Lincoln’s Life Mask, and: God Gives Us Each a Song

117 KEITH FLYNN LINCOLN’S LIFE MASK Who would guess, 150 years hence, that visitors would line up to look you in the eye? Staring face to face with Lincoln, that square Midwestern Clint Eastwood chin, every profile from the right, excepting two, his first campaign poster, and the cartoon of his assassination, shanghaied from behind by Booth. Nearby is the smallest book in the world, containing the poems of Edgar Guest, a book in a bottle that would fit in Lincoln’s mole, and the entire engraved plate collection of Audubon, a miracle itself, reminding one that Lincoln once shot a wild turkey through a crack in the cabin wall. “Who knows what lie they will buy,” Booth thundered. One man’s president is another man’s emperor. Audubon never painted a penguin; and Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day, on opposite sides of a dream. Outside is a totem pole made of light, beaming its one pure eye into space. With a wink, Lincoln charmed Grant into silence, and Darwin stood, staring God down, both refusing to blink. 118 KEITH FLYNN GOD GIVES US EACH A SONG The apple worm’s entire world is only the size of his apple. Some people never venture off the half-acre of their lawn. When turkeys mate, they probably think of swans, though the I is deeply mysterious and hidden, its “other” rarely listening; and in the belligerent meat of our brain there is a terrible reckless precision, a controlled mayhem, chaos in a box; and men spend themselves looking for its source, listening for the pox to creep in. But the mulish trespass after the storm’s hoopla can reveal silver lights sewn in tiny chain mail, trapping a headless shadow in self-portrait, or see the tracks of white birds diminish, swallowed by the sea’s swell, their little forks pointing north, like that. And we feel outward, forgetting our pulse, searching for anything clear 119 and certain, like a cat’s tedious measured pad across a skinny fallen log. Like that the bifocals fog and a fingerprint lands, then vanishes slowly. Listen to Coltrane swinging through Cole Porter like a mad top hat tossed haphazardly across a frozen pond by the wind, making half-moons in the snow as it lights, like that. I hear you, she whispers, I hear you, but I am not this abstraction, bounced forever, as my geography leans in, time given over to nothingness, the time that prefigures Milky Ways and comets scattered like rice from the offering plates of the over lapped universal chances, the same ashes that dissolve in rivers that run our bodies, that give us voice, the worm’s tiny groan as it pops out of the apple’s skin and finds itself alone, filled with the right of the Spirit to be known. ...