Panoramas

In a borrowed room in Chelsea, that first visit,

he made me instant coffee, stirred in the cream

with his index finger. He could still make out shapes

and colors, and he squinted hard, as if trying to see

if I’d drink what he’d touched.

He kept the TV on the cartoon channel,

sound on mute,

colors cranked to high. Big blobs

of gelatinous reds and yellows,

oranges and greens came and went

like the slow, drugged dance of a lava lamp.

Once he dreamed about a rocket ship.

I want to sculpt it, he told me, but I don’t

have silver clay or the right blue.

~

I was supposed to teach him yoga, and we tried

some gentle stretches, but his body was wasting.

So we talked about the sky, his medications,

thoughtless friends who came to see him

when they had colds.

He fired me twice; once because he heard me

tell his mother how to meditate

by following his breath, and once

because he figured out I wanted him to like me.

~

After he went blind, he’d turn his face to the window;

Is it clear today? Are there clouds in the sky?

And I’d say Yes, and he’d say, Are they the big puffy kind?

And I’d say No, today they’re thin and layered like fish scales,

or I’d say, They’re lilies with dark throats; palaces, dragons

turning into heads of old men

sleeping on gray pillows.

He seemed happy

when we talked about things that weren’t real.

~

The night before his thirtieth birthday, he dreamed

six hunky male dancers carried him

on a gold stretcher

up Sixth Avenue to Central Park,

To a picnic, he said,

like the one you told me about for the staff.

We considered the scabs on his face, the danger

of sunburn. I’ll need a hat, he said, with a broad brim.

There should be a line of trumpeters in front of us,

like a parade . . .

And drummers, I said.

Yes, and we’ll launch you from Sheep’s Meadow

in a hot-air balloon with a red and purple canopy—

And green, he said, and turquoise . . .

~

He gave me picture postcards of his collages

He called them panoramas.

Only one survives,

Financial District, NYC:

two ragged bluish towers rise

into matte black space,

a nuclear winter

noontime darkness,

the smattering

of pedestrians pasted in

from other pictures,

walls

rebuilt from different times of day.

He cut everything he shot

into pieces, as if to break apart the world

and recreate it

with tweezers

and toothpicks, intricate

and strangely lit

as his face—

skeletal in twilight.

~

I remember most the unfinished piece

draped across a table, the inside

of an old-world hotel in Monaco.

He called it his self-portrait.

Gold light, dark wood, a stained glass dome—

At first, I thought it was a church.

Two tiny pictures of his face were pasted in:

one at a table in the lobby;

one by the bar with the old men.

I hope I can finish it, he said.

I need to put my face in one more place.

~

Near the end he wore a collar around his neck

so when he dozed off

it wouldn’t break.

He was worried

about the afterlife. What do you believe?

I told him I believed the body falls away,

but the soul goes on.

He changed the subject

to veal, his favorite meal

before he went to liquid.

The spring calves, he said.

I’ve seen them.

They have no room to move at all.