Krystofiak

I was sitting beside the drawer in the doctor’s office

Waiting for my cue

This particular morning when out of the corner of my eye

I saw the roll of old white yarn

Waiting for warm hands

By the window.

That was in those six months when I hated doctors, when I thought

They would tell me only all the things I didn’t like to hear.

I was sitting beside the drawer where they kept the magazines

And papers

Somebody started to speak Spanish right beside me

So I pulled out my collection of bilingual Neruda

And read the poetry in Spanish

Perfectly positioned for the Spaniards

To admire.

They might have mentioned something about how cool I was

But I didn’t speak their language. So.

This was the morning I had promised my roommate

I would water the plants

And wash the dishes.

I didn’t notice until I got to the waiting room

That I’d been waiting

In a pseudo-pseudo kind of way

For an old man that was sitting next to me

(someone to compare my morning to).

The old man picked up that old roll of white yarn and started knitting.

He said to his friend Candace that it would one day be a scarf

For himself maybe

Or for any grandchildren that son of his might bring him

(Here I imagined his son, a watchdog

On all fours, bringing him squealing grey pups

By the napes of their necks).

There was something reluctant in his wrinkles,

That’s what fascinated me,

Some kind of doubt of age –

He was not going to sit here forever, waiting for the doctor

To tell him it was time to invest

In a good, solid coffin

And to start sending out invitations

Cordial Condolences

Et Cetera.

No,

This man had a pierced and piercing smoking-face.

Ash-grey eyebrows and dulled, porous skin

I guess worn thin from clouds of tobacco and

His eyes in perpetual drought from the embers they’d raised.

I tugged on my sunglasses and let them fall onto my nose

Only to watch the drought in his eyes

Lead him far, far away.

This was a day I thought that I was being sketchy.

He leaned over to Candace and murmured something about the rain

And trees

And the flag outside, you could see it out the window,

And the maple leaf.

He started to murmur things I couldn’t understand, not because of his

Clenched jaw

Or his accent

But because all the while he was spinning the white yarn

I hadn’t seen him carry in.

I don’t know if I only started listening because he mentioned hepatitis.

I wondered if that’s why his fingers looked yellow,

Or was it from smoking?

Candace stopped talking to him after a while and started flipping through Cosmo.

I wondered if she was trying to hide that she was actually just interested

In the how-to-please-your-man sections

Or if the classy fashion ads

Did it for her.

I wondered about hepatitis.

I wondered if the old man had learned how to knit because of a wife

Or if he had gone to jail

Or if he missed wherever he was from

So much that he had started knitting scarves

Just to smell the remnants of an old country.

He got up.

The nurse had called him Krystofiak.

Polish.

He wasn’t wearing shoes but old blue slippers

And I saw his squeaking, squabbling shower

The water flowing in bursts instead of torrents

Little algae growing between the tiles

And the bathtub bit of it unused

Because who wants to use the bathtub bit when it’s growing

Green.

I saw his toiletries, covered in a fine layer of dust

And a picture of his late wife on the counter

In the kitchen –

Someone to say good morning to.

I knew that feeling well because I’d put up,

Secretly,

A picture here and there of my brother from when he was little

And of the old maple tree in the front yard

Of my parents’ home.

Like my pictures, I imagined his were hanging off of

Scotch-tape

In the little crannies of his house.

Most of the time, he was alone

(I’m only learning now that this might not mean he was lonely).

Maybe Candace was his only friend he’d see for dinner sometimes,

And sometimes his son, the salesman in Nebraska,

A bit of a vagabond with an on-off girlfriend

Fresh out of rehab.

But she’s a nice girl and she’s Polish too

So.

I can see him walking through the hall with the paper, crisp,

And his cup of coffee.

He has to walk lightly because the walls are very, very thin

And the neighbours are very, very quiet.

Out of his window he can see the lake a little, if he puts on his prescriptions

And tilts his head enough.

It is blue and musical.

He remembers things when he sits down on the balcony

Because there is cement and cement is a lot like his old balcony

A long time ago in Warsaw.

He has an icon in the corner of his house.

The saint drawn on it looks out

To the lake

Without having to put on prescriptions.

Krystofiak shakes his own hands every morning      

To make sure there is one thing he still knows how to do

And turns the switches in his silent house

One by one,

So that he knows they all work.

Then he sits at the table to feed himself a dozen pills –

He counts them on his toes so that he knows

His toes

Are still there for him.

On Tuesdays Candace comes by.

Maybe she is his wife’s old friend,

Or a nurse,

Or a lover.

She is young enough to be his daughter.

On Tuesdays if she comes early enough she counts the pills for him

While he feeds her sweet-bread and coffee,

Offers to cook her eggs but she always says no.

“Look at the flag,” he says to her one morning

And they look at the flag

The landlords have hung on the pole

Where the old maple tree had been.

A week ago Krystofiak had spent three hours sitting in his lawn chair

In solemn mourning as green-shirt contractors

Sawed down that sick old friend.

“That’s funny,” says Candace but she has lost count of the pills

And Krystofiak keeps looking out his window,

Leaning in to see if he can smell

The maple leaf drawn on the flag

The way that old tree used to smell.

He rocks his head the way he thinks his grandma did

And, sing-song, prophesises

“When it rains, all of the flag-leaves will be drenched

And people will have nowhere to run but their concrete

Homes.”

Candace is still counting pills but her nails are too long

To grasp them without slipping.

Last night she drank a little too much whiskey

And to a trained eye this is clear

In her little droopy eyelids and the residue of black mascara

Clumped and solid

In the crevice underneath her bottom lashes.

Krystofiak does not notice any of these things but he does know

By the way she slips through all his pills today

That she’s been drinking.

Krystofiak knows these things from being sober

Three days out of seven

For twenty years before the advent of his new life

Cross the sea.

He never called himself an alcoholic but he knows

More clearly than a man should know

What mornings with long nails and pills and nagging wives and mothers

Can be like.

So he keeps quiet as his Candace counts his medicine a second time

(in secret he is also counting)

And talks about the maple tree

While really he is wondering if there will be a squad of green-shirt contractors

To saw him down too

When he gets sick enough.

This very afternoon I am having ice cream

With a girlfriend

On the patio of a little Kensington café.

We look up at the sky.

She puts out her cigarette and in that

I-am-young-and-reckless kind of way,

Breathes out, “It is blue and musical.”