BEING AND NOTHINGNESS

The sound of rain offers little. Maybe

a kind of being. Maybe

I can’t see anything itself,

not the moon, the square lofting spring

and black locust trees; red rock music, flamingoes,

sprained buttocks, short skirts, strange faces,

this book. Lines of characters

hardly reveal God. Does he indulge

in fantasies, take pleasure, weep aloud?

We can’t even know the leaves of white poplars,

arrayed beside the road, gleaming

in thready rain through a radio sonata.

I read many books, still

can’t describe death’s landscape,

Heidegger and Gadamer’s faces

pale as rainwashed streets.

1980: so many at Sartre’s funeral.

Where is he now,

where are they?

For years, debates over Shakespeare’s truth.

Do I exist, does Sancho, Karl Marx, or Freud?

The past‘s dead, oblivious terrain,

Sartre an empty name, the author of a book,

husk of a silkworm pupa.