944. MOREOVER

MOREOVER
Oldavai Gorge?
Was that the place?
Where Mankind started?
Discovery of the circle and the
square, the line and the wheel?
All that stuff? And only by an
art of such breathtaking simplicity
is the world made? Was the world made?
Where was the screen? Who filtered this
reality in, or then out? I can't say, do you see?
-
Let me get personal - as a little boy, I walked
the gaunt streets of Bayonne, looking at churches,
listening to my father tell me where and how
he lived. The place where his house once was -
'now gone?' I asked. 'Yes,' he said, 'now gone.'
I was surprised how little it mattered to me.
-
Old immigrant Italian soldiers, looking like
for all feast-days small Mussolini henchman
bent on enacting revenge : a stupid Italian
grudge killing, eye for eye, all that talk. I
heard it all forever, in language after language
until I was strangled by the ill-repute and the
stench of death itself.
-
As I grew older, I still wanted to know -
'who started all this stuff, and why?' No
one ever answered my catcalls or queries.
Now, they're all dead - their sickening vengeful
pride having delivered them from nothing, least
of all the grave. I guess they get flowers, though
I wouldn't know, never having visited one of their
graves. The old streets are all gone, just like them:
fedoras and toothpicks and ill-fitting suits.