BLESSING IN DISGUISE
Die knowing something.
—Walker Evans
there is no beer. E=mc2. Beyond the death of self,
more than a dreamless sleep, the absence of all things
familiar, something greater than the freedom from
the vagaries of the marketplace survives. For example,
in a blue day abundant red flowers against a yellow wall.
He died into his statue, a very young boy says
a few steps behind us in the museum courtyard.
Well. Maybe. Sure. Why not, we speculate. In heaven
As distant in time as the memory of memory is in mind,
small caskets in the museum, which once held sandals,
bones, the hair of saints, a piece of the True Cross,
a remnant of Christ’s seamless robe, rest in glass cases.
Now, scientists tell us, at the deepest subatomic level,
if you look closely enough, nothing’s there holding
any of it together, not the caskets in the museum,
the wood, iron, copper, silver; not the peacock feathers,
turquoise, agate, amethyst, ivory, pearls and jasper
that adorn them; not the holy relics; not the red flowers,
the yellow wall; not us. It seems we are bound to this world
the way color is bound to its seed, the seed to the dark.
—from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
__________
M.K. Meder: “While exploring the planes on which the finite and the infinite sometimes meet, the coincidence of a kind I’m also pleased to discover in my kitchen and my garden now and then, much of my work, as this poem does, returns to me as an often elusive sense of wonder, without which I’d find the obligation to live joyfully otherwise unimaginable.”
