It’s OK; I didn’t take the morphine,

so I get to sit longer by the window

happily watching nothing happen

out on the one-way life cul-de-sac

asparkle in no deposit-no return trash.

Play something bluesy.

                                              She had

a laugh that made onlookers smile.

Her thumbs were exquisite.   Once

she changed her name to gliding bird

and you had to look up to see her.

            There are fields beyond

just corn stubble this time of year

dreary ground even in this slanting light.

If I could hear, there’d be a distant diesel horn

and her voice calling from another room.

From my desk I have a first-floor, two-window view of Clarke St.  Front windows, the porch and ten feet of scrappy lawn to the curbless two-lane road.  July.  People walk for exercise here.  Not many joggers, just ordinary folks out for a walk, all ages, dressed for exercise, shorts and T’s.  Retired couple, always side-by-side, in stride, never talking.  Young mothers pushing prams, trying to get back in virgin shape.  Stubborn solo widowers focused elsewhere.  Random neighbors being pulled by dogs.  The kids are usually on bikes.

I get to study walkers and have developed a sort of phrenology of ambulation—an ambuology?—by which to predict traits of character, position, even history.  One can intuit (imbue?) a lot about a person from how they walk.  That dude in the ranger hat, for instance, never played a sport.  Look how far apart that couple are, and she has not stopped talking.  The tall blonde girl is in training for something, crew maybe.  All the guys my age with backs bowed like mine by desk jobs.  Or take this grandma/new mother/baby in pram crew; there is a Bronte novel there—the things they have to pretend are secret. 

There are the younger ones, early on-set middle-age, with their handheld gadgets, communicating as they walk.  Out alone, walking and talking, sometimes with their thumbs.  They are not worth your attention, pre-robotic slaves.  They long to be like everybody else.  Besides, what walkers do with their arms free is telling: Loose or stiff? Shoulders engaged at all? Fingers clenched or splayed?   Suspect the ones who swing their arms in front of them.  The canine tenders, of course, have a leash in one hand and a dogshit bag in the other.  Here is the woman bent with osteoporosis, walking to her yoga class, her rolledup mat under arm.  You can tell that every step hurts.  

Clarke Street is part of a neighborhood.  These are my neighbors.  I have watched them pass often on fine days like this.  I note their dayglow footwear.  I feel I have a right to name them, to assign lives to them.  I even name their dogs.  There are some old injuries passing by, some tragic pasts, some futures worth avoiding, unkind life.  But if I wait and watch long enough, I am sure a perfect ten will glide by as if afloat on winglike legs, a Mona Lisa smile.

A sea of them at the Polo Grounds, all turned

as one following the action on an unseen field.

My dad would not leave the house without his.

If he was outside he had his hat on, every photo,

as surely as the electric chimes at St. Vincent’s.

*

I had to order this one from Milan, the closest

I could find that matched his hat in style and cut.

I rarely wear it out, too fine a hat for this century.

Dad wore his hats out. They’d last a few years

then be retired to work-day status and vanish.

*

You had to stand up straight and square to wear

a fedora right, no slouching to Bethlehem Steel,

and the fingers on the brim in greeting were thick

and every man my dad met was named Mac.

Soul 

“the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal.”

I have trouble with this word, with how it is used.  “Keep body and soul together.”  You mean not dead?  “She had a big soul.”  They come in different sizes?  The definition contains two practical impossibilities—immateriality and immortality.  Dogs have souls?

It is one of those terms that has grown so large in this lazy language environment as to have no shape at all.  Soul food.  Lonely soul.  It is a grey word, both pretentious and cheap. It has been put to some shitty uses.  A couple of priestly cults got into using it in their scam, claiming that—for a price—they could save your soul from a miserable afterlife they invented.  Good money, insuring something that doesn’t exist against illusory harm.  No returning customers complained.  Step right up for paradise.

Why does the brain allow itself to be mysterious?  Allow this fantasy of body/soul separation?  What is gained by the dichotomy?  This tumor of an organ above the rest, wired for survival, does it fool itself into wondering if death can be skipped over?  All evidence to the contrary.  Thought is immaterial.  Could it be immortal, too?  But how could thought survive without a brain to think it?  On another plane, of course, as soul.  There is comfort in this fantasy, not bodily comfort, of another type.

So, soul is born.  As real as an imaginary friend.  If only it had remained so simple, so personal.  The next thing you know, everybody, every animate thing (& why stop there?) has a soul.  Is it an essence?  Some sort of quality?  Spirit?  What is that?  It can be whatever you project into it.  It could be a ghost.  It might end up tortured, feeling (physical?) pain forever.  Maybe it is Mom waiting for you in heaven.  There is even an All Souls Day (confused as Halloween) when everyone gets to play. 

Soul is a vaguery for good reason, because soul does not exist.  There is no such thing.  A spiritual placebo, an empty catchall of lazy language.  Whenever it is used, a better, more focused and appropriate term is available.  Many languages have no word for it at all, no concept of it.  We are not isolate corpus and spiritus.  We are just one.  We die as one.  Get over soul.  Integrate yourself.