Deconstruction of the Blues

Sunset

100 SUNSET Summer nights when I sit my front steps he walks his dog. He floats along on his toes, white haired and aquiline. Think him an old hipster, musician maybe. Not cool, though. Nervous. Shy. The dog is a comma on a leash, so small and limp it seems to say, “See, no bones in my pattering! I’m a cartoon beagle!” Me in my torn turtleneck, book and pen across my thigh. I’m sailing the slow curve and burn of the year, staring down Haste Street into the sunset. But his dog embarrasses me. His wife’s? kids’? He treats it with patient avoidance. Sadness of man, sorriness of dog. Bobbing storklike gait of his that wants to plunge ahead tethered to its tiny sniffing. Sniff, dispirited sniff sniff at the roots of my unkempt hedges. Stops him, and he stands waiting, gazing off the other way. That dog is definitely his burden, like the hats with earmuffs my mother used to buy me when I was a kid starting off to ghetto school. I didn’t bear those patiently. I simply lost them. He, though, he holds to the leash that punctuates his fate. Reminds me of David, my old friend who lives in his famous father’s shadow. Brilliant David, angled and darting, who hides and grays there like a mushroom. Skinny, like this guy, hair turning white. Because of David I like this man whose dog has sniffed us into sadsack connection we neither of us want. Stopped in the gap of my hedges on the pavement to my front steps he’s started saying, “Hi, how you doin’?” I don’t offer much help, just raise my hand and smile. I can see him over the hedgetop getting nervous as he trails up the block nights he senses me there. Dark and sharpcut sitting sideways in my doorway. Like I’m judging him. In him I see my earmuffed white mommadom. 101 Sailing preoccupied. But I raise my hand, don’t switch off my smile. Let nothing mean and sharkish gleam. He doesn’t quaver, get peevish. We greet each other. Friendly. Across the leash that binds us we make it alright. ...