Rembrandt's Nightwatchman Soliloquies, 13

REMBRANDT’S NIGHTWATCHMAN SOLILOQUES 13


I very sad when I visited the museum,
saw
in a glass case a zoot suit.

I especially observed the long chain,
its links
were like the sun-tanned bald heads
of bureaucrats
and shined as if coated
with oil dug out of the ice in Alaska.

This golden glow was produced
by the soft-cheeked, rice-powered
fluorescent lights
that resembles the facial features
Oo dancing girls in Viet Nam bars
that illuminated the glass case.

But what disturbed was my face
reflected on the plate glass.
I had to face again the fact
that I was a tabula rasa.

I needed a belief, something I could
write on the blank slate of myself,
a zoot suit with a long chain
would not suffice, although I had once
visited a barrio and saw rusty tin cans
that had been stepped on over and over.


I visited the next exhibit, a wax effigy
of Marcus Aurelius.
He looked weary, as weary as a man who had
never done anything foolish, outlandish.
With a goose feather used as a pen
he was writing, not Latin,
but a runic language.
I studied the writing, it was a language
that no one has ever written.
Marcus Aurelius was writing a personal,
unique, esoteric, hermetic,
solipsistic language.
He was writing this language
because he despised the quotidian values
of his world, and he did not want
to write a familiar language
because it reminded him of the familiar
commonplace events
such as his wife’s adulteries.
As he wrote this strange and difficult language,
the expression on his wax effigy face
changed from weariness to joy.

Observing the change of the expression
on his face, seeing the new joy
he was feeling,
I thought perhaps, I, a tabula rasa
had found something I can believe in.


Duane Locke

Posted over on The Hold