Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934–1994

Wait

frightened of the silence around me, I am fightingpanic that everything does exist in itself alone. Wait I am a man and do not know why I was born. I can tell you the facts: my mother conceived me when my father lay with her, but that is not what I'm asking about. Why did they think it was necessary for me to be born? I can understand love and the desire to have something to show for it, but should I live on that promise, my parents buried? For whom now should I live when I am dying, as did my parents who left nothing of themselves but me who am about to die? If there is anyone with an answer, let him or her step forward. I am patient and can wait. I Write I write to capture the meaningless as it were an animal in the thickets to hold in my arms; my identity in this animal which, since it exists for me, gives me my reality too. Whitman, I am happy to say, turned inside out, having found the answer to his answer, and away I go, cutting through woods and across fields and rivers back to cities with a shout of absolute terror. Why? Becausehere the meaningless exists too, ready to kill me with a knife or a bullet or a crazy drug. So I shall be killed, and I will weep in my grave, missing the meaningless. Trough I'll watch that mailbox as if it were an ikon of some religious order about to bring me a blessing from another world. After lunch, I'll sit back on the sofa which faces the window and look out from time to time, lifting my eyes from the daily press and, when the mailman appears and spends the first few moments in sorting out my mail from the others, my heart will quiver. And when I do open the letters, I'll 749 ...