Eugene Ostashevsky

The Premises of Grass

The Laughing Philosopher has entered
the Witless Relocation Program


Outside his window there’s a rooster
that looks like a toaster


In the field there’s a cow
on whose rump sits a crow


The crow snaps its wings, caws erratically
but the cow only smiles enigmatically


The Laughing Philosopher thinks,
Ah Nature


nonexistent daughter
of the rhetoric of cognition


We cannot reach you
But there are your representatives


speechless, the animals
conscious machines


of self-replicating nucleic acids
What is life Nature


How does it appear
by accident


How does it stand
on its own four feet


What does it see
out of the moist convexity of its eye

 

 

"The Premises of Grass" first appeared in Boston Review, 30:2 (April-May 2005); and Walt Whitman Hom(m)age, Eric Athenot and Olivier Brossard, eds. (New York: Turtle Point; Paris: Joca seria, 2005).