For Now
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The mind ain’t nothing without the old body
tagging along to follow things through.
- Sam Shepard, La Turista
What lasts in the body is the beauty of the eye even if it doesn’t know better, even if it dreams while opened, while sleeping, while the voices talk on, rambling, saying nothing really – just words that mean other words that mean something else altogether, and it’s snowing – did I tell you that? – the drifts are to the windowsill by now – and the house is settled in against the hard silence of winter sunlight and shade across the floor in the mornings and the stiff darkness of solitude in the deep night that will refuse to end – meanwhile, the phone doesn’t ring and that’s a good thing – and the letters aren’t mailed, and there’s no one to guess your thoughts.
If you had a dream, it was bartered long ago – If you found the path, its fact was undeniable but not possible –
Like Jane Kenyon wrestling Akhmatova to the page, word after word, making perfect sense, a bridge between two dead poets
Like Franz Kafka, head bent over his diary, hand moving, while Prague, swollen and angry, pushes hard against his window
Like my afternoon, driving my father, his second week of radiation – something hiding in his body but his focus is Hosni Mubarak, Tahrir Square, death mask of Tutankhamun, Hezbollah and the Brotherhood, news from the Knesset, the Suez, drops of perfume ... the Cairo Tower – Steps or elevator? He can’t remember. Who remembers forty years? Meanwhile, I’m driving.
Meanwhile, I’m thinking global, thinking universal. I can’t add to politics. So I go science –
“Did you hear about the six new planets they’ve found, orbiting Kepler-11?” I ask.
“... the only friend we have,” he says.
“Two million light years away.”
“...will bring Europe to its knees. And we’ll follow,” he says. “It’s bad business.”
“Yes, yes. You might be right.” I let go the star, and measure the sound of his voice.
“...radioactive dirty bombs.”
One less story,
more ways than one:
His eyes, first on me,
then straight ahead –
on me, then