Good Night, Good Doctor, and: The Secret, and: A Friend's Inheritance

GOOD NIGHT, GOOD DOCTOR

In Memoriam Jim Decatur

I miss those late Sunday afternoons checking out of AVthe phono player hefty as a travel amp, the headset and armfulof scratched LPs—histories and comedies in fall, tragediesall spring—and lugging the load to a cubby on the second floorpast the water fountain and biographies and pre-med kids doubledover Organic Chem. I miss the hiss of the needle touchingdown on the weary, coal-dust voice of Richard Burton,Vanessa Redgrave's lilt, and following along with a six-inch,see-through ruler in my doorstop Riverside (I own it still)boning up for nine a.m., when you'd stride in cockyas Hotspur, or chanting some dread from Lady Macbeth.I miss Lear huddled dank beneath distant fires.All I could see back then were maps to nowhereor somewhere cold. Skeleton of a vanished river.Moth-racked quilt of Pennsylvania farms.I didn't know I wanted to live, let alone sing, forever.I miss Titania, Bolingbroke, Bianca. The way Hamletcould not stop humming the nocturne of himself.You taught us scansion, five-act structure, layout of the Globe.How to forge a thesis worth more than a "turd i' your teeth."I miss Feste duty bound to jest. Lavinia, Desdemonaunfairly offed. But most, I miss the office where you readmy poems, if you could call them that, and were too kind.Sagging shelves, bust of the Bard bargained for, you recalled,at a Sag Harbor fair, and those long, dark windows tracedwith the long, gray argument of rain. Out of fluorescent lightI stumbled, rubbing eyes, the day before commencement,without a clue how much I'd miss "honest" Iago, "saucy" Viola.Or fat Sir John, your likeness, who said it all in banterwith the prince: "I knew ye as well as he that made ye."

THE SECRET

Ice cracked like a voiceand down I shot, hands giganticwith hockey gloves, skate-bladesslicing the murk. Little brother,

in the upper world, shriekedand jabbed his stick, againand again, beneath the crazefor me to clutch. After,

we told no one, not evenourselves, how close I cameto meeting my makers—leaf muck and newt. Yet

every winter when the pondsfirm up, I replay in a flash(my brother must, as well),that dusk on hardened water

when he knelt at the oldest lipand somehow hauled me up—choked, shaken with cold,and too damned proud to thank him.

A FRIEND'S INHERITANCE

It must have been a morning clear as this, after days of woolen fogand dull, stammering rain, a morning with all the doors and windowsof the sky thrown open, the cool mid-autumn air streaming acrossthe grounds of the state-run Home for the Mentally Infirm

two weeks after the family dog began to speak to your fatherin Spanish about the folly of the Contra War, one weekafter wind through loblolly pines and flowering rhododendronsbegan to whistle his name, and his name was Jesus Christ.

Perhaps it was also a morning this radiant, this inviting,when he came to the false conclusion, over a bowl of Chexand fresh-picked berries the blue of bruises, that it was timeto sneak out the janitor's door, feed the river his clothes, and walk

in skivvies to the Stop & Shop on the corner of Forsythe and Elm,where a clerk let out a childish gasp and phoned the cops.It had to be a day this agreeable and bright, 30 years back,when he stepped from sleep into a sudden clearing of mind

and determined to escape the radio hoarse with static and dismal news,the letters dead on arrival from distant friends, the tantrumsand pathetic whimpers leaking from adjacent rooms. He told youlater he had witnessed a sign-a ladder of hallowed light

through the blinds. He said the songbirds, puffed with rapture,implored him to climb from the...