Shade of yellow which is not nicotine or age alone. The color of
the bare bulb. Six floors and a view of airshaft. Below
the feral cats on their nests of bones. I used to cover my ears
in the middle of the night. Not the screams or the
sirens, but whatever was underneath. Billy said he couldn’t
go off because of that blood-hush, the tilt of it
like peering through a smeared and thickened glass.
Pour me my pain in a dirty glass, his mother told him
or something like that. But the music came to him that way—
slantways, bent. Dripping water or
subway trains. The woman unwrapping the paper from
flowers, the sheaves of gladioli. Her man knifing the stacks of newspapers.
Ink drying. A wrench and a slip, a slide, the blip of
what-is-even-now-being-swallowed. Slow varnish on stairwells and
corners—the glass knob, the drawer that sticks, his body on
the bed sweating and shaking. Teabags soaking in the saucepan on
the windowsill. Chamomile flower for untainted sleep. For the sleep that
will not be untainted. For the yellow feet of the fog, the susurrus of the
river which sounds like a correspondence of trains,
this prayer. Billy, his forehead smoothing, and his acute
fingers, and the case with the cracked blue cloth,
unfolding of gut and strap, unfolding of string and
taut. It was like flesh is what I mean. Like he was cutting
through it. A saw. A blade. Ear cocked to
the pools on stoops and behind the buildings,
the pools of fur and water and what spilled over.