Like
a boxer at a pre-fight weigh-in, defiant,
no
sign of acceptance, Mrs. Cavendish began
to
stare meaninglessness in the eye.
The
difference: no one, nothing, stared back.
Mrs.
Cavendish, I said, it’s impossible to win.
As
we consider today, it’s almost tomorrow.
As
we admire the flowers, how easily they’re ravaged
by
wind and rain. The best we can hope for
is
a big, fat novel, slowing down the course of time.
Several
tomorrows always linger in the margins,
which
means until the very last page
you’ll
choose to live with the raw evidence
of
how someone else sees and makes a world.
Mrs.
Cavendish, I’m also sorry to report
the
maps are missing from the office of
How
to Get Where You Want to Go—
just
one more symptom of the general malaise.
I
have little hope that they can be found,
at
least not in our lifetime. At the risk of telling you
what
you already know, Mrs. Cavendish, here’s
something
merely true: the insufficiency of the moon
has
been replaced by the lantern, the lantern by
the
light bulb, but what won’t go away is the promise
of
salvation out there in the bright beyond.
There
will always be people who think suffering
leads
to enlightenment, who place themselves
on
the verge of what’s about to break, or go
dangerously
wrong. Let’s resist them
and
their thinking, you and I. Let’s not rush
toward
that sure thing that awaits us,
which
can dumb us into nonsense and pain.
My
dog keeps one eye open when he sleeps.
My
cat prefers your house where the mice are.
Stare
ahead, my friend. The whole world is on alert.
Mrs.
Cavendish, every day is old news.
Stephen Dunn
