Empathy

Empathy—died sometime before

January 20,2017. The gate vanished

But we don’t know when. The doorbell

Vanished.The trains stopped moving.

Someone stole the North Pole sign. I

am you, and you, and you. But there

are so many obstacles between

us. I can never feel my mother’s

illness or my father’s dementia. The

black notes on the score are only

representations of sound, the keys

must knock certain strings which are

made of steel, steel is made of iron

and carbon from the earth. Why do

we make things like a piano that try

to represent beauty or pain? Why

must we always draw what we see?

Just copy it, my mother used to say

about drawing. The artist is only

visiting pain, imagining it. We praise

the artist, not the apple, not the

apple’s shadow which is murdered

slowly. There must be some way of

drawing a picture so that it doesn’t

become an elegy.