I can say without fear of contradiction that if you sat down the ten smartest people in the world, you could ask them questions for which they had no answers. I read once that if human knowledge was seen as a growing island and its shoreline was the unknown, it could be said that the unknown grows, too, I suppose because new knowledge lets us ask new questions. I’ve long been a student of how we all come up against the limits of our knowledge for reasons such as aptitude, vocabulary, education, or whatever. I like to try and keep stretching and reaching for new territory. I hope I do not belabor the following metaphor:
Here at a scarred library
table salvaged from a one-
room country schoolhouse I sit
pondering fugitive thoughts.
Running bold and rowdy like
desperadoes in unmarked
territory, they escape
through dry desert arroyos
or ragged canyons that gnarl
and prejudice the terrain.
No map or highway signs
exist, and I walk unread
and unknowing. Pictures carved
on this desk have no meaning;
knowledge hid in the dark is
blocked in this narrow canyon.
