Does it really all come down to the woman in the dry-cleaner's who by her
vociferous silence
and the way she flings them down let's me know she's espied the indelible
yellow driblets
on the lining of my pants and hates me for them, thrusting them with loathing
into their plastic
and not looking for an instant at my eyes, my face?And for this that she
won't accept money
directly from my hand, making clear I'm to leave my filthy bill in the dent of
the plastic tray,
that the change will be deposited there for my polluted, contagious fingers to
extract?
Was it for this, this, becoming a patient, transformed to a shivering sack of
blood to be spilled?
And the dark night tracing of malevolent lymph tracks, fear scaling the ice-
rungs of my spine?
For this the surgeon's blade slicing the fat of my gut, leaving that dismal shelf
over my groin?
And the pain, the shuddering post-operative chill, the potassium burningly
blown into my veins?
...But listen to me, complaining: who cares if some snob-bitch turns up her
nose at my crotch?
And you, cancer-fiend, still maybe spitting cells out into my bones and my
brain, fuck you:
fuck you for Zweig, fuck you for Fagles, fuck you for McGrew and Minghella
and the poets
Cavafy and both Hughes, and Ginsberg and Clifton and Jane Kenyon and even
John Donne,
plus all the big public deals like Bogart and Marley and that Beatle, and also
the beautiful starlet
who wouldn't let them cut off her perfect breasts and so died of the fear of
losing her beauty.
Too late for me to be frightened of losing my pot-bellied unbeauty, or anything
else except maybe things
like remembering when Erv Goffman was dying and I said, "What will I do
with only one super-ego?"
and he laughed, and I laughed, and what can you do, with everyone plucked
out of your life except laugh?
Or not laugh, not every day, but not cry either, or maybe a little, maybe cry
just a little, a little.