The Immortalist

If you were to shadow him in and out of life,
his life, day after day, you would be struck to find
that be finishes nothing. Find a coffee cup
he has drunk from; cold coffee, a half-inch of it,
sits in the bottom of the cup. The chances are
some time has passed since he poured it; wonderful plants
proliferate out of the black; alive gray spores
suck up the drink and lie hideously awake.

In his kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and living room
— wherever there are ashtrays of whatever shapes —
hardly smoked cigarettes collect, some of them burnt
tip to tip leaving the bare ash solemn and whole
like molted fire-dragons from a Chinese egg,
the rest half-wasted, balanced on a rim of glass,
inside the paper collar their last heat hunched in.
He smokes endlessly, yet he scarcely smokes at all.

He has women. You can walk the streets anywhere
and figure to yourself that half the girls you meet
were, one time, his, all in the special way he has —
which is not quite to possess them, but to make threats
in a language indistinguishable from love’s
and in gestures any woman recognizes
until it is too late for her to tell him yes.
By then he is not listening; then he is gone.

Everything. Everything. The same arrest, the same
disjunction, the same no. You cannot understand
why he reads books only part-through, and will not stay
to the end of movies; the inside record grooves
of his collection are unworn, he has not learned
a single poem by heart, he does not eat desserts.
You wonder who he is, never to finish with —
and, if this pleases him, what he will not come to. . . .