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Four views from a wicker rocker-- By Jerry R. Strong (AKA Jake) I. This snapshot was taken, I suppose with a precision-engineered camera with its wealth of tiny screws and levers and pleated leather bellows. German, I expect and expensive. It was a difficult time or shortly after we had money then... the...... I am told. I look at the picture closely now: A man stands on a sidewalk, behind him is a row of big brick homes. He is in a top hat and long gray coat. There is a boy on his shoulder in a brown suit he wears a cap with the ear flaps pulled down. He holds up the boy like a prize. It is me and it didn't work out that way. I am told. I look at the unsmiling face and eyes. There is a word in Russian... Skushno. It is difficult to translate...... It means more than dreamy boredom; A spiritual void that sucks you in like a vague but intense longing. Perhaps we never really change I am told. II. In front of a brass spittoon filled with silk flowers chessmen sit in quiet discontent. An oil lamp props up a picture of my grandson. To the left a still wrapped Christmas cane. From here to there, everywhere you look are books. I consider this: Are my impulses Jung... jealously Proust? Do I fear death because of Bernanos, stumble toward nothing do to Kafka? Even this beloved Thomas Mann and I seem second hand at best. III. A beam streams a rhomboid finger across my oriental rug. My dog Indy finds her place in the warmth then curls in an almost instant sleep. The sun illuminates the dust that filters through the long afternoon covering her, and the fringe of little threads that move like cilia in the light and shadow. She sleeps unaware of this silent dirty rehearsal for another place. While I, in a darker corner, listen quietly to an intermezzo by Mascagni. IV. Below the leather hat on the hall-tree in the corner my white dress shirt with the French cuffs pressed down hangs like an armless man whose shoulders bunch as if remembering some distant phantom pain. The new gray suit, wrinkled now, waits long after the music is over for another dance at his daughter's wedding yesterday. Time moves as quietly as the spin of the earth. I think I have very little left to notice as I slump deeper into this living semi-dream, the rest slips silently away. |
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Document last modified on: 08/20/1998