Palling Around

He heard in curtains of sleet cleaving from magnolia leaves encrypted Aztec frequencies, he said. When the sun god liquors loose each ashen tongue the planet tattles. We are advised to listen: this he'd grunt to signal his dwindling fuse and the bartender would show him the door. In his honor I tune my form to the emanations of this vibrant life: Either someone's dropped a blue coin and I've picked up the murmur of its ribs—a quarter kiltering beneath the blond brick arcade of the whispering gallery at Grand Central—or someone's table is ready. No matter that I set my phone to airplane while I thumb these lines, I can still be reached by tender thought: a dirgeful brass cortège stirs the ear inside my chest. The man has passed. I got the text today, and now feel at least obliged to observe silence. Observe this café thick with humid bodies, mugs wafting florets of breath, steam revealing patterns in the glassy chatter. For that he is a phantasm rumoring now a timeless doom, quiet as the carousel of a partial print. For that he is finally transcendent. For that we convened for drinks by some clockwork of urban chance each week, my year adrift in the East Village. For that I renounced him, and now regret having done so. For that I vibed with his passions—more, the deeper we reached in our cups, rifling our mind's files for magical thinking and secrets in our blood's chemical record. I've traveled years through boot-black redactions of thought to find his apparition greet me with a raised fist in the dream of a leather trench coat that crunches like gravetop snow, dream of the self-schooled on secondary sources. He hung a cardboard pyramid to cover the bed in which he slept and quested visions toward the headwaters of paranoia: nightsweats of tar, drumbeats marooned in the distant hills, Legba tapping his cane on the edge of sanity. If you see something. What a fear of hobgoblins and philistines can blind our better senses. At the table beside me children play mosquito tones they say are there, but I am unable to hear.