3221. AND CHRISTOPHER DURANG

AND CHRISTOPHER DURANG

1. And the Knesset. For no other reason.
Wives are in Jerusalem sunning.
The leading of the pipes runs the
water down to the drainage lake.
It's always somehow Summer
where here this once God lived.
I never met anyone I knew.
Christopher Durang, Mel Torme,
Winthrop Regmanster, the old
old Duke of New Burnham. Nor,
now, this left-handed, fickle God
dealing so badly with its
own hand-me-downs.
-
2. And the man in the yellow shirt, with his
fingers around the coffee cup, shaking almost
violently. 'I got the shakes, bad. For a couple
years now. Doctor says onset, Parkinson's.'
I want to tell him about my friend, who
died years ago from the progressive onset
of that very disease. Herb Rosen that was.
It was sad; his body, at the end, was like a
constant motor running. I hadn't
thought of him for years, or that.
-
3. And I am an abstract person, a lens with no
focus, a point with no point. I saddle my feet
in leather shoes. I've never worn 'sneakers'
in my adult life. These are things, this leisure
stuff and all its ease, that I find I just would
never do. Like Nixon, walking on a beach
in his suit and leather shoes. Why?
-
4. And over there, there's a man dressed as a nun,
still wailing about something never undone. All
that catholic crap : it's so over. Long Tall Sally,
and those fucked up rosary beads, skimming
old prayers to newer and newer high heavens.
While, within myself, beneath the bridge, at the
old diving rocks by the Columbia football field -
where - by the way Jack Kerouac (Railroad Jack)
long time back broke forth his leg, and I'm watching
the Metro North go slicing by and - in this most
unCatholic feeling - I too just want to die (but we'll
cross that bridge, no matter how high,
when we get up to it).