Gary Lutz: I Looked Alive

from “Her Dear Only”

Again: is it that one thing leads to another, or that the other has been tugging the first one forward all along? Because the instant your sister is whispering into your mouth, words lose all consonantal bounds.

They’re down to just vocalic mist.

Ah-aw was as much as I could make out of it.

Back off?

Dad saw?

Paths cross.

Then years.

I saw my parents to their graves. (They went neck and neck in a November remembered mostly for the rectitude of its weather. I moved to a close-by city with a dip in its population. (People were either accumulating attentions intended for others or picking over available holes.) There were days, though, when the dick was deputative of a clear thinker and got itself responsibly aloft: I thus married easily enough. I will shoot ahead of the peculiars of her rearing and emotionality, and report only that the woman and I prospered ammonially in close quarters, the washing machine was almost never not going, neither of us was ever got the better of in the heart-to-hearts, but I put myself out of her misery early.

I threw in with a man about my age who made a game of losing a finger in the hairy slough at the foundation of my spine. (I could count on a separate, alkaline smell to him come morning.) Then a woman who said I looked like someone who would be good with tools. (She had lineature already around the mouth and was unrepaired overall. But I liked taking orders for a while and co-signed for the pleasant car she said her thoughtsick son required.) Next the son himself, minus the mother and motionable only in the ebb and flow of semesters. (Nights, he sat up late in a shower wrap and turned the heavyweight workbook pages. The hand I now and again admitted between his legs came out unclaimed and little different.)