•
In my room that night I sat on the side of my bed, shoes untied, laces dangling above the floor. My shirt was unbuttoned and, like my shoes, it waited to be removed. I thought about turning the television on, but my roommate was sleeping and I didn’t want to disturb him. He’d murmured something when I came in, though his words were addressed to someone in a dream. From time to time headlights from cars in the parking lot swept across the blinds. What at first I thought were monitors in the attendants’ station down the hall turned out to be music from a radio in the room next door. As I listened to the music, my shoes began to move, following the rhythm of the song, the laces swaying freely, a feeling that traveled up my legs and into the trunk of my body. To open up even more space for it, I raised my hands above my head and closed my eyes; and I stayed that way until the song played through to its end.
SECTION
6
FROM AN UNLINED SPIRAL NOTEBOOK
A group of people gathered around a dead bat on the sidewalk, one with a cell phone taking pictures.
•
Someone on the subway platform shouts, “Get that stupid look off your face.” And everyone’s expression changes.
•
The moon rose earlier than the newspaper said.
•
As if silence were a way of revealing myself, I make a point of greeting everyone I encounter, even the man whose spike-collared mastiff lunges against its chain.
•
Was there a message for me on the crumpled page of a tear-off calendar caught between the drainpipe and the grate?
•
Small emotions, the great engine of my life.
•
To all outward appearances, she seems deeply hurt by his betrayal. But somewhere beneath those appearances, a suggestion that, having found a reason to leave him, she rejoices in being betrayed.
•
A feral cat approaches with its tail in the air.
•
A woman who walks with such lightness of spirit that after she passes I stagger beneath the weight of my body.
•
An enormous black bird—its head the size of an infant’s fist with one mad eye glazed over with a cataract—perched on the branch of an overhanging tree.
•
A new idea turns out to be the same idea I wrote down weeks before, almost in the exact same words.
•
Take the alleyways, side streets, shortcuts (avoid being seen).
•
The child’s habit of sitting quietly, minding her own business—all the while taking mental notes?
•
In the middle of the afternoon, I pull the blackout curtains shut, take my pills and lie down in the dark, which is darker for being light outside.
•
Curbside flowering lindens, like trees in a Chinese painting.
•
A couple who like pallbearers carry their lives through the department store.
•
The anesthetist yawns before releasing the serum sending me into oblivion.
•
Outdoor café: saucers of sugar cubes for British tourists.
•
A sudden dread of returning home because a week’s worth of unopened mail is stacked on the kitchen table.
•
Getting up from a bench in the public gardens, I seem taller than I was before I sat down. Because people around me are shorter?
•
It takes just one unattended moment for an hour to pass.
•
From inside the diner, a sudden burst of laughter, as if a joke had been told, from a woman sitting alone staring at her grilled cheese sandwich.
•
No longer in pain, I continue to limp, me playing the part of my injured self.
•
Setting the book aside, it occurs to me that memoirs should all begin the same way, “First of all, forgive me.”
•
As the helicopter passes, everyone’s gaze turns heavenward.
•
How slowly the life seems to drain from her face as bite by bite her lipstick smudges away.
•
At some point in the evening it becomes clear to me that I spent the day refusing to do anything I’d planned to do in the morning.
•
In the middle of the argument she suddenly falls silent, as if she’d finally reasoned herself away.
•
He explains the funeral home’s practice of donating leftover flowers to a nearby nursing home, “to bring the old folks a little cheer.” But how terribly confused the flowers must be.
•
Vivid as an illuminated manuscript: graffiti on the side of an elevated train.
•
Coming back from the library, the sensation of being “accompanied,” as though I were walking off to one side of myself.
•
Lying in bed, looking back on the day, nothing comes to mind but an old man in a blue apron.
•
After a successful morning of work, an afternoon spent washing dishes, sweeping the floor, taking newspapers to the recycling bin. Getting ready for tomorrow’s work?
•
As if my body were inside my soul—a response to the new medication.
•
A woman who, having leapt back onto the sidewalk to avoid a speeding car, stands there trembling like a fly.
•
A decade after his death, the same dream: my father asleep on the sofa, his head on a pillow, a large black shoe on his chest.
•
By the time I get to the front of the line my fists are clenched.
•
Looking back in the rearview mirror at a car wreck I don’t remember passing.
•
Free-floating spontaneous hostility, no, not me old man, a few apples from the back of the truck will do.
•
A religious thinker God can’t forgive for all his talk about the human race.
•
A marigold raincoat hung from a nail in a ginkgo tree.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many of these pieces originally appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Great River Review, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The National Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Plume, Poem-a-Day (Academy of American Poets), Poet Lore, Raritan, and Shenandoah.
ALSO BY SHEROD SANTOS
Poetry
The Intricated Soul
Accidental Weather
The Southern Reaches
The City of Women
The Pilot Star Elegies
The Perishing
Essays
A Poetry of Two Minds
Translations
Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation
Copyright © 2017 by Sherod Santos
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