Rosaly DeMaios Roffman: What Are We Supposed To Do On This Earth
After not speaking for days and days
the voice comes out a brilliant little square
to remind you of the geometry of sound
And you go no louder no matter how you try
with your dwarf-man voice–and I’m trying not
to watch you, friend, reading about desert fathers
and the many holy ways we recognize absence; death,
the cedar waxwing buried in the tree by a door, death,
the province of every person who negotiates laughter
.
Borges at the end tells us in a line of a small poem
“There are books in my library I know I’ll never open
again” And it saddens me as I conjure up his photograph
with those eyes too large for anyone’s intelligent face,
and since he was blind at the end, once-seeing, like Matisse
or Renoir, what I want to say to you, is not change your life,
but count those nameless flowers that open beneath you
with some sense of their end before they hear budding
.
The message is not about louder, it is about closer
Copyright 2017 Rosaly DeMaios Roffman
.
Jorge Luis Borges
