The Witness

Aah,the witness: luminous in his Warholian spotlight
Wearing bold god-robes like a bad dinner-jacket.
He floats between the pistols, near the notebooks,
Before the cameras, inside the microphones.
Witness to all he knows, extended finger big as a gallows.
Like moons, scribes orbit his globe-skull.
His second-hand sketches announce wretches to a waiting world.
Contemplate his portraits faceless as a digital watch.
Hear Frans Hals turn beneath his stone.
But the witness is certain as Copernicus.
Is unflappable before the Ciceros.

You know nothing, I say.
Have heard nothing.
Seen: nothing.

Witness, what surety holds Truth against your utterances?
What bondman has your back until the judgement?
And I, who have seen the world like an Odysseus,
Seen the temples, the pyramids, the crest of Olympus
And can speak the words of men in myriad tongues
And have consulted bards, philosophers, oracles
The way a dancing bee denotes his flower from afar
Nectar-drunk and pollen-fat,
Am as certain of cats meowing tomorrow
As of seeing Christ in a cable-car.

What business have I with this witness?
Who can testify at all
Save until the final moments?
Live but half a life and speak:
What shall we who listen believe?
What new calculations blaze in death's atomic light?
The whole before, the hitherto:
Mute shadows flickering on a cave's wall
To hold us in thrall and all sophistry
Beguiling as opera and malleable
As memory straining to remember
Straining until the last shadow catch us
And let fall the certain curtain.


(c) Rhett Talley