Survival Is a Style by Christian Wiman

Author:Christian Wiman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

III

THE PARABLE OF PERFECT SILENCE

Today I woke and believed in nothing.

A grief at once intimate and unfelt,

like the death of a good friend’s dog.

Tired of the mind reaching back in the past for rescue

I praise the day.

I don’t mean merely some mythical, isolate instant

like the mindless mindfulness specialist

who at the terminal cancer convention

(not that it was called that)

exhorted the new year’s crop of slaughters

(ditto)

to “taste” the day, this one unreplicable instant of being alive.

(The chicken glistened.)

Nor do I mean a day devoid of past and future

as craved that great craze of minds and times Fernando Pessoa,

who wanted not “the present” but reality itself,

things in their thingness rather than the time that measures them.

Time is in the table at which I sit and in the words I type.

In the red-checked shirt my father’s mother used to wear

when she was gardening and which I kept

because it held her smell (though it does no longer)

there is still plenty of time.

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