A Darkening of Responsibility
Pessoa adopted heteronyms tighter than ceilings,
yet the spiders had the moldings under cultivation,
like the banks of the Rhine. Like grapes
spiders hung in clusters. Perhaps we should return
to the tradition of using the tips of fingers
on one’s Malling-Hansen writing ball like the
one Nietzsche used to telegraph aphoristic thoughts;
Never ending note taking and a mocking silence
in the 11th hour caught something of the frequency
in the room. Perhaps it was best to follow
the accents of a projected intelligentsia
as in the words of Pessoa...
“I am beginning to know myself.
I don’t exist...I’m the gap between
what I’d like to be and what others
have made of me...”
Turing ate a poisonous apple.
Gödel at the end was paranoid. People were trying
to poison him. Time as fortification: to lay siege to a room
where what you used to know passes with each
inked word. Edwin Denby nearly revised
himself out of existence; His notes reveal
a mind redacting the lesser lines,
yet his capacity for stillness may have been ironic
in that what he once said now seems historic---
I’ve heard one strange theory regarding
Denby’s suicide, sweating the big stuff,
the very big stuff: depression, electro shock
therapy, loneliness, celibacy, a darkening
of responsibility after difficult poetic achievements.
I too am alone as I travel involved
only with chance meetings.
I share this interest with my late father,
who would speak often of “people watching”
or of “being an observer”-- a single person
in a crowd pulling tight his overcoat
that twisted down toward his leg.
But today I am at Cape May
with Robin and Suzy, strolling on the board-
walk and then hiking along
a stretch of clean beach, our day trip
from Piscataway. I pick up four stones
and shells and remember how I once gathered
mysterious, smooth stones on yet another beach
along the shore of Capri in late June 2002.