I see him on
Sundays when I’m running in the morning.
He wears a light blue T-shirt with Beethoven’s likeness;
the curly tortured signature up the side from hip to armpit.
He washes his car with a green bucket and a cardboard
box full of rags, hangs the rags over a little rack; they dry
as he moves from the front of the wagon to the back.
Today, I come bolting through the December air; he comes
down his front steps as I round the corner. Same blue T-shirt,
it must be 40 degrees. I say hello. He asks if my husband
has been
raking his leaves. His wife heard something, but they
never saw anyone. I don’t know the answer, and we gradually
talk of vegetable gardening, the deer that eat everyone’s roses,
the leaves
that spiral into spreading red piles on the sidewalk,
as feathers might, dropped from a crate, floating that slowly,
making no sound; only when I shuffle my feet through their heavenly
organization
do they whisper up at us. He’s lived on our street
thirty years; I don’t know him well, but we are relaxed
conversing this way. I stand close enough to notice the bleached
pinkness of
his skin, the scar on the bridge of his nose, shiny and
ripped-looking, like a penny left on the train tracks. It’s not even
9 o’clock in the morning and I steam from my jog. He tells me
about the pond
he’s built in his yard, they don’t really have enough
room back there, an unprotected well full of goldfish and healthy carp,
larger than his hand; and how he saw a heron one day, amazed
at its
nearness and size, it rested on his roof, watching the fish
in their meditations. He knows a bird like that could empty his pond
in one day, no problem. He demonstrates heron with his naked arms,
blue T-shirt
flapping gently, gray eyes wide.