“Truth is like fire; to tell the truth means to glow and burn.”
—Gustav Klimt, Nuda Veritas (1899)
Truth, I'd say, is more like a foxed mirror
In a dusty, cluttered attic corner
Of an imagined ancestral homeland—
A beaten country that lost its Great War.
Or like a painting of a nonentity called “Me”
Who slinks around a corner in the Goodwill store,
And then (hopefully?) is spotted no more.
Its kindling might get clearer by and by,
It is the flames one cannot falsify.
Telling is—inevitably, I guess!—to lie.
Saturday, February 8, 2025
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