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In January - Poem
Literary Review, Summer, 2000 by Robert Wexelblatt
The celebrated relativity of time we may grasp, but who knows time? To feel it requires some space, to believe it you have to move. All the most essential trees are known solely by their fruits, from mother's love to the Big Bang. Festooned between bright effect and hazy cause is, I suppose, faith. This long empty afternoon is empty because it's long, long because it's empty. Pencil colored, chilly, opaque, pointless, more an engraving of an afternoon. My sister likes to insist that Everything Happens For A Reason. She means, of course, a good reason. Wrapped in this quilt she's snug enough, proof against all chilly, merely apparent evils. The only faith she needs is in a weird roulette that spins for her: Providence. No Stoic ever claimed that fatalism must be disconsolate. Science is an activity pursued part time by scientists. At their conferences none proclaims that what they all believe is real is not all of reality to any of them, that even chemists crave luxuries, comforts, lust for warmth. Who'd choose to be a crow on a wet black branch in January, aware of nothing but one's needs and hardly of their satisfaction, just to know all the reasons that aren't good? Being is wanting; there's an axiom, first principle beyond disproof. Being isn't having. Who wants to be and not have? The cracker crumbs I spread across the gray snow this morning draw from the gray sky, down the gray air, black birds. Sharp heads hammer greedily, squamate feet dance daintily across the crust. For these the afternoon has been neither long nor empty, nothing happened for a good reason, and night, blacker and colder, neither too empty nor too long, will arrive just in time.
Robert Wexelblatt is a professor of humanities at Boston University's College of General Studies
COPYRIGHT 2000 Fairleigh Dickinson University
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
