| Seven of Fifty Liberace was a hell of a piano player, Helga shouted desperately from the couch in the bowel of the honky-tonk. Excuse me, Helga, I said, but no one here has blasphemed Liberace. You’re very drunk. She shook her head. Her permed curls scattered and regrouped. I wish, she said, that right now Liberace would evanesce in this bar, into the middle of a bar brawl, smile the smile of mirrors and flick some rednecks off their feet with the iron-ribbed hem of a purple bugle-beaded cape, thump some beer bellied truckers, leave diamond dents in their pasty foreheads, and twirl about shouting, I am a hell of a piano player! I can’t put it together, Helga said—I am a regular in a pisssmelling place like this and also a regular at the hospice, which come to think of it also smells like piss sometimes, and Lysol, or at least I was until today… do you know they told me not to come back, that Linda asked I not come back, I guess it’s little wonder since when I went to give her that stupid trinket, the snowflake paperweight I brought from Vegas— my God, I thought two months away were nothing— and saw her skin sinking yellow into her bones, the clammy bandages over the oozing sores and her eyes black and glassy, reptile eyes, mean, vengeful, then saw how it hurt her to move her hand to the edge of the bed to touch me, I vomited partly on her lap I think, partly on the untucked sheet, mostly on the floor— I need so much I want to die, to tell her I’m a damn sissy, and with all my heart that she’s beautiful—you know, she’s a hell of a woman, was more a great hell of a friend than anyone else in the whole roacheaten history of man or woman has been a hell of anything else—except Liberace MAYBE, and she always said he was a hell of a piano player. You have been crying all day, I said. Yes and drunk too, and now I want Liberace to come back, said Helga, so I can take his arm, stun the nurses, and walk into the hospice freely, he with his 66 white key smile and me loving Linda with brave eyes and steady lips and ready hands, so I can say, See, I told you there were miracles, I told you. Back to Poems List |
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