Itchy

Hard to reach, so you yank your clothes getting at it—the button at your neck, the knotted shoe. You snake your fingers in until your nails possess the patch of skin that’s eating you. And now you’re in the throes of ecstasy, eyes lolling in your skull, as if sensing the first time the joy one takes in being purely animal. It’s so good to have a scratch, though isn’t it a drag living like this, jounced on a high wire of impulses, every wish the same programmed response to another signal passed from cell to cell, amounting in the end to a distraction— if truth be told—from rarer things, thoughts free from the anchor-chain of self? For even the least sweetness, we behave like the old man on the low wall I saw outside the hospital today, who had his hand inside his flannel shirt, scratching at his chest, trancelike, agog, his eyelids fluttering like butterflies in a meadow of snowy Queen Anne’s lace. I never saw him stop. Such root satisfaction is like the dying desert legionnaire’s in films, when he finds, against all odds, a water jug and, lifting it, delights to feel it heavy. The score swells, his eyes relume. He tugs the stopper out, then fills his mouth with sand. Though, worse: we’ve seen the film; we know it’s sand; we gulp it anyway.