The President's Resignation (Mark Strand)

Early this evening, the President announced his resignation. Though his rise to power was meteoric, he was not a popular leader. He made no promises before taking office but speculated endlessly about the kind of weather we would have during his term, sometimes even making a modest prediction. And when, as it happened from time to time, his prediction was not borne out, he would quickly conceal his disappointment. His critics accused him of spending too much energy on such exercises, and were especially severe about his wasting public funds on a National Museum of Weather, in whose rooms one could experience the climate of any day anywhere in the history of man. His war on fluorocarbons, known as the "gas crusade," is still talked about with astonishment. Among those attending the President's farewell address were: the First Minister of Potential Clearness & husband, the Warden of Inner and Outer Darkness & husband, the Deputy Chief of Lesser Degrees & wife, the First Examiner of Ambiguous Customs & two secretaries, the Chief of Transcendent Decorum & friend, the Assistant Magistrate of Exemplary Conditions & two friends, the Undersecretary for Devices Appropriate to Conditions Unspecific & mother, the Lord Chancellor of Abnormal Silences & father, the Deputy Examiner of Fallibility and Remorse & daughters, the Chief Poet Laureate and Keeper of Glosses for Unwritten Texts & follower.

THE PRESIDENT'S FAREWELL ADDRESS

Ladies and gentlemen, friends and colleagues, thank you for coming this evening. I know how difficult for you the past few days have been and how sad you must be tonight. But I came to the Presidency from the bottom of my heart and leave it with the best will in the world. And I believe I have weathered my term without betraying the trust of the people. From the beginning I have preached melancholy and invention, nostalgia and prophecy. The languors of art have been my haven. More than anything I wished to be the first truly modern President, and to make my term the free extension of impulse and the preservation of chance.

(Applause)

Who can forget my proposals, petitions uttered on behalf of those who labored in the great cause of weather--measuring wind, predicting rain, giving themselves to whole generations of days--whose attention was ever riveted to the invisible wheel that turns the stars and to the stars themselves? How like poetry, said my enemies. They were right. For it was my wish to make nothing happen. Thank heaven it has been so, for my words would easily have been wasted along with the works they might have engendered. I have always spoken for what does not change, for what resists action, for the stillness at the center of man.

(Applause)

Thus we have been privileged to celebrate fifty-one national holidays, the fifty-one days I hesitated before taking office--the glorious fifty-one that now belong to the annals of meditation. How lovely the mind is when overcast or clouded with indecision, when it goes nowhere, when it is conscious, radiantly conscious, of its own secret motions.

(Applause)

And the hours spent reading Chekhov aloud to you, my beloved Cabinet! The delirium of our own unimportance that followed! How we sighed and moaned for the frailty of our lives! Not to be remembered in two hundred years, or even in two! And the silence that was ours, each of us overtaken with a feeling of moments prolonged, magically chronicled in the stillness of windows beyond which the minute changes of the world went on.

(Applause)

Friends, how can I tell you what weather has meant! The blue sky, its variations and repetitions, is what I look back on: the blues of my first day in office, the blues of my fifth day, the porcelain blues, the monotonous blues, the stately blues, the ideal blues, and the slightly less than ideal blues, the yellow blues on certain winter days. Always the great cupola of light, a vague yet luminous crown, spread with tireless regularity, turning the prose of my life into exultation and desire. And then it would dim into twilight and the green edge of the world would darken. Finally the weather of night would arrive, under which I drifted as if my bed were a ship--the monstrous openness of night, in which birds become lost, in which sounds travel with a melancholy beyond tears, in which my dreams of a golden age seem, for a moment, diminished and hopelessly exiled. I have sailed and sailed my whole life.

(Applause)

I remember each morning, when I was young, setting out to cross the plains of boredom, over which small islands of shadow drifted according to the caprice of clouds. Little did I know that those days had historical importance. Airy monuments, blurred remembrances were being built, suggested, removed almost in the instant of their occurrence. Each morning, crossing those plains, armed only with desire for sympathy and adulation, I was even then forming the role I would play as President. The emptiness of those days was as deep and relentless as the breathing of parents. When would the world awake and acknowledge its light, that airy gold in which strange domes of gray paraded soundlessly, far off?

(Applause)

I have never ceased looking up at the sky and I never shall. The azures and ultramarines of disappointment and joy come only from it. The blessings of weather shall always exceed the office of our calling and turn our words, without warning, into the petals of a huge and inexhaustible rose. Thank you and good-bye.

From The Weather of Words (Knopf, 2000)