期待

““I don’t think you understand Leonel. I’m a poet. Do you know how poets are viewed here? We’re seen as bohemian, or romantics, or crazy. Among the poets I admire, there is one who waved good-bye before jumping from a bridge, another who put on a fur coat and gassed herself in her garage. Great American poets die broke in bad hotels. We have no credibility. Although this isn’t true of every poet, and I’m giving you the dramatic examples, when poetry is mentioned in the American press, if it is mentioned, the story begins with ‘Poetry doesn’t matter,’ or ‘No one reads poetry.’ No matter what else is said. It doesn’t matter.” He appeared surprised. “Well, you’ll have to change that. In my country, and the rest of Latin America, poets are taken seriously. They’re appointed to diplomatic posts, or they’re assassinated, or put into prison but, one way or the other, taken seriously.””

“Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.”

They moved me to a rehab facility several buildings down the road from the hospital. I didn’t know where I was and no one had told Drew. He couldn’t find me. I didn’t call for an ambulance when I stroked out. I wasn’t thinking right and I wanted someone to keep track of me because I was afraid of getting lost. Now I was lost. Drew called from the hospital. He said I wasn’t there. I didn’t know what to tell him. An ambulance is a cluster of things: a siren, fast duty, the right-of-way. An ambulance is hurry, pure function, it doesn’t care if you have your wallet or if your phone gets broken. It doesn’t care about the small potatoes because time is against you. Because there are minutes. Because the minutes are against you. Because sometimes you collapse on the sidewalk and turn into a swarm of bees. It only took Drew a few hours to get to me but I was unravelling. I could hear myself getting louder. It seemed inescapable. He sat on the bed with me and I yelled at him. I yelled at him until I wore myself out. Is this who you are now? I don’t remember him leaving but I woke up hours later alone. The bed had a control pad. There was a button for the nurse and buttons that raised or lowered the back of the bed. I raised and lowered the back of the bed for a while. My arm was slow. My leg was useless. I was frustrated. I held on to the rail at the side of the bed and stared at the wall. I had forgotten the regular things I obsessed about—my favorite ugly places, where I would dwell endlessly: old wounds, slights, embarrassments. Now the weight of their importance seemed questionable. I had done worse, been hurt worse. The field had been swept clean of habit. I circled regrets I had forgotten. I dredged up deeper shames. I didn’t know who had forgiven me or hadn’t. I circled new darknesses, things I had buried. I forgot how to suppress them. A satellite finds its orbit once it’s hurled around the earth, endlessly falling as it’s held in place. A planet circles in its groove; it finds its path, a dirt rut—and that’s the shape of things. The solar system spins in its galactic arm, nine trillion miles long. The center holds but moves.