Against Odds Against There’s nothing you can do, After Life, to stanch the passage of time, or the wrack it leaves behind, a wound for which all      “tourniquets” are useless. Everyone is forced to navigate the river of the dead alone. It’s futile to excise a good three-hundred pound      prize steer in offering (from the herd rented at $10 a head even when they just grazed while Hawks was dying for Rain Valley to stop living up to its name so he could get Red      River shot before the cast mutinied) to Pluto--who in this inferno restrains tri-sexual Geryon on a leash of tricyclics..., or an empire builder like Tom Dunson,      Matthew Garth’s foster father. There is no getting the better of a beast who when you yell “go fuck yourself” just asks for its hands to be unclasped;      and never a way to escape the brackish waters of backed-up Cocytos, the infamous Danae and the all-too-famous Sisyphus: thanks to one concise, timely essay      by twenty-nine year old Albert Camus. Maybe pushing a boulder uphill forever isn’t quite as onerous when the wind is your father? There are more things on earth      than making the best of the worst. Wage war on war? Why not? So long as everything comes to nothing. And the wave-roar grows hoarse      from breaking the news to the deluded multitudes who go on “wishing and hoping and hoping and dreaming...” for Miracle      Incorporated to rid the sirocco of the germs it strews cruelly, indifferently, on everyone open to the wind, from tower-hidden kings      to ragged beggars. All that you have loved best will fall away. The land you worked. The house you built. The wife you loved. (The immense tenderness      that grew between you.) Alone, the invidious cypress will cast shadows on your harvest’s golden glow; then in no time at all it will be time to set the field on fire:      so the grain can die. Why are time’s prisoners in their meager tenure on earth so often inured to the giant strides that occurred in the quality of life      while they lived. Take heart that someone like yourself only-- (dare I say it?)--more...evolved...will depart the site where your physical body decomposes      underneath the humped mound, determined to alter future legislation as regards cremation. He knows what wines are ready to be opened and where they are within      the labyrinthine cellar and, jangling the keys, descends. Rest content. You were an experiment. To what end “man is only beginning”      to glean a direction. After Horace (Odes, 11.14) From Provoked in Venice, first published in Arion