Mr. Jackson
Every neighborhood has a
philosopher and ours is gone. His ghost will walk
the pretty little mutt to the dead end and vanish in our
headlights as we come home.
For him the departed still lived
in the houses they had left.
He pointed to each one and told its annals, unsmiling but
amused.
He quoted the best lines of
neighbors he’d lost track of
and meditated on their whereabouts. He thought deep thoughts.
“The atom’s full of emptiness,”
he said. “Did you know that?
And there’s a message woven through the Hebrew letters of the
Bible.”
He kept the world on a short
leash, like his mongrels, the smartest dogs,
compact and pretty as their names, though he never knew their
ages.
When Pearl died he wasn’t
surprised. She didn’t want her kibble and lay down.
And Taffy has outlived him--to get loose and scatter squirrels
up walls and tree trunks.
He finished Latin but not high
school, loaned me a book on Tai Chi
that had raised his energy level. I had it ready to return and
meant to.
The cap, the glasses, the deep
thoughts, the lump of the defribillator
like a pack of cigarettes on his left breast, fell out of his
chair, watching TV.
Mr. William Jackson is dead. He
found a church where he could come as he was.
But I have seen him Sundays in a suit and tie, escorting his pet
dog down the street.
And I have avoided him, mornings
when the talk of mystical
alphabets oppressed me, I’m ashamed to say, because I couldn’t
put two words together.
Cars have come and gone for three
days. His wife has already lost weight
and abandoned her electric scooter, walking guests to their
cars.
“He waited on her hand and foot,”
says a neighbor. “Now what will she do?”
I thought he kept the pretty little dogs as compensation.
When our street lofted the
Hale-Bopp comet above us, it looked like a white puppy tugging
at its leash.
And that spring Mr. Jackson said, “Look how that thing’s made
our dogwoods blaze.”
First published in The Georgia Review, Fall
2005