George Garrett

The Roman Catholic bells of Princeton, New Jersey, wake me from rousing dreams into a resounding hangover. Sweet Jesus, my life is hateful to me. Seven a.m. and time to walk my dog on a leash. Ice on the sidewalk and in the gutters, and the wind comes down our one-way street like a deuce-and-a-half, a six-by, a semi, huge with a cold load of growls. There's not only leaf left to bear witness, with twitch and scuttle, rattle and rasp, against the blatant roaring of the wrongway wind. Only my nose running and my face frozen into a kind of grin which has nothing to do with the ice and the wind or death and December, but joy pure and simple when my black and tan puppy, for the first time ever, lifts his hind leg to pee.

Forgiving the living is hard enough, shrugging away all the wounds delivered with kisses and curses, the thousand and one petty slights that bled me to an albino shade, that shadow me even in dreams. But the dead are altogether another matter, not easily to be enlightened and quite beyond regretting anything (as far as we can tell) and most likely indifferent to our common currency of tears. And so it is that pissing on your grave doesn't please me as much as it ought to. Now that you have passed beyond all blaming and shaming, what can I do but rise and proclaim sincere admiration when my turn comes around to speak?