CLOSING TIME
Someone invites me to write my way out of the year.
I feel today as though nothing is of moment,
there is a great sense of So Whatness.
But.
Not everything is picayune.
Earlier, I received a note
to look on a website, at photographs,
taken before the fall of the city of Bam,
the city in Iran earthquaked into ruin.
I felt I was looking at Roman Vishniac's
photographs of prewar Polish Jews,
feeling not the superior knowledge of one
who knows how the story ends, but the tears
of God who cannot arrest the free will of
man or Nature run psychotic brandishing a knife.
There is another picture: a Bengal tiger,
up close, its eyes staring out at me.
He is in a zoo but he is not Rilke's panther:
there is nothing restless in the gaze,
his soul is calm and visible.
He has no interest in me, in others, even
in being let alone. He is content simply
to observe himself being observed,
confident in his self-knowledge
via my act of anthropomorphism that,
given the opportunity wrought by human stupidity,
he will eat my throat.
Tomorrow the memory of Bam will be in place.
The tiger will continue to stare.
The calendar will have changed.
So Whatness is too important to be wasted.
KTW/12-31-03
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Kenneth
Wolman
http://www.kenwolman.com
"i had not really expected to find any of the art world populated with
ex-murderers fascists green berets and now i know that you can find
anything in the art world and they can even become prophets' -- David
Antin, "Tuning"
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