The Cometary Script

Assume you have discovered an entropy of spirit, immeasurable of course, but it pulls graveward all those whose element is breath, not as the in and out again of water and the sun, but oblivion’s ass-first downhill twenty-four-hour drag. Knowledge is an after-the-fact affair, fair game for a hunger striker’s skeptic gopher tooth. Remember your “agenbite of inwit,” but don’t, please don’t, go knocking on doors declaring you’ve gone hollow with all the others, no one will believe you so long as your bag of flesh is fair. Fall down the stairs to another street. Have you noticed nature does not care for you, no matter the pathos of your fallacies, your antiperspirant, or you arms folded over the stretch marks of your hardest years? That’s you, cell mate, roping a Platonic calf. Rare air, this is all you’ll catch and never can. Live on that for a week and leave a message on your machine, “nourished by words alone.” Those fireworks you inherited, where are they now? Will you set them off to end the show? You have a story that simply cannot be sold, and no rewrite can change country or cast, so here you are in never-never land again. That figure off there in the mist is Nietzsche, stay clear, they say his breath is vile, he needs his space or so the professors say. Were you handed this out of an old script or are you improvising this to-do? Whatever you are, an actor or a human merely with all the other actors, or can you tell the difference without a script in hand, you talk about a text that is not there. Each morning your own short-form obituary appears on every page. An open mike will follow. But this is only in the babblesphere, don’t inhale those dialogues that bubble up. Weariness grows in direct proportion to answers that recede nightly as you snore. Did you audition for this part or did you win it in an all-night poker game? The difference is the same, none, today. Don’t give your chips to another to bet, that’s stacking the odds in your favor, sharing the blame. Avoid places where the lights are always on. Try finding a sunset through a simple gift of looking west. There can be too much light for your own good. Pace Pascal. Let someone close your eyes. Necessary, or so I’m told. That hand in front of your face, try it now.

Clarice, the Swiss Appraiser, paces our rooms, listing furnishings
on her yellow legal pad with a Waterman pen, a microcamera.
Although I've asked why we have to do this, I forgot the answer.

The answer to why is because, inscrutable, outside of logic,
helpless, useless because. Wing chairs, a deco lamp, my mother's
cherry dining table—nothing we both loved using looks tragic.

Most nights now I sit in the den reading the colorful spines
of your art books, Fra Angelico to Zurburan, volume after volume

In order to perfect all readers
the statements should be carved
on rock walls, on cave walls,
and on the side of pillars so
the charm of their instruction can
affect the mountain climbers near
the cliffs, the plainsmen near
the pillars, and the city people near

‘This is the key which was given by the angel Michael to Pali, and by Pali to Moses. If “thou canst read it, then shalt thou understand the words of men, … the whistling of birds, the language of date-trees, the unity of hearts, ... nay, even the thoughts of the rains.”’
Gleanings after the Talmud
Ah! could I read Schemhammphorasch,
The wondrous keynote of the world,
What voices could I always hear
From tempests, with their black wings furled,

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet

I see him moving, in his legendary fleece,
Between the superhighway and an Algonquin stone axe;
Between the wild tribes, in their lost heat,
And the dark blizzard of my Grandfather’s coat;
Cold with the outdoor cold caught in the curls,
Smelling of the world before the poll tax.

And between the new macadam and the Scalp Act
They got him by the short hair; had him clipped

Bavaria, 1946 The clairvoyante, a major general’s wife,
The secretaries’ sibyl, read the letters

By the stream, where the ground is soft
and gives, under the slightest pressure—even
the fly would leave its footprint here
and the paw of the shrew the crescent
of its claws like the strokes of a chisel
in clay; where the lightest chill, lighter
than the least rumor of winter, sets the reeds
to a kind of speaking, and a single drop of rain