Drams and Scruples

A lunatic murmurs in the street like traffic and sleeps 
The night for warmth curled in an ash pile 
By the glass factory. When he wakes 
In the morning, he has clipped a tendon through. 

A sprightly freshet of blood rills over his fingers. 
He wanders doorway to doorway in a fugue 
Of action through the street, peering for bread. 
Afterward his handclasp will remain impaired …
I want to help but there's nothing I can do. 

Spent lemon quarters, coffee grounds, and eggshells-twists 
Of orange peel curl like springs in the gutter 
Beside the last bus terminus 
Before cornfields. The city is its own wilderness. 

By the frame houses with their graying, unpainted eyebrows, 
Lots are overgrown with flesh-seeking thorn bushes 
And with milkweed seedpods spewing 
Airy strands, feathery as threads of mineral asbestos. 

Weeping into a frequency beyond human hearing, 
Tremulous as a soprano, my friend P.J. 
Sits in my room for hours, facing the windows; 
Because he is young, his grief is like music 
And creates an architecture without objects. 

The feeling of what is forgotten guides the remembering—
It is for this melancholy, once, laudanum was prescribed. 
Convulsions, falling sickness, dead palsies, 
Shaking palsies, hectic fevers, 
A man may take two drams and let him fear no harm.  

E. and I and I visit the sickroom of a friend. He is delirious 
And filled with chemical reagents 
Nurses fear to spatter over their own fingers; 
He can step outside of himself, as a dutiful visitor 

(Taking a break from boredom) will step down the hospital 
Corridor for a cup of chemical coffee 
And a sandwich …
       Late in life, Dr. Johnson wrote lectures 
At law for a friend, though when the conversation demanded, 
He affected to be appalled at the profession. 

We speculate his wet nurse was tubercular; 
From early on, he was victim to tics and twitches. 
He was versed in herbs—

That's what my friend says, who is dying; 
Delirious, filled simultaneously 
With grief and fear and gorgeous presence, 
He strains his skin to bursting and goes on.