1
If my brain doesn’t know it’s a brain
any more than this tarmac I’m driving over
to your funeral knows
what tarmac is,
then my mind is maybe like
this heat shimmer
receding as I approach,
mistaking
its freely rippling above the interstate
for origin, unaware
of what the rising up
is every moment rising from.
2
What happened in my brain, or to it,
when I heard that you were dying?
What electro-chemicals flooded through
what long-dried-up
neuronal tributaries to resurrect you
for a moment as you were
when we were drinking pals
before the falling out,
the never too petty
not to cling to
enmities, affection’s
not yet diminishing returns
on the zero sum
“last infirmity of noble mind”
you called a chicken run
where everyone pecks and scratches
through shit-strewn dirt
for scraps
we two pretended to despise?
But for a moment there you were again
in the old bar, Antonio’s Nuthouse,
next door to your wife’s therapist,
your shot glass raised
for the weekly toast:
“While my sweetie sees her shrink,
I go to the Nuthouse!”
And now we’re seeing who can recite
more Dickinson by heart
(you do, of course, as always)
till shot by shot
the dashes are all turning into question marks,
the Belle of Amherst now less Amherst Belle than shtetl,
more Dickinstein than Dickinson,
I heard a fly buzz when I died?
I like a look of agony?
I’m nobody? Who the hell are you?
3
I had to be egged on, guilted even,
by a mutual friend
to call you on what would be your last day.
Your voice phlegmy, tremulous
already otherworldly
and yet still unmistakably yours, but
what surprised me,
shamed me even, was the frank
wide-open pleasure in it hearing mine,
untainted by grudge or grievance,
as if no time had passed, or all time had,
for you at least, and in the walled prison
of your dying all you wanted was to tell old tales again
and pray and sing, and laugh about who loses and who wins;
who’s in, who’s out—all packs and sects
dissolving beyond any need for blessing
or forgiveness when you say before we hang up, please,
please, I’m begging you, get me a rabbi, before it’s too late, I want to convert,
so I, on cue, can ask, “Why not a priest, or minister?”
so you can deadpan,
“Better one of you should die than one of us.”
—Alan Shapiro
Alan Shapiro’s new book of essays, A Dress Rehearsal for the Truth, is just out from Gabbro Head Press.
