This Clumsy Living

Beasts

82 Beasts Everyone’s ordering pan-seared this and foie gras that. Most of the crowd’s down from the symphony, Mahler I think, four-tops mostly, waiters pushing smiles between tables and laughter. The Woodward side of the restaurant’s all glass. It’s snowing a bit, the flakes too small for the innocence we ask of the season. Across the street, the red brick Arts Council building has a steer or lion in front of it, I can’t tell in the dark which animal is sculpted and out of what, papier-mâché or stone. Just north of this unknown zoo, Hurley’s Wigs has no door, no windows, is a name in fading paint, more things have closed than opened in forty years in Michigan, you could get rich selling plywood, nails, forgetting. I order a Glenlivet, crab cakes and shrimp, I’m happy to add Scotland, the ocean to my body. In an hour, five thousand dollars will be spent in this restaurant. A woman at my table leans toward a man in black with silver hair at the end of the bar, she tells me he’s a cellist, his nose is in a glass of cabernet, I want to ask if he dreams in music, if he’d die without his hands. A woman walks by outside. Her coat is made for spring. She looks in and sees me looking out. These are not eyes we have but gates. She is old and I think of her inside one of the Rodins I just visited at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He was accused of casting real people inside his sculptures and I’m certain she was one of them, killed and kept alive by beauty. I’m always knocking against myself to get out. More of the day collapses into this moment of waiting for bread. I’m back to this morning with Carl on the sidewalk. The sky is gray and pregnant with snow. He weaves his hands in and out of each other & his coat pockets. In the three years 83 I’ve been away, he’s obtained fear, it’s below his eyes, the skin sagging and brown, he has two smokes going, a man of fire, one on the sidewalk, one burning to knuckles. We’re talking the best ways to kill ourselves. I suggest chopping parts of my body away and feeding them to an old-fashioned meat grinder, until I’m just a left hand turning a handle. I’m not serious but Carl is because he’s about to drive four hundred miles to work a week at seven dollars an hour packing crates so he can drive home to that not being enough and watch men who look like refrigerators wearing heads haul parts of his life away. Carl’s my age, we worked nights in a foundry, orange flowing steel and orange tipped cigarettes, whiskey on break under the so many stars, he’d been a fullback at Stevenson, he could lift everything, I saw him do it, the world on his back shift after shift, that was his genius, to ignore gravity. I’m trying once more to explain tenure, to convince him that the six weeks I have to myself between semesters isn’t a layoff. “I gotta get me some of that,” he says again, lighting a smoke with a smoke. I remind him I was once lowered into a sewer on a rope to unstick a valve. I don’t tell him I traveled to the cave thought to have inspired Dante, an unremarkable hole suggesting how plain misery can be. I’m visiting Michigan after three years in western Virginia. Having worked for twenty years in the automotive industry, I now teach creative writing. I long ago gave up trying to explain poetry to people like Carl, and have recently given up trying to explain people like Carl to professors. I can’t explain to Carl why I’ll go to the museum for the Rodin and Claudel exhibit when I could be watching football. I can’t explain to most professors why I understand Carl’s reservations when the Colts are on TV and undefeated. 84 This is just one of the impossibilities of being American. There’s so much black to explain to white to man to woman to Christian to Jew and so little...