Raccoons at a bird feeder
exhibit nervous confidence
I wish I could emulate.

Dawn grays like a phony beard.
Already a chainsaw whines
in the distant falling woods.

Chainsaw. Raccoons. Forest.
Not exactly a mantra but
a syllogism. Today, Monday,

I want to become learned
after wasting fifty years at
projects of my own devising,

such as grazing among used books
at Johnson's while the city dark
bled from open pores and stonework

cracked in facades of mansions
erected in a gentler age.
I want to become learned

by weeping over Nietzsche
and exulting as Plato's
Republic crushes dissent.

I read these works with innocence
not of the world but myself;
and now that I'm much uglier

than architecture once deplored,
I can safely inhabit
the haunted places I shunned.

Now the raccoons, spooked by the light,
trundle into the woods and sigh
that heavy mammalian sigh

I remember from years of feeling
raccoonish, a state of being
of which no one should be ashamed.

Plato offers no place for me,
but he could teach me to argue
my way to the center of things

where politicians crouch, raccoonish,
and the dawn burns on white marble
with an arrogant suffering

only finely blended intellects,
alert to every spire and dome,
are allowed to take to the grave.