Fruition is a poem about seeking fulfillment while acknowledging the constraints that govern our lives. As with much of my work, this piece uses the mundane as a point of entry into the philosophical.

The speaker references Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar,” in which Emerson criticizes the human need to name and order the word, expounding a return to a more natural state in which the world is experienced without a need to control it. The speaker then juxtaposes this view against Goethe’s philosophies, whose book Faustus questions the sustainability, not to mention ethics, of our desire to experience more and more, and more.

Solace is found in the historical figure of Linnaeus, inventor of the binomial system of naming—who categorized the world while living “a categorically unstortable life.”

Originally published in The Acentos Review.