Joys of Believer, NCAA, and Existential Stutters
As another finals season creeps towards, I’ve taken to the usual comforts: becoming a serial eater of unhealthy foods (last week’s Ramon’s has given way to this week’s Easy-Mac); walking around the block (but with a new MP3 player); and, finally, increased desire for social outings (Cleveland Orchestra, Art Museum, a film festival, and soon vegetarian North Indian cooking lessons).
But tonight, as peering into a pitiful championship game (the inherent risk of any playoff system, be it collegiate sports or American elections), I finally opened The Seventy-Ninth issue of the Believer.
And this poem snapped and soothed my heart.
OH, WOW, MAUSOLEUMS
says the man who doesn’t remind me of you
except that everything reminds me of you, except mausoleums.
In the important world (my imagination), I am watching you, simply, without hope or
dream. In the unimportant world, this man and I are driving past the cemetery.
The mausoleums are impressive, ornate. They seem meant to crumble, suddenly and
violatently, like the class system, but they have not, and it has not. The angels that guard
them are elegant, Edwardian
hard, cold and unemotional. Their expression won’t change
except to be wiped away, very gently, by time. They are what I now want to be. They
never utter the sentence I utter most frequently:
“I do but I don’t.”
There’s nothing good about ill-timed death. Nor about the death of love. That poetry
glamorizes them disturbs me. I don’t want to be lying in that cemetery. I don’t want to be sitting in the cemetery.
on a stone bench, thinking about others. I don’t want to be sitting in this car, on a bucket
seat of hut plush,
with the man who gets excited by mausoleums.
There’s no fooling the sweet dumb pulse.
Your heart chalks a chair, I sit down.
