Runners

And finally, you ask out loud
as another one passes by you,
where, where
in the hell
are they going?

What have they agreed to I have not?
What have they settled on?

And this, your voice saying this, is probably
the funniest thing you’ll hear

all week.

Warm Laundry

Sitting on the floor, sorting it.
In an apartment we’ve already been told
is no longer ours.
Her socks, her underwear, her
night things. All mixed in with mine.
My hands in it.
She sleeps in the other room. I can
hear her breathing, as all other sounds
one by one are eliminated. There’s half a
coconut cream pie in the fridge, I know that much.
I fold the items and put them in piles.
They don’t amount to much, really,
each garment. One particular pair,
turquoise, I turn over
and over to find
which end is up. The cat supervises
this. All this. The cat and the ants
that just moved in.

The little piles make me want to cry
I think, but there isn’t anything there
to cry with. No oil in the engine, no
no water to boil. But the sentiment is there, it’s a sad sight—
so small.

And then, for some reason, I remember
how as a kid
I used to scare myself imagining people
rising into view of my second story bedroom window.
Just floating out there. Smiling,
in the light of my room. And we’d look
at one another, and I’d make myself
continue to look
as my body became cold with fear.
And I went on to recall my many other terrible dreams,
the ones I could remember anyway, over the years, as I folded them
in halves, thirds, quarters. Packages
no bigger than my fist.

And they were still warm then, but
losing that fairly quickly.

Memory Of A Man Who Drank

He used to break ice with a spoon.
Give it one, two, three
good whacks with the rounded side
before it shattered in
the brown
palm of his hand.

He’d put it in the glass. Add
vodka, olives and sometimes water.
The sound of the chipped
ice in the glass.

Still,
I think of it, the
breaking of ice in summer
on the screen porch, moths
at the light, sounds low in the close
wood. And every few nights, a
gunshot crack somewhere off, or a dog, or a siren
so distant it didn’t seem to come for you. I
think of it with the snapping
of dry wood in fire, in the
flap of hunting bats, in ice, in a
spoon, in vodka, or
in even hands.

Landfill

It’s a matter of irrigation, they tell me,
that’s got the park all sawed up.

Trenches cut across the paths, the grass,
like massive crisscrossed stitches.

And in the trenches, seashells, white, while
we’re a good mile in here.

They filled this area long ago, our relatives
and non-relatives, the ones whose bones

are buried in the many cemeteries in and about town,
with mud from under water.

Oyster shells, clams, scallops, just a little dirty
that’s all; turning up toward me on my morning walk.

And they’ve been waiting throughout the years,
once full of eyeless, sexless things through

what series of human crises and
catastrophes, what wars, what hunger,

just to be unearthed
and turned over, under the sky for the first time.

I Know A Guy's In A Coma

He’s the husband of a friend of my wife.
And well, one day he got a fever.
Two days later he’s in the hospital
in a coma
the doctors put him in.
Said they had to do it
to prevent another seizure like the one
made his wife call the paramedics in the first place.
And it’s difficult with someone like that, they said,
to wake him up at all.
It must happen slowly—sometimes a matter
of days just to let the body acclimate, like a
diver rising out of the depths of the sea
while avoiding the bends.
So he’s far away, asleep, and he’s been like this
for a couple of months.
In those months, his muscles atrophied
and his wife had to get a second job. Her father’s
this guy’s boss (the one in the coma)
at a liquor store he owns.
But he refused to give the wife
(his daughter)
the incapacitated man’s wages.
Instead, he would give her
and her children
food in the form of meals at his house
and just about anything else they needed
other than money itself.
Long as they come over, he says, to keep him
company. He’s a widower. He has trouble
with things like laundry. When he comes out of it,
she tells her father,
he’s not gonna be able to go right back to work.
That’s alright, says the father.
And she says, he’s not gonna be able to make up
the time’s lost, with you or anyone.
He might never be the same. The doctors say they
do not know.
That’s also alright, says the father.
He’s not gonna have anything, even if he’s not a vegetable.
We used up everything we saved.
The father says, I’ll take care of you. When
he’s ready to walk, he’s welcome back.
This talk went on a few more months
while the doctors tinkered with dosages
to deal with his newfangled epilepsy.
They’d do one, wait
while he came out of the coma, see how it worked.
Usually, he’d wake up then nearly kill himself
with a seizure. Well, they’d figure, that one didn’t work.
Put him back under and down he’d go.
When we went to see him he didn’t even look alive.
His muscles retained water so he had this
deathly bloated look about his face. His skin
was gray and waxy. His body
approximated a real version of himself
meanwhile you thought
you were looking into some queer nightmare of a person.
He likes hearing his friends talk to him, his wife told us.
He knows you’re here.
My wife consoled her as she cried.
I’d but met the man one time
around a bar pool table.
Now here he was,
in a coma wanting me to talk to him.
I said a few things, I don’t remember what.
How odd it is, I kept thinking, that this has
happened to this man.
What is it like for these people who get put into comas?
Who have no chance to cover their tracks, to consider
the past and the dark future, to attest to god
some good they’d done?
What was it like to skim barely
the highest, most inhospitable, incomprehensible
altitude of life, and hear the
goings on
of your life carried out, shepherded
by other folks as if through
the water and glass of a deep sea aquarium?
What will it be like
to wake up for him, if they ever wake him up
successfully, wake up
with some semblance of peace his body has finally allowed, and ask
those standing, waiting there, looking at you:
you did what?

He Doesn't Need That

This was late November.
Hadn’t snowed in a while
but there was still some left
along the roads, beaten
and hardened into craggy slush.

I saw a blind man
with a backpack strapped on
start to cross the street. But first, he had to
cross the snow.

He took one step on the ice and slipped, fell forward.
He didn’t use his arms when he fell
so his face hit the ice directly. His cane
toppled with a kinkle and the glasses skipped
across the cold sidewalk. His backpack
came to rest on top of him.

Me and another guy helped him to his feet.
I gripped the flesh behind his elbow while the other guy
pushed from behind. He was heavy, the backpack was full.
“I’m alright,” he said, trying to smile.
He said his name was Tom. “Dumb ice,” Tom said.
There was blood coming from his nose
and was spreading in between his teeth.

A number of other people arrived.
One tried to replace his glasses, which were bent
with one lens loose. They placed these in his hand.
Another person put the cane into his second hand.
A third extracted
Kleenex from her handbag
and tried to stop the mess on his face.
The blood came out in lines like water.
She’d wipe it away and new blood would come out.
He was licking it, tasting the blood, and he must have tasted it
very well, I thought.
“You might need a stitch,” she said.
The blind man tilted his head back, and allowed
the Kleenex to rest, stuffed in his nose.
She produced a Band-Aid and put the
Band-Aid on the blood, secured it to his
cabbage cheeks.

Someone shook off his hat and placed it onto his
head. Adjusted it so it was straight.

Then a final person arrived and
held something out in front of the man’s
face. It was a mirror. A hand mirror.
She wanted him to see
what had happened to him, or how
bad it was or whether he was still bleeding.
This was her form of service.
He simply stayed tilted up though, looking
nowhere, trying to hear whatever he could
to make sense of what had happened to him.

“I’m alright,” he said again. “Thank you.”

“He’s blind,” the girl with the Kleenex said,
pushing the mirror away. “He doesn’t
need that.”