ECCE HOMO Comments

I'd never woken up in a place like that - a hovel past
all imagining, near the gothic city of Santarém.
His house.
I'd met him at the Fandango
and knew only that a tearless sadness
lit up his afternoons and evenings.

This time it was different. I'd just broken
a glass in the only still open pub
(its name now expunged from my memory).
He came over and sat down, one drunk
facing another, united by the quasi-splendor
of their fall. He invited me to follow him and,
without knowing why, I followed. All the way
to the two rooms in which he lived,
without neighbors - an aluminum and plywood
shack that made the word despair
an inadequate euphemism. The dog,
at least, was glad to see us arrive.

Then he cried, over nothing. He merely wanted
a real shoulder where he could lean his head
which his wife and daughters would no longer even kiss
in a dream. He needed no words or gestures,
just an ear to hear him share the unshareable
which perhaps (I don't quite remember) he called sorrow.

He fell asleep that way, on my shoulder - and I
could have killed (but not him) for a beer
or the gin that, a few hours earlier, dropped too soon
to the floor. In the morning, when I woke up, I gently
shook him and said I really had to go. He kissed
my hand, thanking me with his rotted smile
for that nothing at all between two men
who won't ever see each other again. Outside,
a muffled light advised against any
lyrical attempt, dying among the cabbages
and junk that made his solitude less solitary.

I didn't recognize the city: dingy, dull, shoddy.
I shivered with cold and sleepiness while boarding the first
bus and almost believed - for a few hours -
that there was someone, after all, even sadder than me.
...
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