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ARTS AND CULTURE

An infinite number of Tasmanias

  • 15 January 2013

A

You want proof there are no tiny moments, none?Only eyes too dim to see the vault of the moment?Here's one. My son, after a whole year of D and FOn his report card, a steady river of D and F, onlyD and F, not even a plodding C, earned his first A.It doesn't matter what the subject was. Nor what ISaid to him, or him to me, or even what his tenderMother said, or how his brother and sister crowedAnd made a big deal out of it, probably a little tooMuch, all things considered. All that mattered wasHis face as he flipped the card on the kitchen table.I don't have any words for that. But I was allowedTo see his face, at that moment. The world amblesOn, burly and hurried, but there are those moments.Maybe we are composed of exactly these moments.

 

An infinite number of Tasmanias

If you are like me, which God forbid, but maybe,You have on your wall a map, or perhaps several,Of places you know you will never be; not in thisLife, anyway. It's just not going to happen. Cash,Health, the time away from work and your family.The reasons are all reasonable. For me: Tasmania.It's as far away as you can get from where I exist;Perhaps that's part of the lure — and it's an island,That's important in my strange faraway dreaming.And it's dense and wet and confused and haunted,Its history shot through with blood and stone; whyThis is attractive to me I haven't the slightest idea.Lately I think it is the one thousand three hundredForty six lakes. I'll never see them, Lakes TiberiasAnd Rufus, Bull and Bill, Fanny and Fergus, EchoAnd Nameless, Sappho and Shadow, and the quietLake Lucy Long; but I do see them, somehow, notJust on my wall but shimmering in a kind of dreamFor which I do not have to sleep. We hold compassPoints in our heads for which no travel is necessary.Perhaps we must. Maybe dreams are a crucial food.If we just lived in this world we would never reachAny others, and don't we know there are way moreThan we can even yet imagine? An infinite numberOf Tasmanias, you might say. An equation

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