FRATERNAL MEDITATIONS

I've been thinking about the appropriate form for a life, thoughts that are reflected in these first pages of the latest version of my text:

IMMORTAL FOR QUITE SOME TIME


FRATERNAL MEDITATIONS

by


Scott Abbott

For John (Jay)

it can fool me but once
my grandmother used to say
death can fool me only once
then it’ll be my turn to laugh
Alex Caldiero


And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.
John Berger


“. . . nothing returns from what has been destroyed, nothing is reborn, neither dead men, nor burned libraries, nor submerged lighthouses, nor extinct species, despite the museums commemorations statues books speeches good will, of things that have gone only a vague memory remains. . . .”
Mathias Énard


To confess wrong without losing rightness
Ezra Pound


This is not a memoir.
The story is uncertain.
The characters are in flux.
The voices are plural.
The photographs are as troubled as the prose.

This is not a memoir.


Contents
I - Autopsy
II - 5 Degrees Before Top Dead Center 
     Green-and-Tan Notebook #1 
III - The Albanian Smiled
     Yellow Notebook
IV - Variations on Desire
     Green-and-Tan Notebook #2
V - Horror Vacui                                                                                         

     Blue Notebook

VI - A Dry Quill on Rough Paper     

     Blue-and-Tan Notebook


VII - Epilogue