P H I L I P  B R A D Y

Hindu

from Weal

I don't know how they hand out incarnations,

but somebody got shafted with this one:

to be a handsome man without much brains,

bad heart, no money or position

in America in the depths of the cold war -

might as well be celery garnish or

a goldfish a kid's plopped in a vase

on the kitchen radiator.  I guess

some feckless soul in Nirvana's holding tank

thumbing Brahmin mug shots must have finked

out the wrong guy, or maybe flunked

a Rorschach test, or just tumbled, drunk,

off some cosmic platform when the character

and fate of Edward Donlon roared

into him like a train and snuffed his bliss,

and set him on a life of accidents.

Or maybe that poor soul had a plan -

for, looking back on it, you can

follow his life's pattern as easily

as a glassed-in grid map of the BMT

after the graffiti's been scrubbed off.

And even if Donlon's life force got stuffed

into the hard luck carcass of a New York dick

with slattern wife, two whelps, and a thick

skull, he always dressed with style, strutted

his beat as if he knew where he was headed -

whether to the altar or the bar,

or down to the basement to wallop Eddie Jr.

In fact, right up to the Saturday he holstered

his service revolver, climed the stairs

and locked the bedroom door,

I doubt a single soul living on the block

thought anything was wrong - no shock

considering the cornice I grew up in -

Flushing, Queens - a post-war way station

of fenced-in postage stamp back yards,

row houses, unpithed hearts and TV dinners,

where the infirm of the hordes escaping Brooklyn

were culled on their stampede to the Island.

This was the true ground zero or ground nil

of scotch and casseroles - a lukewarm hell.

Our whole block hadn't enough prana

to incarnate an underfed amoeba.

There was Charlie Cast who b.b.'d passed cars;

Michael Stiefel, the owl-faced science nerd;

Leo Sarkissian of the pus-wet face,

Lu Anne Piazza, goosed by Jamie Wallace,

tough guy, who explained it all to us

on the front stoop after Donlon died -

(it being both sex and suicide).

He sucked his middle finger, cocked his thumb

and fired, moaning, a-bing-a-bang-and-a-boom.

It was just one dusk in an eternity

of fireflies and casual cruelty.

Even the Police Force looked the other way

pretending accident, so wife Joan

could get the full-dress funeral and pension.

But because Donlon lived next door and died

a wall from my bedroom, and because I wed

his daughter, Maureen, at age ten,

in a giggling ceremony in the basement

where my kid brother played best man

in his communion suit, and because

I got dubbed Ed Jr.'s godfather and because

my father's spirochettic sperm embalmed

me safely unmade till after Vietnam

and because my lover's brother hadn't yet

hanged himself, and her tumor brooded

in secret, and because no one had been

or ever would be lost, Edward Donlon's

suicide shattered some trajectory -

like the arc of the Pensy Pinky

rubber ball you imagine already homered

out of sight as you step up to the sewer

with a broomstick.  Foul it off, it's gone.

We called it a Hindu - a do-over - when the sun

blinked, the physical world wobbled free

an instant, and no one saw or could agree

on what they'd seen.  The moment

Donlon opened fire into his open mouth,

when his incarnation exploded

into ether, or fumes, or light, or spumes of blood -

I think I was the only one to see.

I didn't see it then, exactly,

and I was far from the only ghoul

to replay that scene in prurient detail -

the coifed, spiffy corpse sprawled on the floor,

the wife and children petrified downstairs,

and later Joan, at the wake, soused,

muttering, "I didn't think he had the guts."

And Eddie Jr. damaged as his father

saying to me, "I guess now you're my father."

No, what I saw developed slow

as a blond negative, slow

as a spectral x-ray of the splashy death,

the hum-drum life, and walleted beneath

Donlon's sharkskin suit, two secrets,

maybe the only valuables he kept,

and kept him separate from the sordid facts

he could not Hindu.  The first was comic:

a rumor snaking through his drunken wake -

he wasn't a real cop: despite the gun

and badge and funeral and pension,

his fragile heart had failed the physical

and so he'd played cop as a transit mole -

a subway sleuth deployed underground to prowl

the detritus.  And Donlon was not born

with a bad heart.  That was the second

secret, second sight that cleaved him

from himself: a drunken night in the infinite

regression of lives before my birth that led

to his being next door, and that night led

to a car accident that killed his first

born daughter, Colleen, and nicked his heart

so that it wobbled, blinked.  And this

is what I saw - Donlon wandering

the flotsamed, numbed unconscious of Flushing,

Queens, dressed to kill, searching

for the snuffed out essence my godson

was conceived in the upper world to clothe again.

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