Everything We Know

Poetry by Nick Courtright

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Nick Courtright is the author of Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist published in 2012 by Gold Wake Press, and Let There Be Light, which is forthcoming in early 2014. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, and The Iowa Review, among numerous others, and a chapbook, Elegy for the Builder’s Wife, is available from Blue Hour Press. He is the Interviews Editor of the Austinist, an arts and culture website based in Austin, Texas, where he teaches English, Humanities, and Philosophy, and lives with his wife, Michelle, and son, William. Feel free to find him at nickcourtright.com.

One of my primary philosophical and poetic interests is that of epistemology, the question of what we can know and what we cannot know, and what we think we know when in fact we probably don’t know those things, either. This poem is about this, and its movements from one thing (the first word, Caesar’s dying breath, the dust to dust situation) to another I think are emblematic of the scatteredness of our human knowledge—the river of all our knowledge is kind of a grand Wikipedia of sorts, but it’s trapped beneath the sea, where it cannot help but be obscured. Despite this, in an infinite universe there must exist truth, and that means that, for us, there remains hope of our having it. I’m so glad to have this poem in Flyway, as it’s been through a lot. For several years it was trapped in a dead manuscript, but finally it found its place: in this journal, and in Let There Be Light, my forthcoming manuscript due out in early 2014.

In dream’s antechamber beneath the sea,

the river of man’s

accumulated knowledge. Capture that river in a jar. Shake.

What you get is a bevy of perspectives. Of clouds, of the northern ice,

of all words once being one word. And the air

that begins all thoughts, how did it get here?

The way one brilliant day is tulips/

there are no tulips/there are tulips/all of us are tulips.

We are all breathing a little

of Caesar’s dying breath

(we are breathing a bit of this, molecularly, it has been proven).

Like this, in only a matter of time all stone must be life.

So sing!:

All adaptations and translations are salt into salt into salt,

some of the sea and some of the rock,

before we know it we’ll have every answer we want.