Two Poems by Hannah VanderHart

The Surviving Fairy Tale

An actual world; real mud with tracks in it; the mud perceived by eternity
with whom I am friends; logic’s ability

and chapter 5: the sheer cliff
wherein logic is confused and runs away; proof of analytic language; a speech

along a lonely road by an old woman whom I address as grandmother; objective
uncertainty in all things, even in the forest;

rational you; the end as sum; you calling
end beginning; you happy; goats and bridges; all things well a variant

ending of the text which otherwise simply ends.

 

What is Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the door to a courtroom
that you walk through to find Aquinas

beside a massage table. And he proceeds
to wash your feet although they are clean.

It is a fly’s wing. The silver branching
on the wing’s vellum. As discussed before

it is the eye prior to its loss of sight. But
also all the staring white and sightless eyes.

In a children’s illustrated Pilgrim’s Progress
Christian walks through the darkened valley

and the skulls and femurs kick up in piles
on either side his path. In this picture meta-

physics is nothing. It has shaken hands with
allegory and left. The City of Destruction

shimmers in the heat like a mirage and fades
while metaphysics, solid as a chalkboard,

scratches away at the simplest number, 1.

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About the Author:

Hannah VanderHart lives by the Severn River in Annapolis, MD. She is a graduate fellow at Georgetown University, where she works with the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. She has poetry published across the US, to include Prick of the Spindle, Rock & Sling, Measure, and also in the UK (1110).