At the time, I had been noticing the growing use of emoticons within what my students kept referring to as “texting.” (“Text,” I told them, means the whole as opposed to the portion or part thereof, so how could a parenthesis followed by a colon be considered “text”? That was a part, not a whole.) I could tell by their faces that I was losing the battle and that our culture was moving past me. For whatever reason—malice, spite, fatigue—I began writing poems with titles using emoticons: (:, ((( ))), :-0, B-), :-’, and others. My first title for “Ontology” was in fact “*-),” which apparently means “thinking.”
Ontology
After I hear a man on television
claim to be a stone-cold man,
a rock-solid man,
I wonder about the others
who haven’t come forward yet,
the daylily man, the katydid man,
men who define themselves
by what they have
a tenderness toward,
the morning dew man
who goes too quickly away.
And what about
the flowers-on-a-grave man,
off to the side, as usual,
though everyone eventually
knows him? Not to mention
the falling leaves man
who sometimes gets together
with the milkweed man,
the two of them
swapping long stories
about the rose-trellis man
down the road years back--
what a kook,
trying to act like
a moon-on-the-water man,
which clearly he wasn’t.
Probably for good reason my emoticon title idea was a colossal flop, as was my series of poems with titles like “LOL” and various abbreviations. Southern Poetry Review accepted “*-)” three years after I wrote it but suggested that I consider a different title. (Eventually I abandoned all of my emoticon titles.) I suppose I went from one extreme to another when finally choosing a title: ontology is a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being. A title like that ought to ratchet up the poem’s importance!
As for its opening line, I really did hear someone refer to himself as “a stone-cold man, a rock-hard man,” as if such descriptions should be met with applause or approval. Are those even valid descriptions, I thought. His bravado and arrogance annoyed me a bit too much, I’ll admit. Wouldn’t it make as much sense to say that I’m a hummingbird-wing man or a straw next to a fire man? Why “stone-cold” and not “leaf-strewn”? Why “rock-hard” and not “moss-soft”? I started making a list of other kinds of men: the daylily man, the katydid man. I thought the absurdity of such “men” might rival the absurdity of a “rock-hard man.”
I guess I’ve always pushed back against men defining themselves by aggression, toughness, speed, power, or any such attributes that seemingly never leave our consciousness. What would it be like to live in a world with “men who define themselves/by what they have/a tenderness toward”? What if men understood themselves as fleeting (morning dew), or what if men approached the world through the lens of grief (flowers-on-a-grave)? Can’t we have a different nature of being? Shouldn’t we?
Well, I tried to be both lighthearted and serious in this poem, a sort of “lightweight” in the manner of the first poem within Small Revolution. After all, we live “in these hostile times” where there is “a great deal more/we’ll need to know/before making/a final summation.”
Yes, the nature of being—understanding what it is, what it means, what it feels like, why it matters. Definitely worth “thinking” about.
I mean, wouldn’t we hate to find out one day that we chose part but not the whole? Wouldn’t we be embarrassed to have built a conception of self upon an abbreviated way of thinking?