These scrolls are icons of uncertainty
Tropes of doubt
Fragments of what we think they tell us.
Metaphors of incompleteness
Interpretation and forgotten loss.
They are the best we can do
Could we do more?
If we had more pieces?
What holes would be filled?
Reality
He is just now gone beyond the wine dark sea
And Ariadne stands by me
With eyes which shed no tears.
I am here free on Priam's beach
While near Odysseus sets up sail
And not far behind me I can hear
The priests chant evening song into the evening breeze.
Dancing Kuratrophe now divert me
From cadences and sequences
Of allusion disillusion and illusion
Visions and revisions and decisions
That I had once called life.
Somewhere is a world from which I came.
Well known to be a fantasy of fools
A noisy place where future merged with past at such a rate
There never was a present.
Now if I am sad the fair Calypso strokes my brow.
She knows Hermes will not descend to call me home
She and I will laugh and swim naked together
Near the caverns of the sea
Until human voices wake us and we drown.
Quotations
We live in a world of quotations
Stitched together by chance
The seams are rough and irregular
Spaces show through the threads.
But they form a garment we can wear
We can pull over our heads
We can fend off doubt and horror
Some are beautiful
Many are even in one sense or another
Whatever that means:
True.
