Waxwing Literary Journal

They say in twenty years’ time some of our cities could be underwater. Right now a major glacier in Antarctica is breaking apart from the inside out. As we do. And yet people are not screaming. They are hardly paying attention at all. The moment of happiness is here, my daughter says. We are playing a game where she begins a poem, and I finish it as we walk to school past all the winter gardens struggling in the cold. I remember a man on the radio saying, We like things that resist us.

Warm summer night, the screech-call of a siren, horns bleeding down an avenue, the skyline's far diamonds glinting. I've long forgotten whose party it was or why a couple dozen of us were up there milling around under the blurred stars in pockets of two or three, beer bottles clinking, glowing baton-tips of cigarettes conducting a chorus of laughter and chatter. Behind blurred yellow squares in high-rise apartments across the alley, silhouettes scrubbed dishes or snored in recliners behind shut blinds, the facing building playing its nightly mosaic of so many human shows not worth watching.

I hadn’t spoken to my father in over a decade. And then, there he was at my front door: an apparition. But somehow, strangely more. Hello, he says, and takes his bowler hat off. That’s the first sign. I’d never seen him with a hat, a suit, hair even. It’s as if he were some kind of salesman and now he was at my door looking as if he were no older than forty, handsome in ways, in the prime of his life, ready to make a deal. I know it’s been a long time, he says. Too long probably. I can only nod, unsure what to say to him, unsure of the last time we’d spoken. What do you say to someone you’d forgotten in so many ways?

Were I a stenographer, I’d write down everything rain says. A camper, I’d set up a tent in the Rothko room at the Phillips. A heroin addict, I’d live in the ‘90s. Jesus, I’d change it to The Last Brunch. Quiche Lorraine, mimosas. I’d not take a police psychologist’s job for anything in the world, other than the world. And why do we say, Shot his brains out, when there’s just the one?