Red Room Where the Writers Are

He is like a storefront going out of business.  Each new day reveals diminishing goods.  Shelves empty and prices are marked down.  Eventually parts of him will be given away, be trundled to the curb and heaped under a leaning sign with FREE scrawled across in magic marker.  His stance is tall, but he's short.  When he stands it's as if he's perpetually trying too hard.  Catch his hands out of a pocket or unwrapped from a glass and the fingers shake.  He hides these little flaws, or at least thinks he does.  Any loose knob in the house, he'll find.  Best get this resolved, he points out.  We always leave something like that for him to uncover.  A handle that needs an aggressive turn of a Philips, a door loose in a jamb.  This time we unscrewed the bathroom door and jabbed the screwdriver into the wood to worm out the hole so the screw couldn't grab.  We'd stand around as he looked it over.  He'd raise his finger, proclaim that he knows just the thing.  Got any matches, he'd wonder. 

He snapped the red heads of the matches off and instructed me to shove the headless sticks in there.  Screws need material to bite into, he says.  That's very smart, I tell him.  Thank you, I say.  I feel the same way I do when I buy my son's pictures from him for a dollar. 

His flesh is thinning, what's inside wells out.  Purple veins snake.  Mornings he'll stand in front of the window without his shirt on, drinking coffee, the steam sliding up his cheeks.  Sometimes when sunlight falls on a face, what's within that person is laid bare.  A truthful face will open.  A face harboring lies will shirk back to shadow.  Others are simply revealed as craggy or old, stunned, morose and wanting, pale, naked, without hope.  There is a point in a life where truth fails to shine, as if truth is something for which one strives, as if truth can be brought close with clutching and grabbing instead of slipped into like warm pools of water.  His face in the morning light is unshaven.  A shattering of red veins scatter up his cheek.  The vessels that harbor his blood spill their crate into his cheeks, a drunken disaster each morning written into his skin. 

I pull open the trash can and the empty wine bottle is inside.  It's good we didn't pull out the expensive stuff. 

Morning light streaming through a window is a great equalizer.  Light brings with it an unmitigated truth.  There is a reason that shadow conceals rather than reveals.  Light is the bridge that a soul can use to breathe.  It's a good thing to stand in its clean bath.  As the sun rises, a slow, yellow warmth crawls.  First the feet, the shins, the knees and thighs slip into the window's warm wash, then the belly, the chest, a wonderful drowning up the face into the flowing sun.  Breathe in.  Feel the finer animal within arch outside its shell.  It is these moments of reaching beyond that convey wisdom and the experience of the world with its objects fully realized.  All grand and high and mighty stuff.  I think these things as I watch him shirtless in the light.  It is my ultimate failing that I only see a hairy old drunk.