Axeman's Jazz

10

BEST I LEAVE you craving mirrors, child, cold, hard faces giving nothing back to the world but the grim old world itself. Best I leave you with an empty purse so you’re forced to fill it with your findings. Your inheritance? Mystery and intransigence. Restlessness, your one and only ID.

My mama’s voice, in a dream. Not the sorts of words she ever used in life, and yet, somehow — on some level I never reached — they feel just like her.

Without vigilance, you’re at the mercy of the wind, a handbill torn off an ice house wall, scuttling past street signs none of the neighbors can read, scuffed doors bolted tight against the heat, truck exhaust, dust, cats pawing through broken bottles, used condoms, bloody Kleenex in a field, past the crying of left-alone babies, the chatter of television, which at least has something to say, the silence and stillness and don’t-give-a-rat’s-ass of everyone else, the cops’ empty promises, the morgue’s waiting boxes, the empty white-hot of the sidewalks chewed by the earth, the wasted basketball practice of a knock-kneed little boy, the wasted lessons of a gifted girl whose ma can’t keep paying for the family’s out-of-tune piano, the sludge in the pipes beneath a dead-grass patch, dead pigeons, wood splinters snagging the bill — snatched up by an old man wasted in the middle of the day, a hungry, grinning scarecrow squinting so the words’ll keep still, words he can’t decipher, words —