The Blackness In Argument

A compact poem likening the slow death of truth in argument to a disease that grows backward and ferments like the shadow of death felt by fish in a polluted pond.

A definition by negation of how truth actually dies. 'The long drawn out death of truth' does not 'sing the chant of evil,' does not grab like a child, and 'doesn't steal like a swift thief' - the poem rules out every dramatic exit. Instead it 'grows backwards down to / Your last littleness' until it 'ferments disease against / life,' a slow inward shrinkage rather than an attack. The closing simile is the poem's gift: it is 'like the shadow of death the / fish feel / from a polluted friend in a pond,' so that the blackness in an argument is not its loud wrongness but the quiet contamination it leaks into the water around it, killing by proximity and by familiarity - a friend, not an enemy.