UPon slowly waking, Everyman
rouses from a dream of fear. Was it his life
threatened by someone waving a rusted single
shot twenty-two, or had he sought to destroy
some other, a trusted neighbor or loved parent?
His spine has filled with fluids overnight, yes,
again, and his ankles give him pain. Across
the loved, silent bones of his wife he must crawl,
or stumble round the bed to find the handle
of his life, or only the door, never slipping.
The floor creaks with dry rot as he passes all
the objects that define him: belt found in snow
on a job in Idaho (but no corpse nearby);
hat bought by mail from Amish farmers, brim bent
to Western specifications; shoes sent from
Wisconsin by mail also; and a shirt from
Maine. He feels, Braille-fingered, for the small room where
all who seek may find that men and women are
only men and women; here they see themselves
before any others see, and by a harsh light:
his eye looks deeply through him from the glass, and
tells him his sorrows are contemptible. So,
but he stands still, washing his sad eyes, and combs
the stiff grey bristles of his jaws, and lifts
the glass of well water with its sulphur whiff
and drinks. He does not plan to die today, no,
nor call in sick, returning to the now-cold
sheets, seeking to resolve that dream. Call it
what you will, habit if you like, but he walks
into the living room, satisfactory
sight, rebuilt by him despite poverty: white
walls and ceiling clean and textured, fireplace patched,
mantel graced with old oil lamps and seemly books.
Here he slowly dresses. Outside, darkness, low
clouds, and the spitting mouths, incessant, of down
spouts. He shrugs. Through kitchen to the cold mudroom
listening to the change in foot-fall of his
heels, from wood to tile, to concrete, he steps on,
pace quickening, no entropy now stops him:
gathering a bent umbrella and stained coat,
he opens a door and goes out to the world.