Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
Gertrude Stein’s Agnosia
A complex number doesn’t have to be truer than binomial theory, right?
Continental philosophy doesn’t have to be truer than an inward turn, right?
The sound of a bass clarinet doesn’t have to be truer than the sound of a sitar, right?
In The Little Shop of Antiquities, she wrote about relics and artifacts, touching them, letting their glow go to the riverbank and send back their sparkles. How the material object moves the spirit. The incomprehensible magic, the shapeless wonder, the familiar history in a middle to high passage.
Their irresolute beauty like an oiled and torched mirror. Slowly crumbling, then shattering.
Was it a wink or a squint as he scraped the bacon bits off the top of the bun?
Was it a duck or the snow or buttons of bark flaking themselves off?
Was it a shout to hurl itself over to the other side of the asphalt?
And who returned the question like an echo into the wind and orange dust?
* This poem first appeared in Fuselit, a literary journal out of London.
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