On the highest deck -- in the lowest dump as well -- there's always a storyteller. The story will be told. *** Whose story: mine or yours? Perhaps . . . his? No matter from whose point of view, it will be told: you, making up a story full of gaps about me. I, narrating your tragi-comical tale? Perhaps, he, the one ignorant of all our days? *** It will be told. *** Even the language of metaphor hoarded like pulp in a giant sponge, even the secrets of the tribe hidden in the moth-eaten saddlebags of time, shall find a haven in words with a slip from the storyteller's tongue, a mere stroke of the pen. *** So are the tales spun from nothing for a world that is nothing in the end but a tale paring its fingernails like James Joyce's god, waiting to be told. *** And though it loses its shine with the passage of days, yet like a record without a needle, it will recite what details there are: those worthy of being recited to whoever has a pair of ears. ________________ Translated by the author