Simone Weil 6

Time and the cave. Tenses split like the cave's lip. I am the cave's tongue, its soft red blade, its reporter on the beat. I am the man in the elevator, the anemone at Shark's Cove, the dancing tool in a cartoon. Memory is a moving within strangeness, cat in a flung bag. Who's to call it “good” or “bad,” name it character in a mystery play, watch its wagons lurch across England. I am a pilgrim, she told her mother. A little girl carries her chair up a mountain, and it is green, not blue. The sky may be, but she's not there yet. The man in blue dances on our skull walls; we cannot get him or us to rest. We see only spotlights, emergency exits. The day before the day he died, he rode around a strip mall parking lot on his bike. We know, because he sat on a curb, refusing the inevitable photograph.