What Is Lost Is Never Said.

Dougherty, Sean Thomas

What Is Lost Is Never Said

"this year a spring wind blew / on the fourth of February"
--Irina Ratushinskaya

   I heard he died on the street
   the last cold night. James Canada
   told me. James Canada said
   they found him down by Hamott Hospital,
   off French street, huddled. James told me
   some short stop from Albion told him
   what happened. But it wasn't true.
   Instead, Randy Glover stole Willie Girard's
   old blue Pontiac and Benny's borrowed cue
   and disappeared. Well, not exactly.
   He left Willie's car at the transit station
   where a cop found it unlocked with the keys
   in the glove compartment and rumor has it
   Randy caught a bus south with Benny's $1500
   Gulyassy cue and a pocketful of small bills
   from his last bar tournament winnings.
   Randy was gone. Not even a tack on a map.
   And behind the stories of all the nights
   he played twenty hours and broke someone
   on the felt, the nights he ran 156 straight, table
   after table broke and racked, when at a hundred balls
   the entire room stopped playing to watch and stood
   hushed. The time he took Padilla for five grand,
   or South Carolina Donny for $700 on one game.
   The time he banked four rails off a star.
   The time he nearly overdosed and was found
   barely breathing in a 12th street motel. These stories
   they are not yours but they are yours, for all you do is listen,
   you brush the blue chalk from the table
   and watch the words rise from the felt.

   Mark talks about playing $2 racks for 20 hours
   with Pookie and Crazy Rick and every time he won
   they'd say, "luck, luck, luck, lucky every time"
   even down a hundred games. We tell ourselves the Fates
   conspire to alleviate the loss. Fifteen years ago
   Dick The Stick left for Vegas. This month
   he returned home, the only reason you know why
   is you overheard him tell old Jim Grassi, "Well, I ...
   well, she died, cancer ... ... now I am alone."
   Dick turned away from Jim, bent his chin
   over his good eye, aimed the next ball
   into the corner pocket. He shoots silent as an asylum.
   Long passed sixty, still running tables.
   The house men work through February.
   Shovel the walk, clean the glass.
   Brush away the blue chalk from the tables.
   We work through Wednesday night league.
   Sunday afternoons the regulars take their turns
   and we brush and exchange bills amid the murmur of men,
   speaking in quiet tones that men normally do not speak--
   such hushedness. Incense-like clouds of cigarette smoke.
   Joe Armini bends to bank. Jim Hynes smooth and steady
   draws the cue ball a body's length. A silence like an asylum.
   Who hasn't arrived? Or what is lost is what is never said.
   So much more than any billfold wrapped in rubber bands.
   In the parking lot our dead. The ghost of Whitey
   gone thirteen years, picking up stubbed cigarette butts
   to puff, still starting $20 games with not a nickel
   or a dime to even mark how many were won.
   Mark explains, "If he didn't have money it didn't matter.
   He had your money after the first game."

   And the fluorescent lights are illuminating the losses
   and triumphs, translating whatever you thought had left
   into something someone says that begins, "Did you ever hear
   about the night?" Or "You'd never believe"
   or "You should have seen" "You should have been there"
   all the what ifs or what had beens. And now Randy--
   who fell asleep in his chair between games, high on horse,
   has disappeared, become another story. This one of a man
   who even half-lidded could run balls with the ease of wind
   passing through trees. You know something bad is coming,
   and time is crawling up to your shoes. And perhaps that is all
   we long to be remembered, like Odysseus on his journey,
   not the traveling, but the story after told before we turn off
   the lights. The rapt unfolding of the ordinary
   becomes extraordinary. A form of labor.
   A lack of explanation. Worn tangled reflection.
   Iridescent pigeons in a parking lot coo. Randy toothless,
   limping around the table with a stolen cue.
   On that Greyhound bus, I hope he chuckled
   to himself, amazed he avoided his own elegy.