Altruism
I'd give you my seat, but I'm sitting here.
—Chico to Groucho Marx, in A Night at the Opera
Everything we know about death
is not enough to kill us. It's the last good season
of tourism and exile and I have a window seat
on the bus to the hotel. Beside me
is a man who refuses medical assistance,
claiming his god will intercede. They can't tell us
apart. That in itself is a considerable
blow to the gut of the revolution.
When they searched our bags, they missed
the huge shell I found half-buried in the sand.
At the hotel, I show it to the guard who
counts his paces on the other
side of the barbed wire. He's dying
without medical or divine intercession.
He mentions a wife, a daughter,
a garden with alternating rows
of lettuce and seashells. If the authorities
try to confiscate my shell, he suggests
that I tell them I'm dying.
Or dead, if I can get away with it. He points
to the bus parked outside, the dying man
waving from his window seat.
The guard says that if I bring the shell
to my ear, I can hear myself leaving again.
In a Duplex Near the San Andreas Fault
When she tells him about the lump in her breast,
he kisses her on the shoulder for the first time—a natural
reflex twenty-some years in the making. Suddenly
their entire vocabulary revolves around benign
and malignant—words reserved
for these occasions—though they will say
very little now, then nothing for a long time. His hands
are just as pale and nearly as fragile as rice paper,
but she's not familiar with rice paper
and what she wants most desperately now
is a point of reference. Calla lilies bloom
like some glorious, abandoned music out on the lawn.
She takes one of his hands and thinks
of the spathe, which has the responsibility
of being leaf and petal, content and shape: without it,
there would be no calla lily to remember,
nothing to see when she closes
her eyes and places his hand on her breast.
Moto Perpetuo
1
I've been walking in circles for what seems like days.
They've been playing Paganini, but you know
how intermittent the conscious ear
can be. How selective. Walking has nothing to do
with distance as clearly as Paganini
has nothing to do with the violin that plays him hard.
2
How it hurt Jackson Pollock, during his black
and white period, to hear the critics say
that he was painting black on white; how important
the gaps and absences were to him;
how crucial the distances, the gulfs; how
critical each emptiness to each composition.
3
There is that moment in, say, the finale of Beethoven's
Fifth, when you hear nothing between the various
false endings, so you make your own music,
a bridge of silence from one illusion
to the next. A deeper and more refined
ear—Beethoven's ear—takes care of this.
© Dionisio D. Martínez. All rights reserved.
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