Spalding Gray
Where is the Staten Island Ferry taking you today?
You’re inspecting the Hudson, gauging it’s suitability.
The MTA is watching you.
They’d escorted you off earlier that week.
Its’ a foregone conclusion,
You’ve made us laugh with it for years.
Step away from the railing, Sir.
Did you jump or did you slip and fall
trying to talk yourself into jumping?
All it takes is one flake
Of courage, one lapse in neurosis and
You’re in flight, Spald.
You’ve disembarked
From the body that abandoned you,
The defunct mind,
down the hole after your mother.
A glorious hiatus in thought occurs in that splice
after you’ve left the earth, before you’re buried in water.
It's as if you'll never come down.
Then you slap the skin of the river and something is jolted
Out of you, like a body hitting the end of a noose
rudely yanked back when it would prefer to keep falling.
It’s very cold, much colder than you imagined
But after the initial trauma
The river welcomes you.
You’ve slipped back into your berth.
There’s the familiar tranquility of swimming
with the new gravity of the ultimate.
If only you could live through it
It would be your best monologue yet.
And you could. There is a choice
In the white of the searchlight
Peering down at you,
But you can almost see her
Down in the dark,
So you gulp and dive to get there faster.
A thousand silver bubbles
Bloom from your nostrils, your ears,
Your legs and arms and teeth
like stardust.
Now that you’ve vanished
People see you all over town:
In the glass of a bus stop,
At Sardi's, skiing down Park Ave,
flying through the light
on to a movie screen in the Village.
Yesterday I went out on the Ferry
to look for you in the water
And though you washed up
On the shore in Brooklyn
I find you everywhere
sleeping in the East River.
