This is the last of this sequence.
Before about the beginning of the 19th century,
English writers had the option of playing
with spelling in order to emphasize something.
Spelling hadn't been standardized yet,
so the poet John Milton took great advantage
of that in Paradise Lost and that gets mentioned in here.
There's also a reference to a really--
a brand of sneakers that was really fashionable for like 20
minutes.
They were called Osiris after the Egyptian God,
and they had the word Osiris printed on the tongue.
So, yeah.
Osiris, you will remember, was torn apart
by the banks of the Nile, and his wife Isis
had to gather the parts to reconstruct him.
"Underworld."
The new and towering boy in out-patient
folds the lavish scaffold of himself into a smallish chair.
[BEEPING]
I've said something alarming.
It must have been outpatient.
Try it again.
"Underworld."
The new and towering boy in outpatient
folds the lavish scaffold of himself into a smallish chair
as though it were an ongoing task
to account for all his parts, and he
takes us in, nods his smudge of beard, and smiles privately.
We've confirmed his expectations.
No malice or irony in it, simply a kind of sweetness.
He's failed to kill himself last weekend
and has landed intact, marveling, interested.
His legs-- I want to spell long with two n's as Milton spelled
dim with a double m to intensify the gloom of hell--
careening into one another then pushing his knees forward
into the speaking circle where we weigh 90 minutes
the tonnage of our shame.
The damage yours only until exactly spoken.
Whose pain's not a common one?
And then the new man, all of 22, stretches his legs entirely
forward and catches my breath with the name printed
across the tongues of his shoes, Osiris, in bold letters,
maybe a brand too newly stylish for me to have registered.
But the unlaced word prays for us to just the right God,
him torn to pieces, each bit of his ruined picked up,
each nearly unrecognizable, attended, carried.
And is it loved or willed back into place, the man and boy's
body radially restored?
Or that's the hope he's poking out
at us with his excellent shoes while we
go on talking until lunch time.