Pointing FingersCurse Copernicus, and curse
Galileo, in the same breath,
malcontents whose persistence
cast us from the
center
of the universe.
They marooned us on a spinning
sphere, hurling through the void.
Dust.
Left now to our own devices,
and the ongoing revelations
of the disciples of science,
we must grapple with our
diminished status in a
greater cosmos.
Banished from the garden,
again.
Forgive me when I peer past you, over your
shoulder, when I wonder too long about the mysterious path
that led you here. It is that urge to know, though,
so hazardous to cats, that I do not always keep in check,
even with the risk of unwanted discovery.
It makes little sense.
For even as I look beyond you, I can assure you that
behind me lies nothing more than the long, slow Huckleberry
stream that finally delivered me here, now, to you, and that the
essential aspects of that journey are contained within me, that they
have been integrated already into who it is that you behold
now, that the details are all blurred into this flowing present tense,
as a tree will assert itself, complete, intact, in spite of - or
because
of -
whatever specifics may lie etched in those deeper rings.
These tributaries have performed their inevitable duties, yours and
mine, for Spring has already erupted, and the greater part of all
that we can celebrate lies less in what we each can do - for we have
navigated our separate waterways - than in what we may
encounter and invent and create
together.
I stand in a manicured federal pasture,
a rolling landscape of graceful, understated
slopes. And quiet stones. The ranks run north and
south, the files run east and west. This is the righteous
culmination of the order you sought, and the country
you imagined. Recalled upon death, this was your last
promotion.
But it is mid-June, and I am again on that construction
site, closed down over a dozen years ago. And again
I have climbed out to the edge of that still-rising
parabola, to gain the best vantage point to scan the far
horizon. I peer into the distance for a similar
monolithic form reaching back this way.
Again I do not see it. But you never were much for these
civilian projects.
So, while I toast our incompatible geometry, you have
long since been relieved of these negotiations, reassigned now
to the more predictable comfort of the company of all these other
still and silent soldiers, arrayed in this respectful grid,
orderly forever.
Around here, people aren't buried when they
pass on. If a casket were buried, it is said, the
ground would heave it back up.
It's a strange feature of the land in this place
that forces family and friends to leave the
departed on top of the ground
some stored in little concrete houses that hold
entire families, but most housed in single crypts,
concrete coffin covers, that just
rest upon the ground, as if there is still some
question about the finality or the reality of death,
after all. Or as if the funeral services
just haven't ended yet, as if they were each
interrupted or suspended, pending some ultimate
and necessary determination. They all
appear to be waiting - for the funeral to resume,
for a decision to be rendered, for the rest that they are
entitled to, instead of this eternal detention.
A country in the air,
they work their
loud but secret code
that none of us has cracked.
They offer up a clue,
they make a
sign against the sky.
It's only something else
that we can't understand.
It only leaves us asking still,
Less than what?
--Martin A. Mitchell
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