Person of Interest
Truth is the fat corrupt detective
who stares through a one-way mirror
at a comfortless interrogation room
and a suspect, i.e., a thinker
who, knowing the cop is there,
performs for him (being also
the interrogator), wonders
*How close am I to cracking?*
(hammering on the glass)
but not *Will I be charged?* since
there are no charges and no innocence.
*Clamantis
“How long,” he cried, “will you be prisoners
of grammar? If you need comfort,
take comfort. Punishment? It’s yours.
The sense that you are precious, or forgiven –
by all means feel it!
If the grave frightens you, imagine
where you would rather go. But to believe
that there must therefore be a comforter,
a vast cherishing hand,
is to surrender more than you receive.
Miracle is a verb with no subject.
Appropriate unto yourselves, I say,
all blessings, for there is nothing else to bless.”
And in a sense they heard him.
For the word uttered in vacuum
is nonetheless commissioned
by history delighting in itself.
The library torn and burnt
is accessible in eternity. The mob
that sacked it was composed
always of basically good people;
the scholar who maintains it
is as motiveless as his laugh.
Shading
What mulch, what flotsam fermenting after rain
brings to me now an approximation
of turpentine?
Smell of truth, I thought during childhood,
or of an activity so absorbing
it would always have priority.
And of the hallways of that building
where my father lived after the separation,
bitter and willful and more inscrutable
than usual. And yet
he too, I sensed, was at a distance:
a critic and curator. We entered
the studios of his friends, on that floor
and others, and I knew
that truth was the gaudy agon,
the somber residual slum,
the form, half-glimpsed half-biomorphic,
of Fifties Chicago Abstraction.
With all this going for me, why didn’t
I paint? In the atrium of the building,
which I never entered, the gods
sat around the bird-stained, filigreed-iron
table and said: He will seek
the illusory eternity
of the Word; he will be too frightened of matter.
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