Sublimity

“When you’re dealing with questions of the sublime you need the answer to be metaphysical.” 
- Anthony Bourdain

There’s an equal distance between 
awe and fear. Remedy: 
a backpacker guitar or 
Turkish chickpea soup. 

Tellicherry moon, who
holds orbit like a
crater-cradled secret.
Galaxy business. 

Here at the precipice or
sunlight, it plays tricks on
the eyes. Distance muffles
cloud cover and the white-capped
tide accordions.

Tears appear from the eyes 
of the madonna at city center.

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In a Romanticism class we learned that the word ‘sublime’ means teetering on fear and awe: be it a mountain peak, the supernatural, uncertainty, etc. Much of the art of the Romantic era (1800-1850s-ish) was concerned with this capturing/expressing this feeling. My professor for that class wore a seersucker suit most days and wouldn’t listen to music made after 1850. You could say he was in pursuit of the sublime.

This poem plays with an Anthony Bourdain quote from the recent documentary and tries to capture moments of sublimity through a variety of avenues, however brief: music, food, science, perspective, religion.