Old Man
Seated in his recollections; smiles larrupping tears lumbering on
reddening lids. What does he see in antique storerooms, smelling
beeswax, dust and memory.
He sees:
Lorraine, almost nineteen, just gone sixteen, running into the
whippet wind. Henna tousled Lorraine; where had the winters
taken her? Forgetting her dreams, how could she remember him?
He blinks, and eyeballing the achromatic distance, beads soft
syllables on his silk tipped tongue.
“Death will be the making of me.”
“Then what will unmake you?”
“I am unmade.”
Trim in his sixty year old clippings, he seizes the taste of
sweat and passion, gliding, chewing-gun paper wrapped in the
satchels of old schoolboys.
“Oh, had I but time still to come.”
“How would you use it?”
“As I have already.”
He looks at his watch, half past twelve, forty years too late;
Ruth’s cafĂ©, dungeon dim and black fly flown. What meals could
he not remember here? Fastened to his old chipped mug, he washes
it all away.
What does he see as the battle retired torn muffles his faintly
beating longing?
He sees:
A hundred faces away from time’s mutilations, just as they had
been; how would he know them now?
Beer bibbed and swollen, oh what times had been.
And his friends limp away; hearts punched nearly through, in bone
homes, yellow and flaking, to wives and retirement; to sit like
him, box near and bent.
He sees the sun until it is no more.
He sees the moon;
and a day over long ago, that maybe history will attach some
importance to, without his treading feet shoe-shining its pages.
“My first kiss, beneath a tree, beneath a sky; strange unhandled
Jill: How I recall each first kiss, withering nearly unmourned on
my damp dittying lips.”
He coughs away those kisses decking in his dull dumped desires;
and sees:
maybe nothing that he has not seen before;
maybe nothing his heart will be able to hold on to.
Page(s) 48
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