No Encore

I'm just an assistant with the Vanishing Act. My spangled wand points out the disappeared. It's only a poor thing made of words, and lacks the illusive power to light the darkling year. Not prophecy, not elegy, but fact: the thing that's gone is never coming back. Late or soon a guttering silence will ring down a curtain like woven smoke on thickening air. The audience will strain to see what's there, the old magician nowhere to be found. For now, I wear a costume and dance obliquely. The applause you hear is not for me, its rabid sound like angry rain—as one by one the known forms cease to be: childhood, the farm, the river, forested ground; the tiger and the condor, the whale, the honeybee; the village, the book, the lantern. Then you. Then me.