The Unknown Citizen

(To JS/07/M/378/ This Marble MonumentIs Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in everyway.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war,he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent ofhis generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with theireducation.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

~Wystan Hugh Auden

Every now and again, a great white mistakes a surfboard’s outline for the shape of a seal. Perhaps it was the blood from a cut on the ankle which prompted it to take a bite; perhaps it was just the sun obscuring its already-poor eyesight. The water need not be murky.

The shark bursts to the surface in a flash of white and grey, the muzzle popping above the waves. Only a morsel of a bite is necessary to snap the brittle plastic in two—an arm, maybe a leg, was tooth-snagged by the way. After taking a taste, the great white finds the meal inexplicably unseal-like, and swims away in search of another meal.

In search of another meal…it’s the sort of thing you hear in documentaries. Not what you would think about when a flash of fin has left a life dangling in its wake, like a limb’s tenuous connection to the torso by a thin scrap of skin. Which is precisely the scrape my friend is in.

A heap of something was taken to the graveyard and buried in a hole. The shark took my friend, and a little later, a forsaken tooth is all we have left of the encounter. And a bizarre tendency to rhyme for no reason at all. Words can look like one another. A surfboard can look like a seal.