How Am I?
So my lady! you’ve asked me how I am. Oh (yawn), I’m fine. But just as important (perhaps even more): How is our friend Life feeling about life these days? Forgive the audacity, but I think I know. Life has kindly let me see the tragedy inscribed in All of It The gently swaying, slowly aging trees. The animals jumping for joy in their untutored ignorance of a clock. The sparkling bodies of water great and small, fresh and salt which one day will dry up and leave nothing but a parched bowl. The burning sun that burns away the gases that feed the hungry flames, the flames we need, the flames that give us burning Life. The vast but not infinite universe that will shrink into a ball the size of a child’s marble, 1
so dense, so heavy, even God won’t have the strength to lift it. The death of God Himself as the Great Furious Philosopher proclaimed. The rise and decline of loved ones, dying only when we forget or when we, too, must leave. The passage of an extraordinarily ordinary pet who, in our heart, wins all the prizes at the dog show, having given us pleasure and fascination as it Grew and Learned to Speak to us in its Own Way. The atomic explosion that split the atom so that the atom is no more.
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And this will happen to each of us… To me, recuperating wildly—and then, hopefully later than sooner.... And the therapist? What will happen to her? Her Life and Being could easily fill a thousand outsized books, such as the Great (even it must end) War and Peace. And many, many more volumes if the writer were just capable of breathing on and on and— onward. The inscription of Tragedy Everywhere, so easy and simple to see if one just looks. So I’m (yawn) fine. How are you?
June 22, 2010 ©Matt Bohart matt476@nyc.rr.com 3
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