call me Ahab

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I read a work of history after dinner.

As I read history, after dinner,
there emerges a black mite
larger by a factor of ten than a book mite
and blacker far
than their scavenging scarlet.

It conducts a random walk across the end-notes
while I try to reconstruct the author’s thinking from his sources.
It draws my attention away from clarity.

From the CD player Richard Thompson, clear-eyed in his Sufi phase,
hammers his guitar against eternity,
against logic.
Then for what?
For love that descends to self-abnegation,
in the end of art.
All this effort distracts me less than the black mite;
as little as Ahab’s metaphysics distract his whale.

Could I be the god on whose palm Monkey danced?
It would be a state as unknowable as Monkey’s.

A parenthesis refuses to close
while the accordion moves into solo after the guitar,
and the mite walks randomly,
pausing across the phrase “Damascus blood libel”.

))))  damn you )

and if I should close the book on the mite?
like closing a parenthesis,
reaching the end of an end-note . . .

While I walk to find paper and biro,
to trap some of this instant,
what has slipped from my grip?

Where has the mite walked now?
Across “committing suicide”
Across “six years later”
Across “throwing in their lot”

And in a blurt of anger against time
I slam the book shut
and refuse to wonder if the mite escaped.


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