Canto XIX

Having slumped his way to the sleeping river
where molten darkness promises to swallow
every thought one wants to forget forever

with numbing pulses, swell by shushing swell,
each mirroring the lights that spell out Camden,
a city that the shadows know so well

that even at noon they seem to come down
in dimming blankets that settle on every surface,
lending to the town a deep concomitant

twilight silence that in its muting serves
to enhance the feeling of an urban ghost town—
the view of which was blocked by a sour face

topped with chalk-white wisps that curled in the gusting
winds in a beckoning manner, somehow looking
mendicant, like the monks of St. Augustine,

or like their owner, whom one could fairly liken
to the Old Man of the Sea who burdened Sinbad
(steaming drunk, his skin besplotched with the lichen

of liver spots from too much time on a sun bed
or simply too much time in general) and who
it seemed had recently been sorely snubbed

by someone, X could gather from his “How
can they…thirty good years…those stupid…
expecting me to dance and sing ‘heigh-ho’

and salute and…” (here the slurring fully stopped),
from which X surmised he’d been summarily axed,
leaving him here all sodden, surly, stooped,

and eager to act before X even asked
if he could help—he found himself on a ferry,
its engine screaming as it was made to exceed

all safety guidelines, fueled by the spiteful fury
of Charlie, as X had come to know the fellow
who offered to take him across the river for free

when he’d heard the path that X was forced to follow
in search of truth, and had moaned his own hard case
of losing his ferryman job to a character flaw

like love of the bottle, but now he could join the cause
of X and strike at his former bosses to boot
by nabbing the boat, to which he still had the keys,

and “give the bastards something to worry about”
as he carted X to the darkened farther shore—
“just doing my job” he said without missing a beat—

where X, after searching for something that he could share
and gifting to Charlie a chain of polished silver
right from his neck, which was met with a gesture of sheer

gratitude, would face the stench of sulphur
that hung about the docks, then spot a bike
to pinch (with more than just the slightest sliver

of guilt) on which to ride to the place and back,
noting a sticker bending around the frame
bearing a name that X had seen in a book

but seldom elsewhere—VIRGIL—before the form
of a nagging shade would spur him to cycle
his way to commune with those who’d bought the farm

and moved to a graveyard full of twisted, sickly
trees of the kind one sees in horror flicks
surrounded by mist and some bones and maybe a skull,

where X could tend the long-departed flocks
of ancestors penned in his crooked family plot,
among them, near the edge, his dearest folks,

his natural parents (if that’s not impolite
to say), from whose dual grave there stuck a daisy,
but when X knelt to look at it and pull it,

it revealed a secret that left him once more dizzy,
in the form of another note from Y that was bound
to the stem, its simple message quite a doozy

(“Brother at City Tavern”) that made him bend
his mind around her reaching from the grave
to guide his feet again, and even bandy

about the thought of a kind of necro-graph,
before determining to focus on the now
and setting aside tomorrow for his grief,

a plan that soon would have him start anew
and bid benighted Jersey au revoir
en route to seek, to find, and at last to know.

[0:00 / communing / terza rima / bowel / ex / Camden]