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FONTENOT (“One Who is Special.”
The Great Canadian Epic. Subtitled
“The King of Nothingness.”)
Prologue
No path in life is totally obscured.
No matter how much we try to hide
ourselves away we ultimately can’t.
Out of all the problems facing a
writer the greatest is knowing that
we are here naked upon the page
with nothing to clothe ourselves
except the words we speak, which
reveal our nakedness all the same,
just in different ways.
The eyes of the world are surely
blind tonight because they see not
me, nor no one can, and these
places more sacred are for not
having me in them. But still I live
and I can’t stop living, here scattered
upon the page, even as I know it is
no life at all.
And I try and I try again to imagine
other paths to life and as a teller
of tales it seems my duty to weave
all threads together and turn a word
into the starting place of a thousand
eternities, but I can’t go into the
breach again and again, for each
time a terrible weariness creeps over
me and my very life is taken out and
put upon the page, here, which is
no life at all I fear to say.
I try to imagine other worlds and
suddenly Earth has a second moon
named Elandra and stars, Ithryxis
and Ihryx are born like stains of
black blood and ochre, or stains
of ochre and black blood. I try to
talk amongst the Ravenlords of Endor
where the witch once stood but the
wings are cast and off away they sail,
their obsidian eyes mocking me
as I am left behind for my betrayals.
And there is Elinora of the willow
burdened tree and admiring her
beauty from afar a sadness comes
over my soul all at once for a
profound silence has taken her away
from me than love can bear to stay;
you see she isn’t real and in her
unreality I can touch her not.
That is the plague of the writer too,
to know that here all things are
possible and all things are equally
bared, and the loves we speak of and
the loves we write of exist and are
confined, and yet our words confine
them not.
And so I start all over again at the
very beginning, and try to tell the story
of my home and of my country, but
the story has been told and the heroes
all carved from granite, and with
this as a final gesture I make a final
world of my very own confined within
the world I know, of woods and waters
and peoples scattered here from
across the murky regions of the globe.
1) The Zoo of the Impossible Animals
I am sitting on a street corner and around
me are many people from everywhere
and the world seems condensed as if it
all collapsed together and I am standing
in Beijing and Toronto and New York and
London and Timbuktu all at once.
And I imagine the animals playing, the
predators only for it is only the predators
who can play, as prey cannot imagine
and so learn how to be dead.
And I think of Zyaruju, a monkey I read
about in one of those books now lost
somewhere in the past, and I know
myself no different than he, being fictional
of course.
This was supposed to be a satire, a look at
my nation, but standing on the street corner
no satire comes and instead I am
struck by the realization of myself
not knowing myself at all.
I argue with myself, plead and question
if when the last word is uttered will I exist
at all, but I can never answer my own
riddle satisfactorily.
And all the faces blur and the day starts
and ends then starts again, and who is not
Sisyphus in this age of ours, forced to
roll the weight of his life, her life up against
the mountain and down the mountain again?
We live as impossible animals in a zoo
without bars or cages, and we are impossible
not because we are but because we are here
even as we stand and go to work, feed
the children and pay the bills, and sometimes
half imagine that neither of these are real
and if we turned back at just the right
moment our sons and daughters would
disappear and we’d never even remember
that they were there.
I exist here and I exist somewhere else
and the streets all vanish and perish and
the people move on, and the whole world
floods past my door and I know it and
try to reach out and grasp it, just a fragment
of it all, but there are not words enough to
prove that there are words enough.
So because I can not possess it all I stop
and mold and fashion Fontenot from my
thoughts, create a woman to represent
all the histories I have known, and
she has sailed here from France and Germany
and Rome, come from Somalia, Lithuania
and the isles of Man, and she knows all
languages and speaks all tongues,
but I am the king of nothingness for
making her, because I am no more real
than she is not.
And I try, I earnestly try to create a story
to solidify her fate, and add such phrases
as duelist sins are many but duelist
flaws are few, and yet I know not if she
ever had a duel, or who her rivals were
or if they are living now.
And so I go round and around again and
bring all of history to the role she plays but
it never seems enough and the boulder
always falls down again, and I don’t know
what Canada means and I don’t know what
to say. Who is not Sisyphus in this age? June 26-27/11.
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