Dogsbody

"Dogsbody"

For awhile he lived with his mother,

Caring for her rusting gutters

And tending what remained of her shabby flower garden.

When the air became too dense between them

He left

And began the shuffle from one friend's moldy sofa

To another's spare square of carpet,

The buzz of their late-night television in his ears as he slept,

The film of their after-hours whiskey on his skin

When he woke.

When his hair and teeth began to go

And the fever came,

No one would take him in.

The first 911 came from the shelter on Prince Avenue.

Weeks later,

Indigent and free,

He thought he'd beat it.

He slept in the tackroom of a friend's barn in Madison County,

His cot made fragrant by hay and horse-leather,

By the intruding scents of earth and grass

Through the crack in the tackroom window.

When the fever came again he had to leave.

He was afraid of not hating the hospital bed this time.

His cough went with him back to the street,

His fever gone for now,

His eyes dark and large in the pale and haunted frame of

His narrow face.

He took to pillaging the thrift stores

For jewelry, old shirts,

And paperback novels.

The waitresses at the all-night café poured him bottomless cups of gritty coffee

Over the trickle of rotgut bourbon

He kept in a plastic flask.

He sat alone in the corner booth,

The round one with "Satisfaction" on its jukebox,

Twisting a strand of purple glass beads

Through his skeletal hands

Like a shabby rosary,

Reading Crime and Punishment to himself

In a hoarse stage-whisper.

"Poor Stephen dogsbody," the waitress called him when she met him.

She let him sleep on her foldout sofa,

Fed him Honey Nut Cheerios

And orange juice,

Let him read her old New Yorkers

And borrow her garnet brooch.

When the fever came the last time,

He shivered in her old quilts

And didn't call her at the café.

The glass beads threaded the pages of The Dead,

Bent and still against his shirt

As she made them coffee

At the end of her graveyard workshift.

When it was done,

She sat alone for a long time

The scents of chicory and bourbon thick in the morning air

And watched his stillness.