Closet Suffocation So you got what you wanted after all, no one had to scrape you out of your burning Dodge. You were spared the tubes in your pickled liver. Instead, a strong black veteran angel swooped you in his arms below the green board where you'd fallen parsing a sentence, removed the false palate no one knew about as why you had always talked funny, and heaved hot male life through you for thirty futile minutes. You had to be really gone, for that would have brought you back if anything could have. The priest couldn't, not after your years of scorning the Holy Ghost. The campus doctor said you were not a student, so he refused even to try. And your widow dared not, exercising herself to forget her twenty-year seniority and the silence the two of you'd kept for nine months since learning you could neither live the divorce nor speak between the rooms. So too your professors out West forgot you'd stopped studying Old English and had given up on the terminal degree. Three dozen truckers along the interstate never really expected you always to be available with a fifth in a rented room with plastic flowers. A thousand ex-students continued to desensitize themselves to their disagreement and unclear reference which you meticulously had remarked. A California poet mourned you wouldn't be around to review his latest book. A Georgia poet was glad that you would no longer knock over his motorcycle in a huff. Some majors got your examination copies and your nieces took the other books for mere decoration that you'd devoured. I kept as a bookmark the requiem cards your half-sisters had made in Nebraska and learned to live with the truth that basically the world took your big secret as no big news and went on about its business with no sense of loss that another quean was dead.Louie Crew |