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"See." The white walls grin triumphantly.
Silence.
Chloe's head collapses back when she laughs, and it's a guttural laugh, but high pitched and her left arm twitches a little when she really gets rolling, but right now it doesn't because she only chuckles and then her head snaps back forward. "Yeah I can see that. But I was thinking maybe we could get a jigsaw puzzle or something."
Blinking fire flies -- twenty four frames per second -- do da do dada -- roosting -- hear we go again -- charred steel drooping -- sniffing -- bagpipes wheezing -- stuttering the future -- glistens and sparkles by design -- can you hear -- the morning line -- the polyphony -- new everyday -- falling off your tongue -- was it good for you?
"You were in high form. I think you scared the shit out of Scratch."
"Nah. That man ain't scared of anything least of all some punk ass kid like me." He pauses for a minute.
"You know what I remember him saying at some point? He was talking to Chloe about something...I dunno... they were having their own side conversation and I was saying something inane to you and I remember hearing him say to her 'I do the best I can not to worry about things. Summers days are here. I have never known where I'm going, but here I am.' It blew my mind. Some people could have said that and I would have slapped them, but from him... shit. He hates poetry because he's living it."
"He hates poetry?"
"Yeah that's what he said. I just kinda looked at him. I went over to his bookshelf and there was William Carlos Williams. I didn't say anything. I just pulled it off the shelf and read the famous one...no way was I going to read something cleverly obscure... he's too old to stand for that kinda pretension..." Jimmy jumps up and grabs the William Carlos Williams sitting on my table. He flips through it for a minute and then reads aloud.
"This is just to say"
"I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast"
"Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold"
He smiles at the page, it's in on something, caught in some private joy and his shoes. Jimmy reads with neither the amateurishness nor pretension that have driven poetry readings to the far corners of New England. His voice is a plum. He swallows, "do you realize that that poem is everything I've ever wanted and never found?" He tosses the book back on the table and doesn't say anything else.
Jimmy reads like James Joyce wrote. There is nothing to say. Do you realize that that poem is everything I've ever wanted and never found? We sit in silence. I put my feet up on the coffeetable and am embarrassed by the noise.
"Are you drinking wine in the morning? In this heat?"
"It's not that hot in here."
"Yes, but at some point you will have to face the outside world where it is hot."
"I guess. But it's not wine. It's water."
"Oh. Well, if you get some wine tell me, I'd like to have a glass."
"But it's over a hundred outside."
"Sil it's wine. We all have our weaknesses. You really shouldn't put water in wine bottles, it teases me in uncomfortable ways that force me to confront yearnings and desires my young mind tries desperately to avoid. I went to catholic school you know." Impish smile. But she didn't really. She just likes to say it and then smile impishly.
"Have you ever heard Jimmy read?"
"You mean like read out loud? No. Do people still do that?"
"Yeah some of them. You should hear him some time."
"Okay. I will" She turns sideways and throws her legs up on the arms of the couch. Chloe is as tall as I am and she occupies the entire couch. I take refuge in the chair.
® ® ® ®
Scratch used to sing "you got to get behind the mule every morning and plow" when he was hunting around the fridge for coffee grounds. The "fridge" was an old icebox that Scratch had found on the side of the road and patched up. When he drank too much and passed out before sundown, he'd forget to restock it. The melted remnants of yesterday's block of ice would eventually force open the door and the bag of coffee would go sliding across the kitchen floor, skittering to all kinds of strange places. "You got to get behind the mule every morning and plow" Scratch used to sing when he looked for the bag. When he invariably found the coffee lying in the farthest crack, he would squat down and scoot it along the floor over to the table, laughing and singing "...every morning and plow..." He would do this little dance, all crooked and insane. I lived with Scratch for a while after Dean left. He had a bad knee that made his dancing comical. I used to sit there and watch him do that hypnotic, crooked little dance of his. He would start gyrating at the knees, flopping his arms about while he sang. The first time I saw him do it I thought he was having a seizure the way he convulsed wildly about. In India they teach that dance to snakes and, in the sewers of America, cockroaches feasting on radioactive waste have begun to learn it on their own. Like terrible creatures from a Kafkian nightmare, they sit quietly underground. We go about our lives while they are learning that dance, passing it on to their children, teaching them how to use it. One day a properly evolved cockroach will crawl out of a sewer drain just as the head of state is stepping to the podium to address the nation... devour the president raw as the live internet streams feed the blood soaked scene. The cockroach will scurry to the podium, strain himself to an upright position and address the nation... "Behold I am." He will dance and spin and enchant... the numbers will explode. Scratch was one of kind. Later I found out the line is a Tom Waits lyric.
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