Minor Informs the Major
after Viviane Houle
The way a pebble indicates
the whole of its earth,
all small things suggest
the existence of greater things—
the only argument for god
I’ll ever entertain. The note
I will die on. On the phone,
my dad says they kept
a swatch of their cat’s fur
after it died. It’s an example
of what we think it means
to remember, but the mind plays
with the memory over time,
develops it into a fuller picture,
and in that picture, we see
all the other mysteries
orbiting our own.
Yet even this picture
doesn’t quite depict the whole.
There’s so much we can never see.
Like the anglerfish with an amputated
esca. I dream that when I die
my body will look just like
a bank robber’s mask in the casket,
just the empty mask, no face behind it.
8/26/2021