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Poetry

The Epistemology Professor Losing it in Cincinnati

by Paul Dickey

About the third time, Dad told Mom,
who was driving the car:
“Exit at Highway 27, coming up
in a half mile.” She said, “I know.”

“I know that you know; I am saying it over
and over because I cannot know that you know.”
Once again, Dad didn’t know what
he was saying. He should know better.
He had a degree in the field. He was
always telling me when I came home
after curfew that a proposition cannot
meaningfully state its negative.

One cannot, he would explain, propose
in meaningful discourse, the statement
‘This proposition is false’ – for if it
were false, it would then be true,
or if true, it would be false.
I told him that I hadn’t meant to lie,
but it never mattered.
I knew I was grounded.

In the night, he could see the road map
only when lights flashed randomly
through the side windows.
Later, when we got to the hotel,
he would explain what he meant:
the duplicity of meaning over the term
know, and the failure of the constructs
of propositional logic to express the human.

He will write a paper for The Philosophical Review.
To me, it was only my lost father,
still in the dark, his raised voice sounding
like screaming, speaking his no.

Paul Dickey’s book of poetry, Anti-Realism in Shadows and Suppertime, was released in September 2022. In the past year he has also released a volume of flash fiction, What My Characters Should Have Said, and a poetry chapbook A Reading of Dali (Likely Misunderstood) Which in Twenty Meters Becomes This Poet’s Self-Portrait.