Who does Dilettante know?
Nobody! Except for maybe a cousin
who doesn’t want to know from him.
Once Dilettante told me
how the sculptor Alberto Giacometti
said that sometimes just to paint a head
you have to give up the whole figure.
To paint a leaf,
you have to sacrifice the whole landscape
like you’re limiting yourself but you realize
that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something
you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling
of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.
Just ask a wandering Jewish Albatross.
One of the mind loops Dilettante gets himself stuck inside
is the Wandering Albatross - Wandering Jew - dynamic?
I am drawn to both equally.
“Once I start thinking of one, I say it,
then I think of the other, back and forth,
conflating the two mostly. Putting them together
in my head until I see a wandering Jewish Albatross.
Did you know they can go years without touching the ground,
they sleep aloft in the sky, drink sea water,
cry out the salt, and practice a form of monogamy I think?”
“The Wandering Jews?”
