disbelieved, disdained, still you thrive, still you clog my heart

1

Ten times an hour, it feels like, I arrive in my brooding,
my fretting, my grumbling, at enormous generalizations,
ideations, intellections, speculations, which before
they're even wholly here I know I'll soon disprove.
Yet knowing I'll refute them, knowing I'm not qualified
to judge them, still I need them, still, forgive me, cherish them.

Though I also fear them: truly I am frightened of you,
dubious conjectures, philosophic flights of folly,
casting such synthetic light on so many dire issues
that bedevil and dismay. Yet, disbelieved, disdained,
still you thrive, still you clog my heart, foliating
from I dare not entertain what stony, nettled soil.

2

And what if once something like a truth should come,
what if in these spurts of cogitation, these suppositions strung
like air on air, a real truth were actually vouchsafed,
in a form I'd understand, in terms I might convey?
What would stop me thinking what comes next,
that something else, that always something else again?
How divert the charter, how quiet the obliterating clamor?
How accept that long-anticipated comprehension
as that to which I might acquiesce at last?
And teach me, too, my unimpeachable convictions,
tell me, when we're so devoted to the rational,
how to relish the relinquishment of being not?

[C.K. Williams {1936-2015}, 'Rash' from Wait: Poems]