"Letter to Simone Weil"
The last painting
I would make for a while
I painted in the Art Barn
Which has since been destroyed
Wild rabbits would come
Peering in the back door
It was a quiet place
Raw and unfinished
And my painting grew slowly in layers
Your last view out the window
Of the sanatarium
Framed by maroon drapes
An ashtray in the foreground
Green hills and a faint trail beyond
And your glasses lay on the table:
“Simone Weil Gives Up Smoking”
At that point I had even seen
A one-day stint in an assembly line
The roll-up door stood open
There, too, green outside
--The beauty of the world
Is the mouth of a labyrinth
My labyrinth that started
In the heart of the atom
Reading your Cahiers in my halting French
(I never did learn to roll the R’s)
Poring over Schrödinger’s wave equation
Page after page of fragrant purple mimeo
And the hulks of Three Mile Island rose
And they didn’t even know
How far the radiation might spread
As affliction
Entered my body
Like the chill of a great cathedral
An old love gone wrong
And I turned away
Changed my major to Art
Miles later to find myself
On a sparse beach in Baja
On the brink of the First Gulf War
I had gone to be far from all news
There was a latrine we dug
Four feet deep and six long
I was there and not there
Reading Celan from a washed up log
And I noticed gerbils
Who fell in the yet unused latrine
They couldn’t get back out
Simone, I spent all that day
Flat on my stomach
With a long beach towel
Fashioned into a sling
And I scooped up each of the little rats
One by one and released them
Metaxu.
"Meanwhile a man
skilled as a singer, · versed in old stories,
wove a new lay · of truly-linked words."
--Sullivan & Murphy's Beowulf 772-4
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