Epiphora, If That’s What It Is
The more watery of my eyes, the right,
drips — that’s not the clinical term for it —
a tear — if that’s what it is — in the dark.
I’m on my back in bed, my sweetheart’s
head on my shoulder, and she wakes
when it falls from my cheek to hers and breaks
her soft long plummet into sleep.
Truly, it’s not me, it’s my eyes that weep.
When she asks if I’m crying — I think,
well, that’s not right. Just my eyes watering,
I reply. So she dabbles at my cheek
with the soft edge of the warm sheet,
and returns her head to my right shoulder,
the one she best falls asleep on, an older shoulder
than ever, onto which the eye above sometimes leaks,
as if something in the bedroom dark
has moved it — one could almost say — to tears,
the eye, not the man. He hasn’t cried for years.
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An Old Man Walking Along a Trail, Under an Umbrella, Through Heavy Snow
So equipped, he attracts attention from Gortexans
and snow-covered machismo men with frozen beards.
Both of the women who pass smile at him.
He’s certain it’s his age that grants him such kindnesses
and not his umbrella, although it’s also his umbrella
that means he is able to carry only the one walking stick
instead of the usual two, so that he’s a tad less
stable than he might otherwise be,
and therefore walks more slowly.
So perhaps it is about his age. Something precious
about an old man walking along a trail under an umbrella
through heavy snow. He wishes he’d brought along
his state-of-the-art whisperweight butane stove.
If he had, he’d be stopped somewhere along the way
making tea, having a crumpet with homemade apricot jam.
He’d offer some to the next woman who smiled. (Tea, love?)
Only now he’s walked by the three mile mark, farther
than most walkers go, and therefore the only ones he passes
or is passed by is a pair of young men, one of whom nods,
the other seems not to notice him at all. At last he stops, clears
snow from a log he loves to sit on, sits a while,
and while he sits, there comes along from farther up yet
a third woman, who does not smile at first
but asks if he is all right — an old man sitting on a log
more than three miles up the trail, holding an umbrella?
She wonders. When he assures her he is fine, she too smiles
and says I like your umbrella and he thanks her and smiles back.
And soon he is speaking frankly to the trees about the bumpershoot,
how he’d accidentally purloined it from the undertaker
at his father’s funeral, when he walked his mother through rain
from the graveside shelter to the car. Her car, as she preferred,
not the white Lincoln limo. More than a decade ago.
He’d found the umbrella six months back,
tucked in her hall closet. A large black expensive umbrella
with a carved hardwood handle, made in England
by the Lockwood Umbrella Company. The funeral home
had changed hands, he assures the trees, and his mother,
having given her blessing, urged him to take it,
so he walked away on a warm sunny day,
through three different airports, all the way home.
Now the only place he takes the thing is up this trail,
on the days it rains, or in this case, today, when it snows.
Mind you, he speaks aloud to the trees,
even when he’s not carrying an umbrella.
So it may be that he is, in fact, an eccentric old man
of some kind. He even, on the walk back home,
greets a middle-aged couple, a man and woman,
with a business-like nod and chirps ‘ello, then wonders
where he might procure, in of all places Idaho, a bowler hat.
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Every Soul Smokes
Here’s the nine-mile cigarette John Prine planned to light,
with a vodka and ginger ale, when he arrived here.
We’re on a heavenly balcony, it’s a starlit night,
the glow of the coffin nail we share
out of sight beyond the ridges of paradise,
a good ways off toward the waning moon.
We’re already dead, of course, but good God,
I swear it’s going to take us half of eternity
to get this cigarette smoked and ourselves
down to serious singing. Some of what I’d choose to have
in heaven is probably best not mentioned,
save for the absence of plucked harps.
Otherwise, I’m here to tell you, the satisfactions also
of cigarettes, thought sublime on earth,
are nothing compared to those in heaven. O quality control
in the lofty hereafter. Every soul that ever was smokes.
Walk a mile for one, my ass, says John. Play “Sam Stone,”
I implore, if we ever finish this goddamned cigarette.