Version three.
"Heartsick."
"But I had already had enough bad luck that summer,
and I had enough bad weather, too.
The sun lacquered the windows across the street
were shut against the heat, and I
knew, staring out from the terminal, that my neighbors were
sweating in their dark bedrooms, foreheads leaked on
by cooling compresses.
I was spending the summer getting diagnosed,
trudging the hot and littered streets for weekly visits
to a doctor who was so expensive my voice shook when
I called for my appointment, and even now he seems to me
a tall white blur in a white coat.
I was not myself.
In that heat, my heart had re-established its old bad habit
of skipping a beat, so that suddenly I
was a factory out of work.
All the machinery went still, the silence
was deafening and quick, and dying seemed first within,
then out of reach.
And I throve on this medical melodrama.
My ill health got me over the bad places until one morning,
the police called at 7:00 AM to tell me
Raoul Flores had been picked up for vagrancy on a traffic
island in Lake Street.
And, not awake, I said, I'm sorry, I don't know any Raoul.
And then there was a blank place, the sound of a precinct,
not sound, really, but to sound what Xerox is to print.
And then a voice--
his-- but so condensed, so tiny, so light, it was like an insect,
it was like the ghost of a ghost.
Lynn, I really need a place to spend the night, it said.
I was not impressed.
I did not want to be disturbed by reverie or guilt,
but all right, yes, I said, take a taxi,
I'll pay when you get here.
And I did.
Because when the door of the taxi
opened and he ducked out into the sun,
sorrow and love kicked me so hard in the chest
my heart just stopped.
It seemed to say, I cannot bear it, you go on without me.
And I did.
I walked down the walk and stood while he handed my money
to the driver and every bit thing
began to take on preternatural detail.
The shoulder of his leather jacket
stood out, sharp and scuffed, and my heart
rose up out of its stutter, out of its limp,
when the next beat seemed to drip
from it achingly, infinitely slowly, and never arrive.
And that dark barn behind the blue light
opened its doors to me again, and I
let myself be backed against the dirty bale, warm against my ass,
as this boy, part gall, part oil,
ran his hand below my boned brassiere and whispered,
Is this the Maginot Line?
while I grew just idiotic with anxiety and lust."