J. Swift's Paris Travel Journal -- Part VI

An old blind man, who knew he was dying, sat on a small bench in the plaza chain smoking. He was paralyzed in fear over the many voices he heard inside of his head:


He wore sunglasses so that no one could see his dead eyes.

The old man saw things from the past and heard these thousand voices, but mostly he thought of a poem by e. e. cummings and what it meant for him as he was about to depart the body:

"what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer's lie,
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend:blow space to time)
when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man.

"what if a keen of a lean wind flays
screaming hills with sleet and snow:
strangles valleys by ropes of thing
and stifles forests in white ago?
Blow hope to terror;blow seeing to blind
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)
whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,
it's they shall cry hello to the spring

"what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of it's grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
Blow soon to never and never to twice
(blow life to isn't:blow death to was)
—all nothing's only our hugest home;
the most who die,the more we live

*****
The old man's cruel nephew would soon come to take the man back to his very small home, an old trailer behind a castle. The nephew lived in the castle where the old man once had lived when he was young and grand and ruled all he surveyed. But now he was blind and heard voices and wanted to live in the small trailer where he would not trip over things as he did in the castle. He knew that his nephew wanted him to die in order to inherit everything, but the old man did not care and was in fact long past caring. The old man reached into his pocket and took a pill. Soon the pill would hit his bloodstream and the voices would be quiet for awhile and the man's mind would be quiet enough to consider the final part of the poem:

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of it's grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?


What did it mean to be sprinkled over nowhere after having been seemingly everywhere?

/////