Musings
By Robert Witmer
Philosophical musings
A Card
He dropped a coin in the beggar’s bowl and placed a small card under the straw mat. The blind man nodded at the clatter of the coin and turned a thin smile. What was on the card? That’s what I really wanted to know? So once the benefactor had walked away, I crossed the street to the blind man’s mat and invited him to tea. He agreed and rose, deftly slipping the card in his pocket.
He told me his tale of woe. Life as a yo-yo. From the bottom to the top and down again. Pride, he said, had taken his sight. An absence of doubt had given him pride. On and on he went. Strophe and antistrophe of vacillating fortunes, until I dropped a sex drug in his tea.
Once he was sound asleep, I took the card from his threadbare coat, paid the bill, and went back home. I waited until I had secured the door and poured myself a single malt before I looked at the card. Just a line of numbers. A phone number perhaps. The combination to a safe. A betting tip. I couldn’t tell.
When I got back to the café, the blind man was gone, and across the street so was his mat.
That was many years ago. I googled the numbers countless times, and I tried AI. Nothing added up. I kept the card in a drawer, until my house burned down. You would think I had memorized the numbers by then, but there was something confusing about the sequence. So, I rushed back into the flames to get the card.
After that, I don’t know. They say a stranger pulled me out.
Eternity
Emily Dickinson. There are so many things we will never understand. Imagine a young woman in a pinafore, with a penchant for prolepsis. An independent spirit who dwelled in possibility, selecting the society of reticence and obscurity, assenting to a divine madness, a poet of uncommon sense, who let the bankers count the nickels and the dimes. She was willing to inebriate the darkness with endless summer days, dazed by the blues, until a stumbling buzz snatched syllables from her sound, and she arrived at winter in her room, alone, with zero at the bone. Let the landscape listen to her truth’s superb surprise: breathless shadows glisten when stone is turned to snow. And then perhaps to know of the Dane’s princely puzzle, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no one returns. Memento mori. Omega. Past the slumbering wonder of near-death experiences with their sensations of levitation and total serenity. Doom’s electric moccasin. The absolute dissolution of nothingness lets nothing go. The chill, the stupor, the kneeling emperor with agent orange in his hair. Quartz butterflies all: papillon, farfalle, schmetterling, mariposa. The soul singing fifoldara. Farewell. To see what is new with eyes of the dead. From worm to silky chrysalis. Imago. Winged angel in her perfect form. Solemn in her soul. Her secret keeps. Dash not through life but make each pause a whelp of words. This world is not conclusion, though deaf and dumb. The bell’s tongue is a swan’s song. A funeral in the brain. The evil that lives after us. Les mouches. Time flies. Finnegan’s wake. Night’s watch. The little folded hands of sleep. The alarm on the Doomsday Clock. Just in time. The pale coachman stops. Kindly for me. And then the wheels turn, a journey’s just begun. And when —
Wisdom Is for the Birds
Something tells me a spirit whispers in the ears of the pigeons as they tiptoe over the cherry blossoms, a still small voice telling them they are doves, symbols of purity and innocence. Then I realize that pigeons have no ears, none at least that are visible, though I believe they can hear. Which gets me thinking. What would it be to realize a spirit? Is something real when we believe? How can corn have ears we see when pigeons hide sound behind feathers? What is thinking to our thoughts, and why do we tiptoe round truth, when it is here, in front of our noses? Underground like the roots of the cherry trees. The pigeons coo. And blossoms fall like angels, turning, beautiful, unknowing, each alone.
