PITY
He was at the clinic looking to solve the moment’s limp with magicnonsurgical intervention to abate the bad knee.
Had to bring Bad Eye Harald as Harald had something too, and Harald
could not drive though his own driving a bit fitful with the knee.
On the walls, posters—inoculation and hygiene—mingled with chalky scenes pastoral.
He wondered who devised the format—decor and all.
That the self, Harald said, dissolves and disappears—this troubles you?
He would not say that.
You’re a clock-slave son off a bitch fifty years and then you’re all what they’ve left of you.
Misery takes its course.
Left in regret like some weepy old boxer over a lost love.
Any of those he could have said.
Any of those he was sure beyond Harald.
In the end, Harald said, I found the dead proved annoying company. If I could tell the dead so the dead would listen, I would tell the dead to shut up.
That eye, he said, they can’t fix it?
There is no remedy.
Difference, he said, between aspiring to perfection and demanding perfection.
One goes, Harald said, and in time the other. Or something else. What did you think you wanted to anyway see?
The sun, he said, the sky, the trees. Whatever there is.
He believed this was what he wanted to see, but grown old in the nominally endorsed and ignored meaningless life he saw why no one believed anything, as only a chump would, save the deranged true believers now arrived and in self-fulfilled control.
There are whole literatures of blindness, Harald said. I have nothing to add.
Harald had said this before and again and now again.
His knee hurt and he feared his knee might at any time fail.
We know, Harald said, Christ could write, but he wrote in the sand.
Pity, Harald said.
Pity?
Pity? Like an Englishman would say?
What was this?
Fail.
And collapse.
Because of the failure.
Felt mostly like this, like rushing forward to absolute collapse, but the room, the waiting, the repeated comments, now felt frozen as though they were always nowhere but here.
Pity?
Pitied maybe they had been.
And pitiless when they could be, probably, they were.
Now pitiable?
Or lost to some language they did not speak but got from TV.
How?
And the eye.
And the knee.
As though something he could not say had been taken away.
Greg Mulcahy is the author of OUT of WORK, CONSTELLATION, CARBINE, and O’HEARN. His next book, DRISCOE, is forthcoming from FC2 in Spring, 2027
Banner Art: Interior, a visual poem by Robert Frede Kenter (c) 2026.
