Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar,

 

Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar,

               complex scent arrives

from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in

               the end of the wretched winter.

The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are

               budded —I hadn't noticed —

and the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken

              the gritty soil.

Up the street, some surveyors with tripods are waving each other left and

              right the way they do.

A girl in a gym suit jogged by a while ago, some kids passed, playing

              hooky, I imagine,

and now the paraplegic Vietnam vet who lives in a half-converted ware-

              house down the block

and the friend who stays with him and seems to help him out come

              weaving towards me,

their battered wheelchair lurching uncertainly from one edge of the

              sidewalk to the other.

I know where they're going—to the "Legion": once, when I was putting

              something out, they stopped,

both drunk that time, too, both reeking—it wasn't ten o'clock—and we

              chatted for a bit.

I don't know how they stay alive—on benefits most likely. I wonder if

              they're lovers?

They don't look it. Right now, in fact, they look a wreck, careening hap-

              hazardly along,

contriving, as they reach beneath me, to dip a wheel from the curb so

              that the chair skewers, teeters,

tips, and they both tumble, the one slowly, almost gracefully sliding in

              stages from his seat,

his expression hardly marking it, the other staggering over him, spinning

              heavily down,

to lie on the asphalt, his mouth working, his feet shoving weakly and

              fruitlessly against the curb.

In the storefront office on the corner, Reed and Son, Real Estate, have

              come to see the show.

Gazing through the golden letters of their name, they're not, at least,

              thank god, laughing.

Now the buddy, grabbing at a hydrant, gets himself erect and stands

              there for a moment, panting.

Now he has to lift the other, who lies utterly still, a forearm shielding his

              eyes from the sun.

He hauls him partly upright, then hefts him almost all the way into the

              chair, but a dangling foot

catches a support-plate, jerking everything around so that he has to put

              him down,

set the chair to rights, and hoist him again and as he does he jerks the

              grimy jeans right off him.

No drawers, shrunken, blotchy thighs: under the thick, white coils of

              belly blubber,

the poor, blunt pud, tiny, terrified, retracted, is almost invisible in the

              sparse genital hair,

then his friend pulls his pants up, he slumps wholly back as though he

              were, at last, to be let be,

and the friend leans against the cyclone fence, suddenly staring up at me

              as though he'd known,

all along, that I was watching and I can't help wondering if he knows that

              in the winter, too,

I watched, the night he went out to the lot and walked, paced rather, 

              almost ran, for how many hours.

It was snowing, the city in that holy silence, the last we have, when the

              storm takes hold,

and he was making patterns that I thought at first were circles, then real-

              ized made a figure eight,

what must have been to him a perfect symmetry but which, from where

              I was, shivered, bent,

and lay on its side: a warped, unclear infinity, slowly, as the snow came

              faster, going out.

Over and over again, his head lowered to the task, he slogged the path

              he'd blazed,

but the race was lost, his prints were filling faster than he made them

              now and I looked away,

up across the skeletal trees to the tallcenter city buildings, some, though

              it was midnight,

with all their offices still gleaming, their scarlet warning beacons signal-

              ing erratically

against the thickening flakes, their smoldering auras softening portions of

              the dim, milky sky.

In the morning, nothing: every trace of him effaced, all the field pure

              white,

its surface glittering, the dawn, glancing from its glaze, oblique, relent-

              less, unadorned.