another April, as always
There is a dead rat on the sidewalk. How long has it been there? I am another year older, they say, but there is no time here anymore. The weather is unavoidable, the trash unpicked-up, the rat undone. They say the world is burning, but there is no world anymore either. Just fuel, data visualizations, scenarios. But something is burning and you can smell it. On some days, actually, you can see it, too. It must be April that is on fire. April is all there is.
You can also see, if you would like, as I do each morning, a mess of soiled Christmas garbage, red ornaments and fragments of a wreath. The wreath is still green and it crowds a tree-bed like remnants of a murdered season. I suspect it will be there forever. This is because it is April now, like it was back then. Now is April. Then is April. Whatever came before Then you’ll have to look for in the wet, discarded matter that blows about your feet.
Spring will come, yes it will. But spring is already here! (It is April.) In the beginning it was April. April came to pass. And with it, wind and rat poison and concrete and hydrofluorocarbons. Were there lamentations? Did the rat die in the night? I keep dreaming of pulling an old brown book from a bookshelf. I open it and then I wake up. It means nothing, says nothing. Maybe it says that it has always been April.
Okay, okay, enough. I will admit it. It has not always been April. [Applause] It is only just now April, which is one month of many. A few days ago, it was a different month, a not-April. And now it is April, I am another year older, and I am trying awkwardly to make sense of things. Sometimes it just feels like two long years of April, of a springtime that never quite comes, of overcast expectancies, of looking for time in sidewalks and subway tunnels.
Maybe one day I’ll get a better grasp on Then. For now it is April, and I am walking through the wind to the subway stop, past the dead rat and the waste. They say I am older but I can’t find proof of it anywhere. Certainly not here on the platform. The past is like something shiny on the tracks that catches your eye right before the train arrives. The present is the train, behind schedule. The future, if it exists, is the man who comes keening out of the train. He has seen things we cannot imagine. He is at the limit and he goes up into the light. I board the train and go off into darkness. The train moves loudly from April into April. The rats here are all still living, and they watch me go.
ben tapeworm