PARTISAN REVIEW
J.
F. suddenly realized that he had lost interest in poetry, what
with the war on, and so much important work to be done, and also
that there isn't much fun of competition when you happen to own
the only one of its kind, so he answered, "No, don't bother," thus
finally giving up his equity in the affair.
With no pursuit, and nothing to measure his pace by, the last
poet ran off into the desert, completely alone. His body, dehydrated,
was found only yesterday by some soldiers who were engaged in
scouting for a suitable place to set up hospitals for the survivors of
destroyed Los Angeles to die in. De Parter had been writing with a
stick on the incredibly flat salt plain, in letters a foot high, and seemed
to have finished his work. Before anybody could copy it, if anybody
could have been interested enough at the time, bulldozers had torn
up the poem, which was approximately five hundred yards long, and
all that remains is the report of the corporal-surveyor who stumbled
over the body. He says the last line was
Brothers! We have come
to this!,
but he can't remember the several others he saw.
In this way, the last poem of our last poet was written and
destroyed. It is possible that something important was lost, something
that might have given us some insight into the kind of civilization we
now have to live in, but it is always safer and wiser to take the
simpler explanation: that it was nothing more than the final, convul–
sive, incoherent scrawl of a man we know was
raving mad.
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