Jen plays piano in the jazz trio that gigs in the hospital lobby
for a couple of hours every Saturday afternoon. Nothing faster
than you can move on crutches, nothing louder
than a bedside consultation. They are called The Feelgoods.
They play “Stormy Weather”, they play “Sophisticated Lady”.
They play “There Is A Balm in Gilead”, the way Archie Shepp plays it.
Jen sings it like Jeanne Lee but slower, even slower. Last night
I watched her practice, sitting in my windowsill crow’s nest.
Her fingers drifted over the plastic keys like minnows in a soft current,
barely moving, then darting to drift somewhere new. They are so light
that I can almost forget that each one is half the size of my body.
They hold me so easily while she laughs, while she tosses me softly
from hand to hand. I weigh nothing to her, gravity disappears
at the top of my parabola, and then her soft palm, its mounts and plains.
Last night she opened a Bible to tell me why she sings it so slowly.
She reads, “the harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”
“For the hurt of the daughter of my people am I hurt; I am black;
astonishment hath taken hold on me.” She stops to collect herself.
“Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?
why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?”
She turns the onion skin pages for me. They are so thin
that you can almost see a couple verses ahead. They are so light
that I can almost turn the pages myself. She says that she forgets what happens next.
I think I know what happens next, and that she does as well.
Yesterday was the day we knew it would be the last day of our lives.
but here we are in the cities of the living. Yesterday Jen
staggered to Justice Park where there were orange slices,
where people were hugging and crying and someone old and stunned
grasped a walkie talkie. He played Thomas Tallis on the PA:
quomodo sedet solas civitas plena populo? Ierusalem, Ierusalem,
convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum. When the song ends I look at Jen
from a million miles away, from her hand with her fingers curled around me
and I can’t hold her hand. I cannot hold her hand. I can only hold on.
Today is the last day. Already a crowd is gathered. The man
who organized the rally is about to speak. Jen and I stand in the back,
our stances wide as if we were at sea. She sways so gently.
Above us the snipers count our scalps. When the crowd erupts
and surges forward to kill the speaker, the well-dressed rube
who wanted to tell us that we are rubes for caring, that we are rubes
for not seeing the puppeteer’s Semitic hands, I look up at Jen.
I tell her I love her but I know she can’t hear me. She looks down at me
while I watch the sad disheveled man who played the Lamentations of Jeremiah
yesterday. He bursts through the crowd, walks toward
the young fascist with his hands raised in angry surrender
to the snipers’ authority. That is when she tells me she loves me.
We watch a woman tackle the fleeing man into a bush,
reassuring him at the top of her voice that we love him, that God loves him,
and perhaps we would have held hands if I wasn’t already held in hers.
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.
There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.
There is no record as to whether or not Jeremiah ever found it.
Size Writes 