The first thing I thought
was What if this is
the last time I ever see him?
He’d just come from the CVS
and was crossing the street with
an un-customary grimace on his face,
contorting into a crescent smile
the moment he saw
me closing in.
I could tell he was in pain
and he probably
didn’t want me knowing it,
never wanting to draw attention
to his defects or failings
as he was trying so clumsily
to be one of the living.
His grocery bag dangled
like a drug addict’s purse,
a green leafy lettuce
poking out from it,
a feeble reach towards freshness.
He was one of those rare men of age
that still kept up with cooking
his own meals.
That, and he had needed his refills.
They say he’d come around
to Bingo and was looking much better
in the last week.
He’d even been seen
binging on an over-sized
wedge of birthday cake;
a grown man channeling
a wide-eyed child,
even as life threatened to become
more than he could chew.
I can see that photo-ready face
he must have made,
an actor still ready to deploy a mask.
He always announced himself
with that funny gait of his
that made him so easily imitatable;
a stride that, I felt sure, had been quite sexy
in youth, but now had resolved into
a kind of wounded affectation. I knew
he was in pain only because
we once spoke about
the evils of opioids
after an un-characteristic confession that his feet
hurt him with every step for a decade.
“How are you feeling,” I asked.
“Oh, I’m soldiering on,” he said flippantly.
He was wearing one of his plaids.
His flannels always made me think of the Midwest.
I think he was from Illinois or Michigan,
a life bolstered by it’s proximity
to water.
Was it poetic license that he once added:
“Every mother is a natural body of water.”
I pretended to know what he meant.
Once I saw him talking to a much
more youthful man
that looked like the other end of himself.
I wondered whatever were
they telling each other.
Why is it so odd
to see the young interact with the old?
Maybe because there's only so many ways
a man can hide a battlefield with a smile.
I keep to myself, he once said.
The youth today are animals.
I gave him the benefit
of his cliche convinced that it
was just his loneliness talking.
Maybe we’re all animals
until we birth a soul,
I thought to say, but didn’t
as I wasn’t about to lecture him.
But my inner thoughts continued
to close the circle.
What if a soul is not a given?
What if we were cobbling one
together all along
even as we used
those imaginary tools
of childhood?
He had a fear of falling.
Life had become a balancing act,
each day passed in
a death-defying circus ring.
Of late, he’d taken to walking
around the block looking for
someone who’d dare to meet his eyes.
More than that, he wanted
to be seen straight through
to his insides.
To meet that person
who could apprehend the
journey that was curling
around itself like an embryo
at the heart of him,
as if an affable visibility might
bring him full circle.
Could I be that person?
Dilapidation had begun to
bring reassurance;
a wabi sabi of acceptance
of one’s own diminishment,
even as his handsomeness
had long since sunk beneath
it's lunar surface,
he was and is a man of great beauty.
On his worst days, his spirit
felt like parched flowers
in a waterless vase.
He thought of Mrs. Conrad
who kept a jar of crisp
rust-colored roses
by the side of her bed
where dust had formed
an encasing web,
unwilling to bring herself
to clear it away;
the last of her beloved’s cells
as precious as
the memory of a first snow.
Now, back on the raw reality
of 10th Ave and 43rd,
a wind conspiring to
blow us both away,
I embraced this civil war
of a man
and for one
un-embattled moment
he and I became
a circle of two.
Peter Valentyne
February 9th, 2019
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