Shine

86 the minnesota review Richard Katrovas Shine I sear all pettiness from my brain and go out among the idiot lovers and sweet zealots of the Quarter. Wind scapes plastic over cement, rousing tucked faces from chemical slumber. In my thirty-first year, quaintly faithless, I grow more trustworthy, and towards those I've learned not to trust, hideously amicable. If I have suffered anything of late, it has been the sweet-sick knowledge of righteous anger turned absurd. Yet in the faces of homeless men I've regarded power born to lack of power, and have shivered because I know even a saint may press fingers gently to an infant's skull and feel, for one electrifying second, an urge to press deeper. I press deeper into this dark morning, turning on Rue Chartres into the ill-lit Square, and pause, freeze, gaze at the cathedral, wonder why I do not more often feel it a strange place for vagrants to gather in shadowless calm, and why, passing them katrovas 87 each morning where they slouch and grumble by the gate, IVe quickened my pace. I've judged their lives as I cannot judge my own, and my judgement is as droppings dripping from the grey spire— luminous, insignificant. What faith have they, unwashed and stinking of wine and piss . . . faith, perhaps, that I will toss some silver chump, or cigarettes. I toss inflated words, not to them, but to the sky; for a revelation of our time is that we are made of stars long dead, though some say we are made— inasmuch as we make ourselves— from words. I toss all that I am into the sky, and old drunks gather at 5 A.M. in Jackson Square to watch, to wonder, to shine a little. ...