studies philosophy now
in Shanghai, China. Google services make not of one small set of things
published with the Ottoman Estate under a collective title, Poem about how to
live; something quite childish for Boston University's Clarion magazine; and a
long silence gathering up things to say since then.
Tags:
Poetry