Literary Review: In January

   The celebrated relativity of time

   we may grasp, but who knows time? To feel it
   requires some space, to believe it you have
   to move. All the most essential trees are
   known solely by their fruits, from mother's love
   to the Big Bang. Festooned between bright
   effect and hazy cause is, I suppose, faith.

   This long empty afternoon is empty
   because it's long, long because it's empty.
   Pencil colored, chilly, opaque, pointless,
   more an engraving of an afternoon.

   My sister likes to insist that Everything
   Happens For A Reason. She means, of course,
   a good reason. Wrapped in this quilt she's snug
   enough, proof against all chilly, merely
   apparent evils. The only faith she needs
   is in a weird roulette that spins for her:
   Providence. No Stoic ever claimed that
   fatalism must be disconsolate.

   Science is an activity pursued
   part time by scientists. At their conferences
   none proclaims that what they all believe
   is real is not all of reality
   to any of them, that even chemists crave
   luxuries, comforts, lust for warmth. Who'd choose
   to be a crow on a wet black branch
   in January, aware of nothing but one's
   needs and hardly of their satisfaction,
   just to know all the reasons that aren't good?
   Being is wanting; there's an axiom,
   first principle beyond disproof. Being
   isn't having. Who wants to be and not have?

   The cracker crumbs I spread across the gray
   snow this morning draw from the gray sky,
   down the gray air, black birds. Sharp heads hammer
   greedily, squamate feet dance daintily
   across the crust. For these the afternoon
   has been neither long nor empty, nothing
   happened for a good reason, and night,
   blacker and colder, neither too empty
   nor too long, will arrive just in time.
Robert Wexelblatt is a professor of humanities at Boston University's College of General Studies