The Old Story

Each task made waiting easier.

With scissors and a razor you could approach

Full of purpose, uninterested

In the old story coming to a close in his gaze.

He could be shaved as he dozed, as he smoked.

It was all one. He was tired of fighting

And afraid to say it, knowing we'd hear him.

When he slept, the dreams that flashed by

Seemed to gain him ground on a bodiless exit,

But a stronger sense always blocked the light,

And he would flail as if at a thick curtain

Until the radiance was spent. Waking him at dusk,

I found his presence dwindled to a sly liquid

Reflection, a double‑looking that, before,

He had always saved for the comer of his eyes.

Then a trace of his voice took up his memories,

Making a knot of each plot at its point.

The summer job at a greyhound track came up once.

One of his duties was to give a few dogs

Too much water before a race, to slow them.

The dogs, their sopping sleek muzzles

Laced with mud, would barely make it home.

It was the game behind the game he counted on

The fix beat a lock, Sure Thing took the ace.

His laws of nature found luxury in chance,

So no accident put those thick tears in his eyes

After the ones who would survive him were revealed

To be everywhere, their changing features waiting

In the swaying disk of some bright water in the bowl,

In the sharp mirror of the shiny blade,

Even in the sinking lines of his own face,

As the razor dragged mound his mouth

And cut away everything above his skin.

The whiskers fell to the floor when he stood,

Bearding the crumbled Lucky Strike ashes.

It wasn't more pain he feared.

He could hardly imagine more pain.

But the discomfort might stop soon, signaling

How he was to prepare for what followed,

To grieve as a seer at his own death.

In another's myth, he would have been a god,

A king outliving usefulness, even for a father.

Though time demanded a new tradition, here

The waiting would go on, everyone wanting

Their new life to begin, the saddest life.