by John Valentine
 |
| Dharmik Vibes |
What is madness but nobility of soul
at odds with circumstance?
—Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time”
At home once in the universe,
the old physicist
used to weave theories of everything
in the cat’s cradle
of his mind. How orderly the atoms
danced, how fleeting the
half-life of years. Wrapped now in rags,
his words spoken
only to the wind, he signs the language
of loss, hands tangled
in mudras, like a manic Buddhist, or an
operator at the
switchboard of chaos, pulling wires,
answering calls,
frantically making connections on the
streets
of the fallen.
John Valentine is a retired philosophy teacher living in Savannah, Georgia.
