The Color Green

Two floors up, at the corner of Hearst and Shattuck, he’s clamped for good in an iron lung. When it’s time to eat he nudges his head a sweaty mile to the edge of the pillow. It takes a while. His brilliant bloodshot light-blue eyes steer me from cupboard to fridge: he would like his chicken burrito cut into bite-size pieces, a bent straw for his glass of water, please. How does the body live its only life in a cage? I watch him compute the distance from bar to bar, and squeeze between them with a violent compression, a fury of bursting free that doesn’t last. His will is a crowbar, angled to pry up the rooted intractable weight of matter. I watch him slyly, I check out the way he does it. He does it. But pain in its absolute privacy weighs what it weighs. I come here to study the soul, posing one question a dozen ways, most of them silent. “If I’m only a body,” he laughs, “I’m up shit creek.” His laugh a gritty eruption of rock, salt and breath. Like me he writes poems but he does it letter by letter on a propped keyboard, the mouth-stick wobbling between his teeth. That kind of speed keeps a poet accountable. He won’t ever say, “The grass is very green” when it’s only green.