I've forgotten how to be an artist without publicity.
Paraplegic afternoon, with the dogs standing around as puzzled as i.

   "Mortality

This is the surest death
Of all the deaths I know.
The one that halts the breath,
The one that falls with snow
And nothing but a peace
Before the second zone,
For Aprils never cease
To resurrect their own,
And in my very veins
Flows blood as old as Eve.
The smallest cell contains
Its privileged reprieve,
But vultures recognize
This single mortal thing
And watch with hungry eyes
When hope starts staggering."

--Naomi Long Madgett, in The Poetry of Black America ed Arnold Adoff (1973)

'The honor bestowed upon the icon is bestowed upon the prototype.' --Basil the Patriarch

'The I is not the stake, but the game.' --Jabès

   'Distant Howling

In Alsace,
on 6th July 1885,
a rabid dog knocked down
the nine-year-old Joseph Meister
and bit him fourteen times.

Meister was the first patient
saved by Pasteur
with his vaccine, in thirteen
progressive doses
of the attenuated virus.

Pasteur died of ictus
ten years later.
The janitor Meister
fifty-five years later
committed suicide
when the Germans occupied
his Pasteur Institute
with all those poor dogs.

Only the virus
remained above it all.'

--Miroslav Holub (tr Ewald Osers) in: Poetry With an Edge (ed Neil Astley 1988)