God, what’s wrong with us? What’s so god-damned-funny
about answering a phone.
I’m visiting—it’s your and Paul’s apartment—that’s part of it.
You’re in the same room with me. Making faces. After
eyebrow-raising me into answering Paul’s line. Paul, already blind,
is three floors down, sunning his reed-thin body
au jardin. You (later) explain, the renovator lined up for the master
bath, Paul’s latest project, worries, phones a tad often.
This city, aglow with young men
looking in on each other.
Two days in a row when Paul’s boxy Bakelite rrrrring–rrrrings
your eyebrows beckon me to pick up.
Yesterday, best I could muster,
“Pa-ulll’s—not—heeere—may I taaake—a mes-ssseeedge?”
Today, I shoo your giggly eyes away—bite my lip. What was
so funny? Under the circumstances: in less than a year
Paul will be dead. Then, the young designer. You,
who escape this plague
but not a slow-moving cancer, gone in twelve.
I’ll tell you what’s god-damned funny:
there’s no rationale—everything’s both:
“okay, Mister Death, be right with ya…soon as we polish off
this ringy-dingy joke.”
Until then, we rarely lost the alchemist’s bet. Life’s daily dose
of awkward remixed:
ruffled hair, tour jeté, high kicks. Somebody—
slide down a table, pull out a horn,
polka-dot hanky,
brass clock. Fly like a goose:
flap your arms—Don’t look.