There was a man in the bar tonight turning his wheelchair in slow half circles, digging patterns into the sawdust and talking about the whores on Tu Do Street to various women, who seemed to feel obliged to listen, paralyzed in attitudes of polite sympathy. They clutched their drinks and nodded, looking stricken, until he turned away abruptly and stopped speaking. Then he simply drained his beer and left. It was the beginning of my shift, and as I worked I thought of him, returning to a room where he would lift his half-limp body into bed and dream — not of the dead, who probably seldom bothered with him now, but of the women. I once loved a man like that, though we’ve lost touch — we used to spend nights together, after his awkward bathroom ritual with the plastic gloves, after the arrangement of the pillows and the long tube from his penis. I would take my clothes off for him in the dimmed light, and then bite his nipples, where he felt the most pleasure. He’d talk of fucking me until it meant something different — not the act itself, which he had never experienced, but this careful passion, his legs sprawled helplessly over the sheets, my body moving slowly against his hand. I wondered if the man in the bar had someone, too, a woman stronger than I was, able to stay with him without the notion of sacrifice — possibly he’d hoped to find her tonight, her face softened by neon, somewhere in the smoke and slam of the pool players. I saw him turning and turning, surveying the room of strangers. Later I picked up his glass from the table; the damp ring it left I wiped away; that, at least, I could erase.
This poem is excerpted from Kim Addonizio’s The Philosopher’s Club. © 1994 by Kim Addonizio. It appears here by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd., 92 Park Ave., Brockport, NY 14420.
— Ed.
