If One of Us Should Fall

Chaser

18 Chaser You are almost dying, smooth thin wrists, all the time. This is what waiting does. By the time the voice on the telephone arrives at you are too good, to keep your guts have packed out, eyes gone hollow as Penn Station without wingtip hurry, a thousand umbrellas deftly shaken free of rain. You are fingers run across, slide hollow scraped up the neck, you are practice. Lying is many scavenger birds, knees beneath dinner tables crossed and uncrossed, a virus fortressed in blood and spit, a name you do not speak, feathers left in the mouth. And now you belong to the long pause on the answering machine after the beep, the moment in which countless trees went flying by, squat railside tenements threaded with backyard laundry, scrolled blue as ghost in that twilight spring hello— The pause is an oncoming answer. The pause is nothing you don’t already know. 19 This evening birds might festoon the trees. Jays, thuggish, brazen. You will want to kill them to stop their shrieking, but will climb the fire escape and watch a moon rise red as disaster, a decapitated horse head lobbed into the sky barking to the birds shut up shut up. ...