The first thing I'd say is that I don't think, and have never said, that sensory perception is everything or the only thing; it is merely what we have to work with. When I talk to people about phenomenology and sensuism—concepts I explore humbly because I feel I'm a novice in the arena—I am often confronted by statements that "there must be more."

Well, I agree that there are facets to the world than we cannot perceive due to our particular toolbox. We are limited to what we can perceive with our bodies, our remarkable but still-bounded sensory organs attached to our brains. You point this out well, and I agree that this set of limitations means we get a human experience of the world, rather than an objective experience of that "grey world." Yet I am enthralled and grateful for my human body for what it allows me; I daily unpack the gifts of the senses because they seem to me constantly refreshed and infinite in capacity to renew my experience.

That's the point of intersubjectivity. Our experience is certainly subjective, as is the experience of every other thing. My subjective experience intersects that of, say, my cat or the tiny aphid depicted in the photos above. We intersect in time, in the lebenswelt each of us has. So I agree we may not always, or ever, perceive what's there. I'm not so interested in that. I'm challenged enough to write about what I perceive, which I hope makes me fully human and connects me to others who seek the same. I don't want to transcend humanness. I like being human and accept my limitations for the beauty they offer.

Your ultimate question fascinates me. Is poetry a "quarrel or critique" of dasein? I don't know. It could be, for some poets. I don't feel it is for me, but tomorrow I might discover a different understanding. I suppose a well made poem seems more to me like the poet is making love to the moment, not fighting it.

Thanks for your thoughtful and insightful ideas here. Party on.

Chicks with their eggshells still adhering to their tails dart for cover when a hawk flies overhead, but not when the bird is a gull or duck, heron or pigeon. Furthermore, if the wooden model of a hawk is drawn over their coop on a wire, they react as though it were alive—unless it be drawn backward, when there is no response.

Here we have an extremely precise image—never seen before, yet recognized with reference not merely to its form but to its form in motion, and linked, furthermore, to an immediate, un-planned, unlearned, and even unintended system of appropriate action: flight, to cover. The image of the inherited enemy is al-ready sleeping in the nervous system, and along with it the well-proven reaction. Furthermore, even if all the hawks in the world were to vanish, their image would still sleep in the soul of the chick—never to be roused, however, unless by some accident of art; for example, a repetition of the clever experiment of the wooden hawk on a wire. With that (for a certain number of generations, at any rate) the obsolete reaction of the flight to cover would recur; and, unless we knew about the earlier danger of hawks to chicks, we should find the sudden eruption difficult to explain.

All I mean to say is that it's possible we never perceive "what's there." I was reading the other day that the colors of the world—your zinnia's colors, for example—don't really exist "in the world"; only various wavelengths of light exist. These light wavelengths are not colored, but our brains convert them to perceptions of color. In other words, color is something that our brain perceives, and not every person or every animal shares the same color view of the world. If our brains were not able to convert these wavelengths into color perceptions, we would see the world "as it is"—in shades of gray. That gray world is dasein—Not somewhere any of us wants to live, I think!

I guess what I'm wondering aloud, stumbling toward, is a question. Is poetry not a kind of quarrel with or critique of dasein? Or maybe I'm overcomplicating the whole damn thing.....