Friday, February 6, 2009

Rhetorical Questions at the Gas Station

 

Is the divine then

In the gray snow bank

In the dead weeds

Of the railroad side?

Rhetorical question

Rhetorical question

 

In the questioning face

Of the poor man

Hands in his pockets

Hunched against the cold

Hunched against the cold?

 

Rhetorical question

 

Soul knows the cold

Soul knows the seasons

Soul knows the questions

Soul knows the rhetoric

That gnaws itself away

 

Rhetorical question

 

Old snow

Dead weeds

Poor man

No fences

 

No question

 

 

 


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

No question

What? No question! How can there ever be an absence of questions? This minute is different from the one before or the next one coming up - now. Surely each New Now opens itself to questions.

But that itself begs the ... you know. A quest for reply becomes "rhetorical" only when the asker suddenly doesn't want to hear the answer. No wait - don't tell me. I fear the possibility of light and even this glimpse of enlightenment. So, no - no. Be silent. I prefer myself to be blank.

I don't want to see The Me morph into the sooty snow bank, the dead weed or old body - used up, displeasing to the eye and the grandest of our senses. I won't ever be unsightly and slightly soiled. That is if you don't tell me I will.

So you choose not, then, to see the remembered joy of the snow bank stil hearing the trill of the child making snow balls. Or the weed, far from a pest, which openly offered the succulent spring greens and glorious sun-of-a-blossom. Perhaps they and the old one have joy and fulfillment coursing through their various veins.

Say not "rhetorical." Don't ask if you choose not to know ...