The Shroud of Hubris

by Martin Vest

The Shroud of Hubris
   for a fish

In those days I had panic attacks so severe
that I once shit myself to avoid the risk of passing
someone on my way to the community bathroom
of the sleazy hotel where I pretended to live,
where we all pretended to live —
the man in the next room with only one sock
but an arsenal of guns to polish like wingtips,
the alcoholic across from me
who recited the rosary night and day
and wouldn’t stop crying,
the vet who knew ten ways to kill a man
and practiced them all on himself.

A river ran just outside the building.
Not the splendid thing of cinema,
but a dirty canal banked by concrete,
condoms sloughed like the skins of lightbulbs,
old liquor bottles filled with Giardia and smut.

When you died I placed you into a white rag
and carried you there, your tiny purple image
pressed on the cloth when I unfolded it.

I thought of Turin, Veronica, but also of saviors pressed
like butterflies in a book, your majestic color washed away
in the brown water where other dead things go to die —
the rotting mattress on which lovers once loved,
the shopping cart, the stolen bicycle —
the guns and fists and weeping supplications
that waited upstairs in the river of crazies
where I myself was crazy.
I thought of you, but also of the species that walks on bombs,
the 40-watt lodestar that lights our dolorosa,
the bad decision of us,

the double sapien of us,
the gauntlet of spectators I’d pass on my way back
to the tenuous privacy of my room,
pupils opening and closing around me like salty mouths,
my agony an inky trifle floating in their eyes,
as close as I came to swimming.