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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=346203" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Transparent Man</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I'm mighty glad to see you, Mrs. Curtis,<br>And thank you very kindly for this visit--<br>Especially now when all the others here<br>Are having holiday visitors, and I feel<br>A little conspicuous and in the way.<br>It's mainly because of Thanksgiving. All these mothers<br>And wives and husbands gaze at me soulfully<br>And feel they should break up their box of chocolates<br>For a donation, or hand me a chunk of fruitcake. <br>What they don't understand and never guess<br>Is that it's better for me without a family;<br>It's a great blessing. Though I mean no harm.<br>And as for visitors, why, I have you,<br>All cheerful, brisk and punctual every Sunday,<br>Like church, even if the aisles smell of phenol.<br>And you always bring even better gifts than any <br>On your book-trolley. Though they mean only good,<br>Families can become a sort of burden.<br>I've only got my father, and he won't come,<br>Poor man, because it would be too much for him.<br>And for me, too, so it's best the way it is. <br>He knows, you see, that I will predecease him,<br>Which is hard enough. It would take a callous man<br>To come and stand around and watch me failing.<br>(Now don't you fuss; we both know the plain facts.)<br>But for him it's even harder. He loved my mother.<br>They say she looked like me; I suppose she may have.<br>Or rather, as I grew older I came to look<br>More and more like she must one time have looked,<br>And so the prospect for my father now<br>Of losing me is like having to lose her twice.<br>I know he frets about me. Dr. Frazer<br>Tells me he phones in every single day,<br>Hoping that things will take a turn for the better.<br>But with leukemia things don't improve.<br>It's like a sort of blizzard in the bloodstream,<br>A deep, severe, unseasonable winter,<br>Burying everything. The white blood cells<br>Multiply crazily and storm around,<br>Out of control. The chemotherapy<br>Hasn't helped much, and it makes my hair fall out.<br>I know I look a sight, but I don't care.<br>I care about fewer things; I'm more selective.<br>It's got so I can't even bring myself<br>To read through any of your books these days.<br>It's partly weariness, and partly the fact<br>That I seem not to care much about the endings,<br>How things work out, or whether they even do.<br>What I do instead is sit here by this window<br>And look out at the trees across the way.<br>You wouldn't think that was much, but let me tell you,<br>It keeps me quite intent and occupied.<br>Now all the leaves are down, you can see the spare,<br>Delicate structures of the sycamores,<br>The fine articulation of the beeches.<br>I have sat here for days studying them,<br>And I have only just begun to see<br>What it is that they resemble. One by one,<br>They stand there like magnificent enlargements<br>Of the vascular system of the human brain.<br>I see them there like huge discarnate minds,<br>Lost in their meditative silences.<br>The trunks, branches and twigs compose the vessels<br>That feed and nourish vast immortal thoughts.<br>So I've assigned them names. There, near the path,<br>Is the great brain of Beethoven, and Kepler<br>Haunts the wide spaces of that mountain ash.<br>This view, you see, has become my Hall of Fame,<br>It came to me one day when I remembered <br>Mary Beth Finley who used to play with me<br>When we were girls. One year her parents gave her<br>A birthday toy called &quot;The Transparent Man.&quot;<br>It was made of plastic, with different colored organs,<br>And the circulatory system all mapped out<br>In rivers of red and blue. She'd ask me over<br>And the two of us would sit and study him<br>Together, and do a powerful lot of giggling.<br>I figure he's most likely the only man<br>Either of us would ever get to know<br>Intimately, because Mary Beth became<br>A Sister of Mercy when she was old enough.<br>She must be thirty-one; she was a year <br>Older than I, and about four inches taller.<br>I used to envy both those advantages<br>Back in those days. Anyway, I was struck<br>Right from the start by the sea-weed intricacy,<br>The fine-haired, silken-threaded filiations<br>That wove, like Belgian lace, throughout the head.<br>But this last week it seems I have found myself<br>Looking beyond, or through, individual trees<br>At the dense, clustered woodland just behind them,<br>Where those great, nameless crowds patiently stand.<br>It's become a sort of complex, ultimate puzzle<br>And keeps me fascinated. My eyes are twenty-twenty,<br>Or used to be, but of course I can't unravel<br>The tousled snarl of intersecting limbs,<br>That mackled, cinder grayness. It's a riddle<br>Beyond the eye's solution. Impenetrable.<br>If there is order in all that anarchy<br>Of granite mezzotint, that wilderness,<br>It takes a better eye than mine to see it.<br>It set me on to wondering how to deal<br>With such a thickness of particulars,<br>Deal with it faithfully, you understand,<br>Without blurring the issue. Of course I know<br>That within a month the sleeving snows will come<br>With cold, selective emphases, with massings<br>And arbitrary contrasts, rendering things<br>Deceptively simple, thickening the twigs<br>To frosty veins, bestowing epaulets<br>And decorations on every birch and aspen.<br>And the eye, self-satisfied, will be misled,<br>Thinking the puzzle solved, supposing at last<br>It can look forth and comprehend the world.<br>That's when you have to really watch yourself.<br>So I hope that you won't think me plain ungrateful<br>For not selecting one of your fine books,<br>And I take it very kindly that you came<br>And sat here and let me rattle on this way.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Anthony+Evan+Hecht">Anthony Evan Hecht</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=346203" data-title="The Transparent Man de Anthony Evan Hecht" data-description="I'm mighty glad to see you, Mrs. Curtis,
And thank you very kindly for this visit--
Especially now when all the others here
Are having holiday visitors, and I feel
A little conspicuous and in the way.
It's mainly because of Thanksgiving. All these..."></div>
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