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It is all light and life and love. The black and white kitten charges toward doves, splays himself on the screen door. Doves disappear, leaving behind a shallow puddle on the tan lanai. Four years ago today, my mother died. Death is all occasion, or it is none. An occasional poem returns to her more as concept than as mother. Concept begins with con. She told me the story of the invented spy whose “body” was left on a beach for Germans to find. It's the body that's fictive, once the spirit's gone. Dull container of nothing contained. Our witness is hollow, clues that come after fact, not redeeming but merely resurrecting it. “That doesn’t mean there is no racism,” says Derrida, “but one is obliged to conceal it to the extent possible.”

--14 June 2015

Derrida's words come from an interview he did with Ornette Coleman in 1997.