ABSOLUTE BEING

                    
                    When you were holding

                    everything in hand in one great effront-


                    ery, nothing could

                    force you to admit the fabrication


                    of will that you wished

                    to appear given in natural law.



          That today is text remembered still from

          yesterday, tossed with the tense of one who


          thinks he can remember clearly what is

          gone and stamped finished and rubbed beyond sight.


                    There is no doubt of

                    the years that transpired since your mother bore


                    you: is that abso-

                    lute reality or not?  Can there be


                    a doubt that SOMETHING

                    definite between then and now occurred?


                    You wish not to be

                    a statistical average of ran-


                    dom events occur-

                    ring between date A and date B but some-


                    thing on which critics--

                    even Fish men--could not equivocate.



          You wish not to be something vaguely re-

          membered even by you, but rather like


          a hard-edged cup and saucer in an old

          'fifties diner with chrome and big mirrors.



                    Well, there is silence,

                    the denial of text, the withdrawal


                    into negative

                    action, which becomes positive by its


                    outrageous contra-

                    diction.  You wish that to be radical


                    realism, but

                    wishes won't do in the blindness of no.



          Wishing, of course, can fade and lose focus.

          There is the field of primitive action,


          where life becomes death through acts of one's will.

          Good God, do you have to kill or be killed,


          then, to be a hard-edged real live someone?

          Is all but blood and guts equivocal?



                    Absolute presence,

                    wish or not, leads to absolute absence.


                    Kind God, then, grant one

                    the angst of being at the edge of fog.

Copyright 1995 by Richard P. Richter