Driving home past the dives on Airport Boulevard,
I counted, on Sunday mornings, the drunks passed
out
beside their cars, their bodies pressed slightly into the
gravel
and crushed oystershell.
I’d never done that, slept the night,
drunk, beside my car, and I knew already
that I never would. Even if I became a drunk
I’d drink quietly at home in front of the television,
so I envied and hated the drunks slumped in the
crushed oystershell
because my life was already so ordered and driven by
work
that all leisure, from rough drunk to country club
swell,
looked romantic to me, romantic because it was
impossible:
even the numb, sobbing despairs I fell into, kicking
against order and obsession, were orderly and
obsessive.
At work I sold tickets to rich people leaving town,
then stood at the black glass and watched the after
midnight flights
turn into lights, then watched those lights accelerate,
rise and dwindle
into darkness and the east-Atlanta and the world,
which I had little desire to see, though I knew I
would.
Driving from job to school to another job, I often
thought
of those drunks and how hard I worked. Though
I’d’ve denied it,
I wanted to turn into a light myself
so I could rise and disappear. I didn’t want
to go anywhere, I simply wanted to be left alone –
and since I knew that was impossible
I worked and went to school and worked some
more,
waiting to see what would happen, and there those
drunks were,
nestled into the ground, half-buried and asleep, while
I sped past,
sleepy myself, but sober, very sober. I’ve never talked
so elegiacally about myself and I don’t care for it,
the puzzled arrogance and bland
forgiveness of it, as if I were beyond the night wind’s
buffeting
and the day wind’s bite, as if from my great height of
understanding
I’ll fade into death, afflicted
with no greater grief or suffering than I can bear
with graceful indifference, classical restraint.
But it feels so much like wisdom to talk this way.
I finished school and because I was now married
I kept two jobs and sometimes, briefly, three.
For a couple of hours late Sunday afternoons my first
wife and I
sat on the porch, talking, watching
the cut grass and the bright water arching across
the neighbors’ yards. Children shouted.
Gunshots and laughter wafted from the nearby
houses,
the television world all wrong-excessive, always too
much violence,
too much laughter. The lovely fragrance of roasting
meat
rose from a dozen grills, including mine, and while
we talked
ice cubes clicked in gin and every now and then
one cracked, a solitary explosion in our hands,
a sound that startled her and made her laugh.
They weren’t what I was living for, those moments.
Perhaps they should have been. But how can I now
regret
the great accusations and sudden acquiescences, the
paltry squabbles
and quick capitulations of people straining
to be dignified, to be noble, inside their bad behavior,
guilt, rage, and greed? How glibly elliptical
abstractions are! Mumbling, winking-but gracefully!
I no longer
have much to say or much to hint. I’m simply using
them
for the Olympian pleasure of pronouncing on myself,
and to build a walkway to my new life. New life?
What life is new? It’s the same life, still mine,
but with—there are only a few ways to say this -a
better wife,
better gin, better meat on an equivalent grill outside
a better house
in a different city, with children that for all I know
or care
could be the same ones shouting over the hedge, the
same
dogs barking in the distance. Not a different life.
A better life. Only shorter.
What great height have I attained
that the young me and the person I am now can slip
so easily,
like prey, into the crosshairs of my sorrow and pity?
A sip of red wine, the scent of red meat on the grill
and the whole disordered world falls into order.
Driving to work or back from it, I still think of those
distant drunks,
not with the rage I felt when I actually saw them,
but gently, as if sentimentality were my reward
for living my life, because I want to lie down on pea
gravel
and oystershell still warm with the day’s heat
and burrow into it and sleep for a long time
and dream someone else’s dreams – not live their
lives,
just dream their dreams -and wake to whatever
you wake to after such different sleep. Then I’d drive
home
and face the consequences. What? I don’t know. I
can’t imagine.
But memory and imagination have consequences.
When I think of those sleeping drunks, that distant
town, I remember
Sennacherib’s report to the state god of Assyria.
To quiet the heart of Ashur, his Lord, he reports
obliterating Babylon, that great city, burning it,
razing the charred buildings, killing all inhabitants,
young and old,
but before he flooded it, he swept up the dust of
Babylon
to give as presents and he stored it in a covered jar.
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