Today, as we leaned back in the wobbly chairs at our kitchen table, a radio
announcer bleated
That it was eleven when we’d thought it was noon. The morning suddenly seemed ecstatic:
lukewarm coffee
In my battered tin cup, the Enterprise with news of another school board
reshuffling, trash cans
Full of egg cartons and plastic strawberry boxes outside the window were all
more hopeful.
These last months you and I have slept long past the alarm’s blare each morning, in our
bedroom—dark where ginkgoes
Block the morning light—we call “the crypt.” That time spent writhing in the green sheets, half-
awake
And testy, seems lost, given away. (My sleeping patterns are corrupt, reads the first page of
your journal
From last year—the only page that’s written on.) On our second night in this house
You picked gardenia blossoms from the bush outside and put them in a bowl of
water on the
night table,
Where they filled the room with a scent so sweet it stung our nostrils like
ammonia;
Of course they turned a sickly russet in a few days and puckered inward, bound
for the trash. You
also placed,
On the bedside ledge, a picture of my young grandmother sitting by a wooded lake—years before
Her six children? I can barely recognize her clunky, skewed smile, her black
hair
In a bun, high cheekbones pulling her skin taut in the 1940s afternoon. What was
her voice like?
Suppose
We could telephone the dead, J. wrote; but we can’t. I remember my grandmother in a flimsy
green hospital gown,
Playing round after round of gin rummy with her best friend Jim, the red-baiting
priest, whose
own
Death wasn’t far off. As I left for the airport she said, “I’ll come to New York for the weekend
when I get out of here,
We can go to dinner at Mama Lucia’s.” She knew she wasn’t getting any better but what could I
answer?
The next time I saw her, she was full of embalming fluid in a flower-filled
casket.
What wouldn’t I give to be back on the ninth floor of Indianapolis General, going downstairs
to
scrounge
Cigarette butts from an ashtray outside the emergency room? I don’t want to end up hooked to an
oxygen tank, croaking
My last words; I finally quit when you and I fell in love, after however many
years of trying. I do
long for it, though.
Once I bummed one from a sandbag-bellied security guard at a Tenderloin bus
stop, his face
laced
With bulging veins, the whites of his eyes a dull pink. He wheezed handing over
the smoke, and
cackled,
“Tell St. Peter at the pearly gates, ‘I’m sorry, but I just can’t wait!’” I’ll never forget him. Or
will I?
In my favorite novel, Carmine recollects only the most insignificant happening
on his deathbed:
Why on earth his memory should have squandered and destroyed so many days and so
many
events, and yet
Preserved that moment so accurately, bringing it through the years, tempests,
and ruins, he did
not know.
What will we remember of this time of our love’s (as we say) fullness? Maybe the pain
Of your fingers squeezing a blackhead from my chin in the bathroom last night
will be the only
scrap left
For me to clutch, at the end.... Last March, waiting for you to come down the
airplane’s
accordion-tube into the gate,
Surrounded by other waiting people—some with crinkly, heart-shaped balloons, scanning the
emerging faces,
Others off to one side reading newspapers—I remembered the Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet
slipped through
The mail slot one morning: a painting of people all ages and races, hugging
frantically or
staggering back to gape
At each other; YOU WILL BE REUNITED WITH YOUR LOVED ONES IN HEAVEN, it
read. How I wish
That other world were real as the half-rotten wooden lawn chairs in our
backyard, where your
red sweatpants
Are pinned to the line, and we sit all afternoon reading and eating almonds, our
knees barely
touching. Maybe the joy
Of that extra hour is the only afterlife we’ll ever have. Omar the cat—grayish brown, fat,
Green-eyed—saunters inside, stops, hacks, pukes up grass and pink bile on the kitchen
floor, then
pads away,
Proud and disinterested. The shower drain is clogged with our hair, glued
together with
soap.
Tomorrow we will lie in bed past ten, then eleven, in those book- littered
sheets: “Sweetheart,
“We have to get up.” “I know.” “No, really, we do.” “I know, but listen—just give me fifteen
minutes more.”
