For Dad
In sociology, we say
mapping,
we say
cartography instead
of
understanding. To profess
to understand, you see, is hubris.
I am a professional digger. I
should say
excavation or
archeologyinstead of
digging for the truth,
which is uncouth. Which is emotional.
And, again, hubris. We should never say
truth. What is the truth, anyway? Instead,
we should say
subjectivity, as in:
To whatare we subjected? Or:
What is the subjectof the story of your life? To name it,
I say
loss, I say
yearn, I say
tell me.
What else can I say? In fall, before
the surgery, we walked, the sky the color
of pigeons. I listened to you breathe, the soft
wheezing. I listened to the sound of your shoes
shuffling, crunching dead leaves into the ground.
I thought I would lose you. How could I betray
you by mapping these cities so far away:
Paris, Prague, Vienna, Kiev? How could
they hurt us? These faint cartographies
drawn in traces of my DNA, and names,
the names escaping me over time and sea
poetically in slant, half, off, and straight
rhymes. I could never escape you. Before
us, our name stands constant, and the City stands
constantly shifting, like truth. Like words and meaning,
making meaningless the crude facts of my making.
[Truth is] a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory (Frederich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, 1873).