I put the 448-page report on my desk and
asked it if the president had colluded with
the Russians or had obstructed justice and
like a stone sphinx the tome stared back
at me not uttering a sound or attempting to
make contact with a person who believed
Robert Mueller when he said that he had
chosen the words in his account carefully
and that the words speak for themselves,
which they were clearly not doing despite
the fact that I was only being polite in
asking my questions and had even offered them
a cup of coffee and some cookies to help
break the ice between us that I didn’t think
should be there since I’ve always been a
big fan of words and have used them
often in my writing to express what is in
my head and heart but when I told that to
the words in front of me they just gave me
the cold shoulder, which was sad since I had
no room in my house for a chilled appendage
and what I really wanted was not a chunk
of their torso but a discussion with them
about what did the president know and
when did he know it.
Martin H. Levinson is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle, PEN America, and the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics. He has published ten books and numerous articles and poems. He holds a PhD from NYU and lives in Forest Hills, New York.