A Grammar of Being: New Poems

By Lewis Ashman

Recently I said to my father, who is on the cusp of turning ninety, You should write down all the wisdom youve garnered in your long life so my brothers and I can learn as much as possible from you.

My father pondered that for a minute and then said, Too late. I dont remember.

A Grammar of Being is my effort to preemptively address this issue with my sons. Im a youthful sixty-something, but if Im going to say anything substantive to them, I can see that Id better say it now. Essentially, these are notes in the form of chain-linked poems, speculating on what it means to exist. What is being? How and why, can or should we make ourselves into persons? What kind of persons? Ive spent my entire life pondering such things, and I have no conclusion. None at all. I only have provisional insights of a thoroughly dubious nature. That, and a huge thankfulness for the process, accompanied by bouts of mild anguish.

I love my sons more than I love myself, which is saying a lot. I wanted to say something to them. This is it. Perhaps it will be interesting to other folks as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984548085

Lewis Ashman

Lewis Ashman is a graduate of Purdue University in philosophy. His novels Null And Void and October and his three poetry books Possible Worlds, Love And Other Wrongs, and April Fool, have been published by Xlibris.

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Copyright © 2018 by Poems by Lewis Ashman.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018909944

ISBN:              Hardcover                978-1-9845-4811-5

                         Softcover                  978-1-9845-4810-8

                         eBook                       978-1-9845-4808-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 08/21/2018

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

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784013

dedicated to

Samuel Eliot Ashman

and

Benjamin Wesley Ashman

with love

Contents

■   A Series Of The Form

■   Where There Is Sense There Must Be Order

■   A Somewhat Different Situation

■   The Algebra Of Logic

■   Intangible And Ethereal

■   The Point Of Writing

■   The Concept Of Meaning Something

■   A Picture Of A Person

■   Logic For A Vacuum

■   A System Of Reference

■   Beyond All Examples

■   A Maze Of Paths

■   Mathematicians Sometimes Think

■   There Is A Deeper Explanation

■   The View Could Be Better

A Series Of The Form

1.

The evidence is done; the placement is

finished and will not be altered in this

life or any other I can find the sense

to imagine. Where we meant to be

is as irrelevant to where we are

as distant planets or the river in

its bed gushing away, mud and waste, sticks

and leaves, the broken off nature of things.

What will be is like a quiet song that

drifts into thought, too far away to reach.

2.

A fashionable structure of thought bent

toward the unfashionable darkness

but that is also part of the design

revealed moment by moment to one who

only sits as if waiting but not in

fact waiting at all, only being. This

is also life. Thought can be laid aside,

too slender of a reed, expectation

can be surrendered, energy given

away pointlessly. This is also life.

3.

Along the edge things come apart but not

really, it’s our perspective that makes things

out there seem small and disassembled,

a broken outer shell that as we enter

draws up and stands as firm as these plain facts

we live among daily, orderly as

gravity. It is best to be grave; to

take all of this seriously. Even

if you have to make it up yourself, the

invention of usable life matters.

4.

The establishment of these locations

were events prior to anyone’s first-

hand experience, existing in deep

primordial memory beyond our

individual recall. And yet this

is what we were born into and what we

have each lived through, old ruins or present

day immediate structures as sound as

the dollar, though haunted by dead dreams

and torn notions of human possibility.

5.

Name: hard to pronounce. Identity: off

the charts. In other words, normal enough

for the place where we have landed, strangers

in weirdness. As it is, nothing here works

the way we sense that it should; kindness, which

should be as natural as breath, is as

rare as the golden treasure created

by working people and given over

to the already quite wealthy. Love is

for movies and belief mistaken for faith.

6.

The sieve of broken windows lets in a

sparkle of light, weak and spotty, and mud

clots on the floor at what used to be

work stations for the assembly of key parts

of merchandise the buying public had

a keen hankering for: those things just flew

off the shelves. Pigeons flutter among time-

worn ruins. Nobody takes care of this place.

Nothing is done. A jumble of weed trees,

ailanthus, crowds what was a parking lot.

7.

Shine and rise, sparkle and glisten, the new

day has dawned and all who were poor and hurt

will be richly healed in love and kindness,

the better angels will govern with true

justice while bigotry, misogyny,

racism, and homophobia will

be cast into the pit of darkness and fire

where they belong: love of money will

no longer rule, the fat white men will no

longer preside, all will be good and grand.

8.

As the years go slinking by like tired

animals looking for shelter, a place

to be hidden from examination

and judgment, the too much of it, and thoughts

or memories are the same, wilting to

nothing as they evade considering …

love is like that when it happens to chance

into life, abrupt with surprise, without

method or rationality if you’re human;

if you’re not, all of these words are wasted.

9.

As I have tried to explain … but here we

have to pause and meditate on what each

particular of the assertion might

mean, this trying and this explaining and

even this I whom I have lived with so

many tiresome years without learning

much about what he’s about. Not really.

Puffs of wind move the scattered white clouds

from horizon to horizon; in between

the sky is such a deep and endless blue.

10.

What it will do is impossible to

predict with any assurance of real

accuracy, though estimation of

close enough might actually be close

enough. All of it is beyond that

kind of crystalline proof that we always

find to be so comfortable, fuzzy

warm, so to speak. But here we are naked

as never before, beyond nude so to

speak: freezing and frightened into silence.

11.

And so we’re back to that. Take a break, let

your stride ease and now pause in your thinking

and take in the view which you have been

too busy to even notice, too busy

in your