Identity: —in memoriam, RGB

They wouldn’t let me identify the body. When his two nephews came downstate the city morgue was closed. For a week they shuttled up and down, never arriving

on time. So the body just lay there until they phoned to say they’d seen it, but couldn’t be sure. “What do you mean, not sure?” I said. “Well, he was, well, we don’t want to go

out on a limb.” He lay there another week until they named him, alone as when he’d died in his East Tenth walkup railroad flat, top floor, under a thin asphalt roof that bubbled in summer

and in winter, more than once, collapsed. After Thanksgiving, when neighbors complained of the stench, the super called the cops who found him slumped over his desk. “The cats

were going wild,” he said. “You wouldn’t have recognized him. I knew him as a tall white man not a short black man. They had to peel his face off the wood.”