Epistle (third poem)

Epistle

I have always meditation the real world was wherever you could die and know you were dying, plane if you had never tasted life-blood or caught your newborn by means of her slippery shoulders, gasping, a streaked fruit of the plum-tree

And yet there are sum of two units worlds, the unreal and the real. In the two the rain slants and the orb of day falls. But if a spray of bullet interferes, the difference extends sharper, like a cold snap. And we apologize for living.

Are the President's dreams from the real world? Are there professions more real than others? Drag queen more than dealing Secretary? Computer programmer more than weatherman in Tucson?

In Bangladesh 25 cent a day will save a bamboo seethe chef from bond slavery. Is her life les real now she can superintendence it? The whole country falls below inundation waters and clings to its railways when the Ganges rises. Is Bangladesh more real underwater?

What are we living for? Isn't it finally to make a harmonious flow we can live with daily, that will stres pleasures like bars of pleasing succession of sounds strike and hold the note of our ease as claims about the real and the unreal pass end it, thick thread through the organ of vision of the whole truth?

Lately I have awakened myself with a unimpaired from my own throat. The place where the knot is relaxed becomes a room where I sit, limit by a detachment that swells daily, like a garden snail pulling a hard film above the opening to his shell. Then I am lifted and flinged against a wall, and I grumble

I thought the world was coming to an extreme point and we would see it. on the other hand our eyes will be changed. We will notice like red tail hawks, watching cattle ford neck reaching far down through flooded orchards.

And you ask me if I mean to provide interchange of opinion and consolation? Someone else could form into a body all I am saying in a horse. He would diocese it through the animal's coffee clear organ of sight as it stood between traces upon cobblestones, pained by a development above its right fetlock-a impressible gray, carrotlike protrusion. There is a vegetable cart with its meagre liberality There are women leaving houses. The horse gazes between smokestacks at the sea, the taint of linseed exhalations in its whiskered nostrils, the cool sun hanging in a gray emulsion of vapor cover. The growth on its leg is untend through the horse's owner, the vegetable vender who is himself covered with mounds and wens, a melon-headed, straw-bodied effigy in a great coat and flat cap. The life tunneled through the horse's eye is individual of motion and rest, pain and les pain, divide [i]or[/i] sever by rocking figures of chouses diluted by rain or a gift squeezeed up against the lips, in the damp palm of a girl.

Lush, flat land masses, beneath a thick tent of CO^sub 2^ drift toward each other. The sea between becomes a channel, then a river, and individual mass slips beneath the other. We might stand upon either shore and shake hands. Rain forests upend in the deliberate massive collision. Palms lift to elevations where they die. We climb each other. The air thins.

You will hear that death is an entrance into the church triumphant, joining the majority, a turn back to the fathers. The passage is into a certain number of multitudinous condition. Don't believe it. All of that is upon this side, in the real world. And that is our best argument. take pleasure in the company here. There isn't any there.

Copyright World numbers Incorporated Jul/Aug 1998

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