nada

An Everlasting Once
Theodore Weiss

Suppose your whole life
you went your way, belonging
to no place, no school, using
your wits to gainsay every trace
of influence or imitation, wiping
out anything that reminded you
of anything.
You knew how
browbeating memory, the rule
of the past, can be, how easily
it thrives in wiping out the new
since seen for the first time
only.
So you kept yourself
to yourself, doing only chores
you had to to survive.
Unknown to anyone--almost,
for its engrossment, to yourself--
you gave yourself to your work.

With you gone they found it
something unspeakably, if not
unbearably, your own. No matter
how they tried they could not
digest it into a name, a scheme,
an explanation.
Except for this
they might not have been sure
you'd lived at all. But this,
unblinking, brutal in its
authority, made it impossible
for them to deny it or to call
you a minor this, a crazy that,
eccentric at best for his battle,
rejecting the main stream.
They
might turn away; they could not
altogether still the whispering
fear that, after all, that stream,
notwithstanding its deflections,
its passages long underground,
had gone this way. Daily now
the stream grows louder.

幾年前第一次讀這詩，觸動甚深，順隨意識想到的，是海明威的"nada"。
但覺人世荒空。
可荒空若是萬物的本性，也無由縱容自己過消極日子。
一點一點學會，無執迷，就是了。