Claudia
Grinnell
Unsuitable Biography, Written in the Latter
Part of the 20th Century
Show
me a Polaroid of your suffering: a burnt child, a limping dog,
a
departure at night, two suitcases, a blue coat. The latter a last
possession
of your golden age. Elsewhere, people say, it's
worse.
But
even this is enough.
A
taxi pulls away from the curb. It doesn't matter who's inside.
I
forgot to tell you this: nothing matters. Nothing, except skin,
voice,
glance. That's not quite true, of course, and I don't believe
it
myself but it's August, and behind the saturated green wheat fields
lies
a tempting horizon which allows us to rise above the gloomiest
of
weather forecasts or biblical floods or snow in Miami
and all
end-time
predictions, and be happy. Just be happy, for God's sake!
It's
never so bad it can't get worse.
No
Fear, the shirt says. But then this courage bleeds in the wash
and
a horoscope is consulted: Trust your emotions. A romantic
interlude
brightens your afternoon. Tacitus tells us about runed
sticks,
thrown and read like the migration of birds.
Amphitheaters
collapse, and, earlier, the Tower
of Babel. In 1902,
Mount
Pelee erupts, flattening Martinique's
capitol city and killing
all
residents, except the city's only prisoner. In that year,
the
silk tail, a flashy bird at home in extreme northern latitudes
appeared
in mass quantities, fleeing south to escape the arctic winter.
(The
history of doom can be written in a language of feathers.)
Three
days after the eruption, Jacques, the prisoner, speaks to birds,
confesses
the theft, the rape, the murder.