Moments Like This Never Last
A
recorded message assures me for what seems the twentieth time that my call is
important. I want wings made of eyes before the hold music returns – “Winter”
from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” Somewhere in the future, a frighteningly
cadaverous woman in blue scrubs who says her name is April asks, “On a scale of
1-10, with 1 being the lowest, how severe is your pain?” Leaves on the trees
immediately wither as the burning airship passes overhead. My wife refuses all
offers of a ride. Reality is most real when it dissolves into shadow and mist.
We cling together just like the words in a poem.
Dead Trees
For
years, my condition remained undiagnosed. I was scarecrow thin and often cold,
and I was always having to look up how to spell words whose spellings I
suddenly couldn’t recall. When I went out in my black beret and belted black
raincoat, I might have even been mistaken for the author who famously
discouraged the use of semicolons. Or at least for some unhinged grammarian on
a self-appointed mission to silence him. But just because my condition now has
a name doesn’t mean it has a proven treatment. I watch in trepidation as these
woods fill up with snow.
Scenes from a Drinking Life
I
knew him back when I worked the lobster trick at the old Charlotte Observer.
His byline contained pretty much every consonant in the alphabet. He was the typical
police reporter – a hard-drinking, chain-smoking Army vet with limited
education but excellent sources in law enforcement and strip clubs. His one
eccentricity was that despite fleshy cheeks flushed with broken blood vessels
he loved to be photographed. Somewhere I have a picture of him standing in a
drunken daze outside the newspaper building, his head crooked to the side as if
he were listening to the Carter Family sing “Wildwood Flower” via his metal
fillings.
Howie
Good is the author of Failed Haiku, a poetry
collection that is the co-winner of the 2021 Grey Book Press Chapbook Contest.
It is scheduled for publication in summer 2022.