His face says it all, those hound dog eyes from beaten
down to the ground, hands blistered from a half century of hammer and nails,
cuticles broken and blanked from wounds that never heal, a titled wrist from
some break he refused to cease his labor to allow to set right, his dark gaze
meeting my mother’s that last time when I drove her to meet her brother in the
hospital in Haledon, just as I later drove her to meet another brother before
his passing, with the ghost of that one brother she never got to see before his
death a decade earlier, me, acting as the grim reaper’s chauffeur, wondering if
I will have to drive her hearse when her time comes, fate flickering along with
the pain as she stares down, she remembering things I can never remember from a
time with him well before I was born, the struggle through all those temporary
homes they had to share during a time people still call The Great Depression,
and her guilt later at resenting him when she went mad and he had to admit her
to a hospital not too different from this, as if both stepped through the same
mirror, exchanging places so that now he danced with the mad hatter and she had
to watch helplessly, knowing exactly how he feels, and how she – no one can
help him, and he can’t even help himself, his face framed now by the small
rectangular of glass upon which his heavy breathing leaves clouds of steam, and
he too weak to even sketch out letters of affection with a finger he cannot
life, she staring through the haze at his shredded coat and worn sleeves, the
stain of his months living on the street through the roughest memory since they
were kids, the smell of dumpster oozing under the door, along with the stench
from the cans of cat food he devoured when he could find nothing else to eat,
turning horse flesh into his flesh, only to wind up here, shrunken, desperate,
and searching out our faces for sympathy he did not, would not give when he stood
on this side of the looking glass all those years ago.