Brilliant, passionate, abrasive, a man of dark moods and mercurial temperament, wearer of greatcoats, able to coolly evaluate grocery store clerks one minute and step on a june bug for being nosy the next, cloying, handy, often to be found napping in waiting rooms, demure, obscene, multi-fisted, a person against whom many have measured their own worth, red-eyed, whose breath smells like salmon in the morning, ceaselessly flirtatious, man of many wits and deployer of all of them, often at the same time and in the same sentence, early bird, investor in commodities, braggart, leader, mincing chatterer, teacup full of something that looks like tea but is in fact not tea but a vile unidentified liquid, figuratively speaking that is, marshmallow thief, fly fisher, winter vacationer, spackler, carrier of a rape whistle, tennis spectator, retired army engineer, unconscious assassin, diplomatic if a bit obtuse, ritualistic buyer of new galoshes every February first, ham radio operator, serene, divided, assigned, numbered, connoisseur of chaos, observer of titmice and recorder of their migration patterns in a little field notebook, sketcher of their habitats, brilliant, passionate, abrasive, clear-headed, able to get straight to the point without flattery or self-deprecation, winged, antsy, false-legged, flesh-beaked, grubby in the moonlight, with tiny black flashing eyes and unusually lightweight skeleton, scullion, trapeze artist of his own dark moods, something of the town munchkin, frequenter of fluorescent-lit sundries aisles, small-time poet, writer of exceedingly vain memos, offender of women, explosive, diffident, surprising—the only thing bigger than he is the blue blue sky into which sometimes he secretly disappears.
[2006]
