ill fitted wings

My arms and legs were trembling as I stepped out of the pool. Only fifteen laps. My god, what’s come of me? I wanted to swim off the saucer’s edge, but more than the tiled perimeter held me back. It was the bone cold truth of my wasting self, from which there was no escape. Dr. Cooper’s words hung over me like a personal cloud, a thought bubble of dread.

“There is reason to suggest it’s back with a vengeance, Bill.”

And what exactly AM I supposed to do, armed with information like that? Fling myself off the overpass? Call up all my friends, Sarah, the kids? What’s the protocol here? God’s always so silent in times when I need him to be that screaming chisel of unprocessed truth.

So go so many of us, equipped with this great weight, this nuclear wedge of a reality that we must choose to unleash on our loved ones, coworkers, etc… or labor long to bury.

It’s quiet here tonight. Daddy’s guitar hangs like a crucified saint, softening the overhead light and bending some of it my way. Pepper’s in his familiar spot. The couch has been his since Sarah and I split.

I think I’ll crack open that book of poems and see if I can find that the one about the angel and the fiddle. That was my favorite, I think.

“… sawing and sawing, and shaking the dry powder off of those ill-fitted wings…”




ill fitted wings
november 28, 2006

 
 
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