Nalyne Lunati © 2004 All Rights Reserved
Nalyne Lunati © 2004 All Rights Reserved
He
He can be the very soul of elation. Yet
some days he’s too sad to even button his coat.
He wonders why there are no tigers in the bible.
He thinks someone should consider putting them in.
An impetuous man, not entirely bound by natural laws,
he never gets enough kissing, or figures out what kind
of animal he is. An impoverished doctor or handsome
drifter, when he sees a woman carrying a sick child
wrapped in an old plaid coat into the emergency room
he rushes over to help her. No coward soul is his,
though he is given to copious groaning. He once
wrote a play called “Eight People Who Are Really
Tired.” The audience loved it. When he and his brother
were thirteen and fourteen, respectively, they took LSD
in a tree house their father had built. For seven hours
he watched his cells vibrating in time with cells
in the tree’s trunk and leaves. Now, thirty years later,
he has never entirely forgotten that feeling.
It’s been raining for days. He seems content
to stand on the covered front porch, under the dripping
eaves, smoking and petting the head of his adoring
sheepdog. He sits on the welcome mat, taps off his ash,
and kisses her furry neck. She wags her tail and licks
the knee of his jeans. In gleaming wet moments like these,
forming and falling like raindrops, I would give anything
to be either one of them, man or dog, instead of finding
myself hopelessly in love with them both.
Amy Gerstler lives in Los Angeles. Her books of poetry include Ghost Girl, Medicine, and Crown of Weeds. She does a variety of kinds of journalism, and teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars Program in Bennington, Vermont and at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.