Song Behind a Rear-Tined Tiller
They believed consciousness resided in the heart,
Aristotle believed this, and the Egyptians
who scooped out dead pharaoh’s brain
through his nose with a spoon
and stuffed his skull with rags assuring
that he would not be thinking in the other world
to which he’d travel by long boat
being wrapped in cloth, speechless, in gold, supine,
embarked with a breathless retinue of slaves
through the hole at the end of the earth
to a place far in imagination.
Here and now sunlight climbs a trellis of trees
along a rail line on which, at irregular intervals,
a freight comes dragging coal behind three engines
or hauls boxcars labeled J.B. Hunt,
or pulls chains of steel cubes and chemical tanks
heavy with inventions of consciousness,
some inscribed with graffiti sprayed by
a deft hand in bold letters, in colors
set with a master’s touch
tuned to the tones of both heart and brain
while the smell of blue-grey diesel
sparks a synapse between beats
and one step follows another
behind a rear-tined tiller
as I urge a throttle.
Who knows who sings
through what instrument
—did Aristotle?
Jim Culleny
from Odder Still
Leana’s Basement Press, 2015
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