The Cibic Ear

It happens you’re in public and wearing something awful. It’s a hat made from spoiled pomegranates. Worse, it has smelly tentacles of hair, tiny legs fringing your head, legs that move spasmodically. The whole thing gives off an odor of stale vinegar.

A train station, a proper one in a big city. New York: Penn Station. A train is arriving from Washington, DC. 

Well surely I’m writing about myself. The conceit, addressing my reader, well it’s a brass nameplate: disabled and perfectly visible... The object of stares... The old story, almost medieval: all those cripples in the Rues Tolliers who stand outside the hospital where the poet Rilke watched them and took notes. Blind, obvious, walking alone in Penn Station I’m another of Rilke’s sketches.

Listening and moving in the smoky quartz of the station I hear men arguing about whether my dog will take me around the restraining ropes that are designed to control the crowds.

“I’m telling you these dogs know what they’re doing!” says one.
“Here it comes,” says number two. “Shit, the dog’s going around it!”
Slap of hands. Is that money being passed? I wonder if I listen hard enough I can hear money sandwiched between their palms. The dog moves left. A woman squeals. It’s an actual squeal, the voice riding a wave crest and crashing.

Years and years have gone by and I still can’t get used to all this staring. And then the talk. Talk like fruit dropped in crystal.  The talk they have kept secret even from themselves. “That man is not like me, but he is like my shadow, the wild wife living inside me, a flock of migratory robins under my rib cage; a little symbol of incarnate flesh I tend all the time; that “me” with the spasming, fruity hat…”

It happens you’re in public and wearing something awful. And you’re moving seaward on this stream…

Sk

Comments

[Kevin Wolf]

Sent over here by a Lance Mannion/Blue Girl one-two punch.

This post is a beautiful piece.