Three Prose Poems
in a long winter
A Bintel Brief
Worthy Editor,
I came to this place, like so many, fleeing persecution. Yet I find persecution here as well. Does a person have more than two chances? Many do not have any. I look at others in this place who are worse off than I. But how could I urge them to flee, if they will only find persecution where they go, as I have? I do not know our persecutors since they do not wish to mix. And so I have no better understanding today, in this second life, than I did in my first about what causes persecution and how if ever it may stop. I am a freethinker, I have not lost a faith I never had, yet fear I am beginning to become one who does not think freely. Because freedom is not a part of my experience in this place and not in the place I was born. Did I see freedom en route, as I passed through so many places between? If I did, I must have been too busy fleeing to notice. Or perhaps it was itself so fleeting, that any momentary lack of concentration on freedom is enough to miss its only appearance. I am writing you this letter, worthy editor, to ask advice. Should I believe in freedom from persecution? And if not, why did I leave my miserable home? In my misery there, I had an idea that there was less misery elsewhere. It was this idea that made me a freethinker. Tell me, worthy editor, how I might continue to be one.
Lessons of the Avant-Garde (for Alison Knowles)
It’s not the oldest tree in the garden, but one that bears the marks of time most clearly. Pliability - bending easily in the wind or under snow - combines with a stubborn return not to original form but to a form, we might say, that only this tree achieves. Under greenhouse conditions, the tree proves to have surprisingly regular growth throughout its lifespan, and with restraint may form straight and even symmetrical patterns. This is never seen in the field, however; there the tree, in part because of its relentless growth under any and all conditions, reaches shapes not only rarely seen but, as far as observations allow, never repeated.
Conservation
If gloom begins to descend on a room with a fireplace, no fire in it, and a view of blank sky fading on a day that never had any sun, with a stillness broken only by the occasional shadow moving slowly across a wall, whether from someone or something passing by on the street or through the air, or simply from one’s shifting attention to the deepening shadows, and if there is quiet in that manner which never comes without precisely this kind of gloom, then do not by any means switch on a light.