A Sail to Great Island

On Brattle Street

37 On Brattle Street It’s sunny, but fat flakes of snow are swirling in the air on Brattle Street outside the library window where he sits hoping to answer, in the spare hour he has, a woman friend’s challenging remark that few men allow themselves to listen to an inner voice of prophecy. Fat flakes, as if the people on the sidewalk, and the theater with its bright banners, and the stick-like trees, are all within a paperweight and even his doubts are a bubble world within the star-choked larger universe, and perturbation is no more than the shaking of the little glass globe, the flakes already settling once again on the roofs of the houses. How pathetic that he can’t remember when the gods in him were last heard from, when they last seized control. Maybe he should look at himself laughing and talking, losing himself within the pleasant duties of daily sociability, to understand what his genes always had in mind for him, affable, as his grandfather was, and round-bellied, now, like the Chinese god of prosperity? Sometimes, when he is knotted in a knit tie, and seems least free, at a meeting interrupted by a note and a messenger, and he signs something, e-mails an answer, the phone rings, and everything is happening at once, and nothing seems worth remembering, he finds no inner voice at all, no gap between reflection and speech, 38 as if his whole life has been a cowardly deafness to the true song that is filling Brattle Street beyond the library’s glass wall. Though it doesn’t stir the banners on the theater, or dislodge the plaster casts of snow from the trees, it floods the brains of some of the sidewalk-trudgers passing by who may not know whether the wordless song they hear is one of longing, or of praise. ...