Whirling, unfurling into what should be wailing
but isn't, not yet, not with the news of his sister
so new, she to whom he had barely spoken in years
& yet her sudden absence, as nemesis or sidebar
or childhood memory, leads Louis not to reflection
but reaction, hailing a cab to the very birthplace
of punk rock and before that, Klein Deutschland,
Little Germany, & after, Loisaida for Nuyoricans
with whom Zelda might or might not (who knew?)
have spent her last moments, slurping rice noodles
or channeling Pedro Pietro, but in that shoebox
of a prewar walkup where she had lived, no one
meets his eye, save her old neighbor, who berates
him, then shuts the door in his face, not telling
him anything, leaving him with his map of scrawl
& loop, in Zelda's hand no doubt, with its list
of names to be pursued, and the first, in beard
& yarmulke, bitter as overstepped tealeaves,
calling his sister, whom he remembered as loud
& ungainly, a heartbreaker--really?--Louis'
hand tracing the nub of a scaly head in his pocket,
fiddling with it, caressing its contours, drawing
it out in open air absently, like a pencil-chewer,
the last gift Zelda ever gave him, a hand-painted
dragon perched with gossamer wings spread
over a rock cave, evidence she hadn't realized
he was no longer the geek in the front of the bus
playing Dungeons & Dragons with his friends,
but the last thing she ever sent him nonetheless
& then, as if an omen, further proof of his deep,
abiding ineptitude, he drops it, shatters it
into thousands of visible and miniscule pieces,
an analogy for his quest perhaps or just plumb
bad luck, if the deepening sneer on the face
of the man, Dan, whose socks and lox-smelling
brownstone he finds himself in, can be trusted,
sweat pooling in Louis' pits & upon his palms
even before he notices & recoils from the glint
of steel he has only seen before on cop shows on TV:
a fast curtain to a second act he may not live to see. |
