April 11, 2024
Poetry
Participant; The Heat; A World of Good
Artwork by DALL·E
Participant Four women from her choir meet bi-weekly with my wife to sing: still strong sopranos, one alto. They do show-tunes and reminiscent rock, interspersed with raucous laughter; little (I’m told) about illnesses, late husbands, etc. I say hello then go to my desk, but like hearing them. Our cat, who is proportionally as old as they and very shy, has recently curled on the couch beside my wife, or whoever is sitting there, listening. She stays awake, seems to enjoy it. I love her dearly but she runs from me. Except in the morning, when I’m trying to eat (and just before she does), she rubs against my leg, and I bend down to stroke her, checking for a purr. The Heat So much work has been done on the sensitivities of trees that it may be proper to say the leaves suffer. They turn yellow, drop, then quickly, on grass and sidewalks, brown a month before the solstice. We (liberals) are currently focused on the death of democracy, but an appeal stressing suffering always opens our wallets. It would come too late in November or December, when the surviving leaves follow, and the sentiment proper to fall returns: the one that overlaps the feeling roused by ancient ruins and battlefields, where you can’t see who or what fell when or why. A World of Good Behind luxury trees, luxury brownstones. Coy amber gold glass doors lead to Michelin-star eateries and a spa. I’m too old-fashioned a male ever to have countenanced spas. But an inexplicable, nameless admirer paid the enormous, baldly-stated fee; I received a tasteful card. See no other clients. The staff are girls as perfect as cats, with titanium sinews. They treat me not as a man but a thing eager for perfection. Cold lasers scrape the bags from my eyes, crepe from my skin. Massage gives me new muscles, even, I feel, new bones. Rare odorous earths, gels, sauna, shower leave me more than rejuvenated – young. Handsome to the point of poetry. The goodbye and come again of the staff is a salute from elegant soldier birds. (They have even laundered my clothes!) Someone once said that all the essential action in Dostoyevsky could take place in nine connecting Petersburg apartments. As I leave, something like that has happened to my city – it feels efficient, available, right. I visit or run into friends. They peer over stairwells, signal from doors. All kvell (Yiddish word) at how good I look. Ask how I feel. “You know I’m an intellectual – it isn’t as if the body has replaced thought, rather thought is translated into signals from toned limbs.” They seem somehow smaller. One ruined by divorce – I never noticed his seedy mistrust. One whose work has come to nothing, even what she does to survive. The word “failure” escapes from the long confinement we all guarded. Loneliness, weakness; then, somewhere behind their adoring eyes, I see an indefinable clue that it was they who put up the money, sent the tasteful card. But if that’s true …