From My Window
Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet,
laminar,
complex
scent arrives
from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill,
glorying in
the end
of the wretched winter.
The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the
way are
budded
—I hadn't noticed —
and the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have
already broken
the
gritty soil.
Up the street, some surveyors with tripods are waving each
other left and
right
the way they do.
A girl in a gym suit jogged by a while ago, some kids
passed, playing
hooky, I
imagine,
and now the paraplegic Vietnam vet who lives in a
half-converted ware-
house
down the block
and the friend who stays with him and seems to help him out
come
weaving
towards me,
their battered wheelchair lurching uncertainly from one edge
of the
sidewalk
to the other.
I know where they're going—to the "Legion": once,
when I was putting
something out, they stopped,
both drunk that time, too, both reeking—it wasn't ten
o'clock—and we
chatted
for a bit.
I don't know how they stay alive—on benefits most likely. I
wonder if
they're
lovers?
They don't look it. Right now, in fact, they look a wreck,
careening hap-
hazardly
along,
contriving, as they reach beneath me, to dip a wheel from
the curb so
that the
chair skewers, teeters,
tips, and they both tumble, the one slowly, almost
gracefully sliding in
stages from his seat,
his expression hardly marking it, the other staggering over
him, spinning
heavily
down,
to lie on the asphalt, his mouth working, his feet shoving
weakly and
fruitlessly against the curb.
In the storefront office on the corner, Reed and Son, Real
Estate, have
come to
see the show.
Gazing through the golden letters of their name, they're
not, at least,
thank
god, laughing.
Now the buddy, grabbing at a hydrant, gets himself erect and
stands
there
for a moment, panting.
Now he has to lift the other, who lies utterly still, a
forearm shielding his
eyes
from the sun.
He hauls him partly upright, then hefts him almost all the
way into the
chair,
but a dangling foot
catches a support-plate, jerking everything around so that
he has to put
him
down,
set the chair to rights, and hoist him again and as he does
he jerks the
grimy
jeans right off him.
No drawers, shrunken, blotchy thighs: under the thick, white
coils of
belly
blubber,
the poor, blunt pud, tiny, terrified, retracted, is almost
invisible in the
sparse genital hair,
then his friend pulls his pants up, he slumps wholly back as
though he
were, at
last, to be let be,
and the friend leans against the cyclone fence, suddenly
staring up at me
as
though he'd known,
all along, that I was watching and I can't help wondering if
he knows that
in the
winter, too,
I watched, the night he went out to the lot and walked,
paced rather,
almost
ran, for how many hours.
It was snowing, the city in that holy silence, the last we
have, when the
storm
takes hold,
and he was making patterns that I thought at first were
circles, then real-
ized
made a figure eight,
what must have been to him a perfect symmetry but which,
from where
I was, shivered, bent,
and lay on its side: a warped, unclear infinity, slowly, as
the snow came
faster,
going out.
Over and over again, his head lowered to the task, he
slogged the path
he'd
blazed,
but the race was lost, his prints were filling faster than
he made them
now and
I looked away,
up across the skeletal trees to the tall center city
buildings, some, though
it was
midnight,
with all their offices still gleaming, their scarlet warning
beacons signal-
ing
erratically
against the thickening flakes, their smoldering auras
softening portions of
the dim,
milky sky.
In the morning, nothing: every trace of him effaced, all the
field pure
white,
its surface glittering, the dawn, glancing from its glaze,
oblique, relent-
less,
unadorned.
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