Kimmo Rosenthal
Everything imaginable can be dreamed
(A cento inspired by Invisible Cities)
The thoughts that come to a man who sits on his doorstep
Unknowable thoughts of which our own are perhaps often but a shadow
The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us
A zodiac of the mind's phantasms
The tracery of a pattern so subtle
The catalogue of forms is endless
The lake of our mind
Labile mists of memory
A glint of lights in the fog
The journey begins even before imagining the journey
You sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself
Everything is possible except, of course, the actual
Endnotes
The title and all the lines in italics are from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
(Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974). Specifically, they are from the conversations
of Marco Polo with the Kublai Khan, which are intercalated with the descriptions of the cities.
Line 2: Malicroix, by Henri Bosco (New York Review of Books, 2020).
Line 3: The Necessary Angel (Essays on Reality and Imagination),
by Wallace Stevens (Vintage Books, 1951)
Line 10: Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza, (Graywolf Press, 2026).
Line 11: The Imperial Message in The Complete Short Stories and Parables, by Franz Kafka
(Quality Paperback Book Club, New York, 1983).
Line 12. Land Deal in Stream System by Gerald Murnane (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2018)
Bio
Kimmo Rosenthal, after a long career of teaching and publishing mathematics, has turned his attention to writing. He has over forty literary publications and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Some of his recent work has appeared in Hinterland, The Fib Review, BigCityLit, The RavensPerch, Sage Cigarettes, and After the Art.