ENCOUNTER WITH JOHN MALKOVICH Poem by Jeffrey Harrison

When I spot him in Tower Records, two aisles over,
flipping through bins of discounted CDs
at their going-out-of-business sale, his shaven head
half-covered by the hood of his gray sweatshirt,

my first thought is I want to tell my brother,
but my brother is dead. And yet I watch him furtively,
searching for some Malkovichian quirk,
some tic that might make Andy laugh,

but he isn't giving anything away
besides his slightly awkward stoop over the racks.
Then it comes to me that if I can't tell my brother
about John Malkovich, I can tell John Malkovich

about my brother, and my heart starts pounding.
Normally, I don't believe in pestering celebrities,
but there are exceptions: if Spalding Gray
walked in right now, I would definitely talk to him—

but that's impossible, since he, like my brother,
though under very different circumstances,
killed himself. But John Malkovich is alive
and standing right over there, and my mind

is racing ahead to the two of us leaving
the record store together, then having coffee
at a nearby diner, where I am already
telling him how my brother was obsessed

with the movie of Sam Shepard's True West
and especially with him, John Malkovich,
playing Lee, the older of two brothers;
how Andy, who was my older brother,

loved to imitate Malkovich, or rather Lee,
everything from his small off-kilter mannerisms
to his most feral outbursts—but even then
he'd be smiling, unable to hide his delight;

and how, every Christmas, he brought the video
to our parents' house in Ohio, and our parents
would groan when they walked through the room,
and sigh, "Not this again," or call it

"the most unChristmassy movie ever made."
Which is probably true. But for us—him and me,
our other brother and our sister, but especially him—
you'd have to say it was our It's a Wonderful Life.

And I have to tell him how Andy used to cue the tape up
and ask, "Can we just watch this one scene before—"
before whatever it was we were about to do,
go out for dinner or visit our demented grandmother,

and we'd watch him, John Malkovich, standing on a chair
shouting pronouncements, or destroying a typewriter
with a golf club, and we'd go off laughing and exhilarated
to our appointed errand, his inflections ringing in our ears. . . .

But now it's something about the way he thoughtfully
considers his purchases, shuffling through them,
then putting one back, reconsidering, his hand
hesitating over the bins, that somehow reminds me

of Andy, and makes me certain Malkovich
would be interested in him, a sympathetic character
if there ever was one: funny, gentle,
a lover of dogs and kids (who had neither),

with an odd sense of humor and some mostly unobtrusive
symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder,
who, like Lee, but to a much lesser degree (or so
we thought), had trouble placing himself in the world—

a part I'm certain Malkovich could play,
all of it coming full circle, Malkovich
playing Andy playing Malkovich playing Lee,
or just Malkovich playing Andy, bringing him

back to life, the way Lee suddenly springs
back up at the end of the movie, alive
after all, menacing as death, the phone cord
still wrapped around his neck. . . .

It turns out that John Malkovich and I
do leave the store together: we check out
at the same time, two registers apart,
then head for the door, the moment coming

to a peak for me as I realize my last chance
is about to slip away. But Malkovich, in front of me,
has to wait there while a stream of people coming in
briefly blocks his exit, and I watch, in profile,

his flurry of impatient blinking—or is it a display
of exaggerated patience?—each blink counting off the seconds
he is forced to wait, or the number of customers
going by him, not recognizing him, it seems to me,

though his hood is down by now. And I think,
this is it, this little fit of blinking is the thing
Andy would delight in most, the one detail
he would rewind the tape to see again.