16.1.17



Poem For Sancho Panza
What I would have speak would stay silent. How to lure the crab from under the rock?
And what if it cannot speak but only scream?
If there are no words, no way to notate the howls and racking sobs in language?
There is something too large for my eye to encompass, something down there, in that sea, too big, too broad, too heavy, and, unable to see it in its entirety, I cannot speak of it. Can say, only that it is big, and that it weighs more than I can bear.
An island, sunk beneath the salt, it’s villages, their shrines, their hearths, their marketplaces, sunk also. Forest, field, sloping hills, streams sprung from those hills, winding, skipping over scree, widening, to sea shore. Sunk.
Small idols of shrine and hearth, clay, fire-hardened, or wood, whittled, or stone, carved, sunk also.
It’s people, who laughed, and drank, and sometimes, were moved to song, sunk also, drowned, that is. And the things they would do, will never be done. Love, and other things.
Lost. Is a life of such little account?
Yes, I know, there was error. On my part also, and that cannot be ascribed to youth, for I am not young.
We walked the mountain paths of scrubby Hispania, the sun, hot and hearty, and we sweated and cursed, dust in the mouth, and you talked of food, and thought of food, complaining cheerfully, as the part dictated.
What makes Sancho Panza different from other men? He drinks as they do, is as lazy as they, and as gluttonous. His stomach speaks of that, it says, in its roundness, this man, is a man of this world, not any other, and yet, who can dream as Sancho dreams?
Till the world melts away, so that if the storyteller says forest, then trees appear.

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