The old woman, seventy-five years
old or so,
lay like Snow White on the pavement
in front of the Hallmark card store.
It was as if she had suddenly decided
while buying a scented candle as a gift
for her granddaughter’s graduation
that a life of absurd tissue paper
and foil wrapping was simply too tiring.
Out of her sense of common decency
she waited until she’d already paid
for the candle and left the store before
she laid her cane down on the cement,
herself parallel to it and fell to sleeping.
If it wasn’t for the plumb of a bruise
protruding between her lightly closed eyes
as if her soul was escaping
through her forehead like an alien parasite,
the above case might’ve been so.
She was like that old, troubling Eskimo
in the Jack London story, waiting in a cold cabin
to be taken by wolves to Arctic heaven.
I slowed down, nearly stopped while driving past
the scene. Several men and a woman
stood above the old woman, impotently.
One wielding a roll of quilted paper towel
like a blunt, useless instrument
for an otherwise delicate operation.
And I thought how terrific death is, its fumes
stunning even those who surround the dead,
how it confuses us like a drug when it comes,
like the last shot of whiskey
before you take your keys and insist on
driving yourself home through rain and snow.
This poem’s been an excuse to tell a sad story,
to show you how sensitive and insightful I am.
Forgive me if it smacks of the anecdotal. Pretend
we’ve just met, perhaps at a Christmas party.
You’re with your wife, who works with me,
and I’m with gin and tonic water.
Because you hate crowds of strangers,
because I hate sports coats and ties,
because the party hums about us like a beehive,
we corner each other in the hall near the basement
falling to the talk that the world calls small.
I’m telling you about the old woman,
deliberately fingering the ice in my glass.
You pretend you’re interested and patient,
listening and nodding your head (do you need
to use the restroom?) as I accuse the world
of unforgivable remoteness...
The bluefish zigzagged from shallow to shore.
It was the same day the old woman fell.
Jack and I were surf casting--(you know Jack,
the nervous guy in accounting).
“Nature won’t forgive us,” I said. Not for
the old woman but for not taking that fish
that seemed to want to be caught and eaten.
“But that’s not the nature of sport,” Jack said.
I reached into the water to touch the fish.
It quickened with my touch. I pulled back
like a child too close to flame. I was quickened too,
a slight tingling of shame in my chest
because I tried to take a sick bluefish and failed.
But as I said: Nature wouldn’t forgive us.
Up the beach, where the blue finally beached himself,
a seagull pushed the fish to death, pecking its flesh
until it stopped its beached-fish flopping.
This is where I’d pause, waiting for you
to make the connection between the bluefish
and the old woman. Perhaps I’d tell you how
I walked to the end of the beach,
my pole like a wisp of bamboo on my shoulder,
how I tried to rescue the fish from its predator,
or how before fishing, I’d returned to the old woman,
racked with guilt, and how I noticed the paramedics
attempting to resuscitate her weren’t hurrying.
At least I tried to do something good, you’d say.
And perhaps again I’d repeat, sipping my drink,
as you twist with urgency of imminent urination,
“Nature won’t forgive us--death’s all around us.”
And that’s where I’d end my story, as if to say
be grateful for what you have, life is tenuous at best,
and I’d mean it. I mean it now. But what
I wouldn’t tell you about, and this is the point,
is the small death I died that day,
before the woman ever wobbled and fell,
before the fish and his flesh were washed away.
Along the chartered isles of K-Mart, I saw
in front of the Little Debbie Snack Cake display,
a woman I knew I knew. She seemed anxious,
as if she was searching for a lost child,
or the answers to questions she shouldn’t have asked,
or perhaps for the sale on cat food.
Whatever the case, I didn’t care to find out.
Generally she talks too much, and I wasn’t in the mood.
So I wished myself small, as I can do,
to be a ghost among the living,
flickering fluorescent beneath fluorescent light,
still breathing yet hoping not to be noticed.
This is how death surrounds us, here,
in our tendency to look away instead of nodding
good morning to a perplexed neighbor,
in our tendency to forget the name of someone
who’s taken the trouble to remember our name,
in our tendency to look down at the sidewalk,
hands stuffed ashamedly into our pockets,
as we march like pigs off the curb, across
the parking lot into our cars idling indifferently. |
Rio:
A Journal of the Arts