What'll be the Brueghel of the
Floating World
now that they found him in his
car, held in his last breath by a heart attack?
Television, maybe.
Television, Land of Maybe. Fitting,
I guess, since television was his
wife those last two years, after
Annette, his constant flesh and blood,
disappeared through that anguished peephole
cancer opened in her cervix. It
never let her go. Pinched the
tail end
of her spinal cord, and tugged, sharply, by
milli-moments, until painkillers
looked out at him like two separate Annettes
through her eyes. When she died,
the hospital told him: credit card debt.
His friend in Columbus said: move in.
He moved in. It was only a
slow gesture. He was already out, and he knew it.
His admiration for others had its
counterweight in
self-loathing, so
to hold better, he switched it. Hating
by word well before hope of touch
his loathing them brought him
even with himself. Vodka said:
television. Tele-
vision said: job. Job: no one
will tell you why not. So he didn't.
One by one, the names crawled up the wall
but failed to find a summit.
Instead, him. Camped upside-down
for days until his buddy kicked him
as far as the shelter would take him. Homeless,
he felt how close home was less.
So he took the construction part-time for rent.
Congestive water around
his only rhythm, diabeaten, he let
smoke roll to the very bottom
of his undiagnosed emphysema. Four arms
and no legs. Eleven legs, no arms,
but mysteriously many fingers to spare.
He counted the years on them. The
resolute, the comfortable, the carpeted, the
ragged. Believe it then not, it all
added up to be even. Turning the ignition
with a key, through the windshield
and wind and parking lot, dawn a faint
slit along the distance. High and low
bleeding light and blushing color.
What was it, looking then--Annette, was it
her, when time hid its secret from her
so she could be young again, fresh, a bale
of fresh hair
falling to her cheeks, him pushing back in
his E-Z chair to enrich the vision of that one channel?
For a couple of weeks afterwards a few
mentioned it, more as a warning to
themselves. Theirs now: a story. If
the myth of wholeness and release
and communion with the reason for bodies
were here, to speak for him, what would it say?
We gave you this one for a while.
What happened
gave him. He took and made of it
someone for a time. Now that's not
an issue,
time. When you mention him, you
could mean anyone. Yourselves,
and everyone who would
give much of you back, looking by lights
beyond a day or mirror, for themselves.
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