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

 

A Personal Savior

Under a moon like a ripe yellow canteloupe
the youth minister confessed his doubt--to me.
We stood between cars in the church parking lot,
after the youth group meeting, keys in hand.
It was Sunday evening in fall, I was sixteen,
in love with his younger sister who lived on the moon
and would not return my calls, made every Saturday.
And I was the minister’s son, so I had to listen. 
It was about the time the desert winds that blew
down from the mountains wore out and the Pacific
blew back a coolness against the coastal hills
where we were nestled.  The moon was pulpy ripe,
climbing above a windbreak of eucalyptus
across the street, on its way to the Pacific,
the vat of all acceptance, the world’s baptistry,
placator and drowner, swallower of continents--
everything could fit inside that body.
Meanwhile a young man told a teenager
a theology that would have gotten him
pitched overboard in the old world,
or thumbscrewed if he hadn’t chosen to sail,
or simply fired in this world because of who I was.
But I wouldn’t tell, because I loved his sister.
“It’s funny,” he said, “but I can’t imagine Christ
or anyone like that being born to save me,

die for me, endow me with obligations.
I only think of something monstrous
outside me and inside me, as if I were
both Jonah and the whale.  We long for touch,
the cupping of a hand beneath our chins,
out of the all the enormity--a touch.
There’s no redemption.  Just that recognition.
That’s what we have to love, if we’re going to live.”
The canteloupe moon was turning white and hard
and, lopsided, reminded me of our volley ball
(The youth group played volley ball Sunday nights),
and how his sister stretched with her arms upward,
pulling her breasts, a little sister’s, heavenward
to let me rest my eyes on them in thought,
just as now I had to consider this thoughtfully,
or appear to consider this thoughtfully right then,
had to think how the only thing that could save a life
(She was waiting in his car for him to finish)
was loving someone who didn’t know you were alive.

     First appeared in The Southern Review, Spring 2006