Kashtanka

The days were shorter since I’d made a mistake or two  
whose cumulative effects would take me out the pool entirely.  
Palm readers searching my life line would find it thin.  
Career counselors are begging for lowered expectations.  
I say: busser. They say: lower.  
I see a rare dime from my current gig. It’s a helping thing.  
I’m giving out aid—lame aid, like band-aids and lemonade and not much else.  
And when I do, they ask if it’s charity; it’s pity at both ends.

One old case, he stays past the wind-down period,   
rounding up the calculators and wax-paper cups,  
and we never talk. He’s a hard-knocks graduate.  
One day the helper heads, eager for a 3-3 game, leave me with the keys.  
I’m alone with this guy and he has a quiet heart attack.  
I find him by the fishbowl too late. This dumb, big-eyed fish  
is looking down at what I’d missed—dead.  
Well, I lay into him.  
It sounds like I’m pushing one more tile in the mortar of the floor.  
The EMT gives me a fist bump for breaking his ribs.

Seven months later, he’s back at the Center.  
Didn’t get to see St. Peter’s old gates, he says,  
but saw the clouds for sure.  
The music—the warbled raga of the Indians,  
with the drive of the Union drummer boy.  
The rest was ahead.   
He was ready, he says, but he got mobbed.  
Hundreds, he says, hundreds of dogs.  
Kash, Keekee, Baby Blue—their wet smell all over him.  
Tongues, tails (some sheared off and others full on), ears each way,   
a rattle of bullets and burst organs and owners’ tags.   
Even the ones he’d briefly known,   
even many decades ago—  
they wouldn’t let him up.  
He got no glimpse of heaven’s God,  
but felt a love immense.  
Who’ll drag us by the scruff  
down here? he asks. Well,  
I’ve been working up the dough  
for a dog of my own—  
what else could I tell him?