Lincoln
       

Arnie's father, 87, called at 6 a.m. "in pain,
and he never admits to pain": the daycare nurse
fucked up the catheter cleanse, and his kidneys
ballooned with urine overnight. That afternoon,
3:30, Arnie was booked for a lawyer consultation:
his wife, who he loved, and who he still loved,
was divorcing him, from her bed
in the oncology wing of the hospital where his father
was being recatheterized. These days

when we say "tipping point," we mean the phrase
as climate change, pollution, species death, perhaps
the economy, but there's a tottery, ever-jostling
atom-diameter fulcrum up in everybody's head, where
over-scale loads are duly weighed: I think of it
as atom-Arnie deep in every Arnie, and
as atom-you-and-me in you and me,
and when it shifts and slips,
the greater life around it shifts and slips.
Let's simply say he didn't need,
and handle easily, the car's flat tire
at 3:00 that grayly raining afternoon. And Arnie's

specialty at the local U is American History, notably
the Civil War. He once said, "I can lecture
about the 750,000 Americans who died: the very
enormity is a counterweight to emotion.
But show me the photograph of a single
seven-year-old daughter clambering a mound of corpses
in search of her father, lifting a detached arm
like a damp baton, to double-check if the ring on it
is her father's .... " Twice, he wept at that
in the lecture hall and had to be led away.
And so I drove out in the rain,

and helped in my own dumb all-thumbs way
with the tire, and took him, not to his lawyer's,
but to the clinic where his therapist works.
"Meltdown," I said by way of explanation
to the receptionist. "I prefer," said Arnie,
"'a little disequilibrium."' He's better
now. And he showed me his meds to prove it.
He lined them up on the desk in two rows
facing each other, as if for a battle.
The Bring-Him-Higher pills
and the Bring-Him-Back-Down-Again pills.
The blue and the gray.

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Copyright © 2021 Albert Goldbarth All rights reserved
from Other Worlds
University of Pittsburgh Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission