William Matthews

Baudelaire: "The dead, the poor dead, have their bad hours." But the dead have no watches, no grief and no hours. At first not smoking took all my time: I did it a little by little and hour by hour. Per diem. Pro bono. Cui bono? Pro rata. But the poor use English.Off and on. By the hour. "I'm sorry but we'll have to stop now." There tick but fifty minutes in the psychoanalytic hour. Vengeance is mine, yours, his or hers, ours, yours again (you-all's this time), and then (yikes!) theirs. I prefer ours. Twenty minutes fleeing phantoms at full tilt and then the cat coils herself like a quoit and sleeps for hours.

The last light of a July evening drained into the streets below: My love and I had hard things to say and hear, and we sat over wine, faltering, picking our words carefully. The afternoon before I had lain across my bed and my cat leapt up to lie alongside me, purring and slowly growing dozy. By this ritual I could clear some clutter from my baroque brain. And into that brief vacancy the image of a horse cantered, coming straight to me, and I knew it brought hard talk and hurt and fear. How did we do? A medium job, which is well above average. But because she had opened her heart to me as far as she did, I saw her fierce privacy, like a gnarled, luxuriant tree all hung with disappointments, and I knew that to love her I must love the tree and the nothing it cares for me.

Amidst the too much that we buy and throw away and the far too much we wrap it in, the bear found a few items of special interest—a honeydew rind, a used tampon, the bone from a leg of lamb. He’d rock back lightly onto his rear paws and slash open a plastic bag, and then his nose— jammed almost with a surfeit of rank and likely information, for he would pause— and then his whole dowsing snout would insinuate itself a little way inside. By now he’d have hunched his weight forward slightly, and then he’d snatch it back, trailed by some tidbit in his teeth. He’d look around. What a good boy am he. The guardian of the dump was used to this and not amused. “He’ll drag that shit every which damn way,” he grumbled who’d dozed and scraped a pit to keep that shit where the town paid to contain it. The others of us looked and looked. “City folks like you don’t get to see this often,” one year-round resident accused me. Some winter I’ll bring him down to learn to love a rat working a length of subway track. “Nope,” I replied. Just then the bear decamped for the woods with a marl of grease and slather in his mouth and on his snout, picking up speed, not cute (nor had he been cute before, slavering with greed, his weight all sunk to his seated rump and his nose stuck up to sift the rich and fetid air, shaped like a huge, furry pear), but richly fed on the slow-simmering dump, and gone into the bug-thick woods and anecdote.