Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, CRUELTY, by STEPHEN ORLEN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

CRUELTY, by                    
First Line: Because we were all sweaty
Alternate Author Name(s): Orlen, Steve
Subject(s): African Americans - Women; Cruelty; Death; Drugs & Drug Abuse; Impotence; Dead, The


Because we were all sweaty,
And irritable, and in a sort of jerky hurry
Like junkies always are, my friend, and the dope dealer
And his girlfriend the dying woman, and me
Who always came along, I'm sure it was summer,

And also because
I remember the smell of the nose-opening ether
They used to cut heroin with
Mixing with the bitter, smelly, Grape-Ade effusions
Off the purple flowers of a jacaranda tree
Whose top brushed the window
Of the dealer's third-floor apartment,
And the tingle of mold that rises from a carpet
When spring is over.
The dying woman
Was a short black stub dressed like a clerk
Or a secretary on her lunch break,
Someone who works every day without complaint, and because
I didn't know her very well I could say that maybe
She also lived in a run-down dump like this,
With a lumpy sofa she slept on and a TV set
And a table with one wooden chair for eating, but I imagine
She kept her place clean, dusted and swept
Because that's how she looked
With her flowered blouse tucked in
And her straight skirt pulled below her knees,
Even as she was nodding into an overdose,
Like someone falling into an afternoon nap,
Until the nodding stopped
And her head spasmed and jerked back, and her eyes,
Stuck open for a moment, showed only the whites.

When the dealer began slapping her hard across the face
I knew there was no cruelty in it, only panic,
And beneath the panic the sure knowledge of his trade.

When he stripped off her blouse and pinched her purple nipples
Hard enough to almost tear them off too,
There was no cruelty in that either.

I can only picture her now
As a rag doll being tortured by a frightened child,
The way the dying woman's body
Moved only when the dealer moved it,
Then, failing to revive her, he lugged her dead weight
Into the shower and ran ice-cold water
Over her half-naked body,
Which was so black I thought it too was purple,
Glistening under the shower's spray.

The dealer positioned himself like a boxer,
He set his feet just so
And jabbed methodically
At her wet and slippery body, and while we watched
She kept falling and the dealer kept lifting her up
To lean her against the wall, unbearably.
This is when it happened, the one moment
I keep thinking about, like a window
Within a window on a terrible event:

My friend picked up
The dying woman's black plastic imitation patent leather purse
From the floor, and rifled it,
And held up the small wad of bills
Like a birthday present to himself
Or a prize won at the amusement park, and grinned at me,
Then we moved on to the next connection's apartment
And bought some dope and I watched him shoot it up.

We always, afterwards, walked around a lot. We always stopped
To play with the little kids on the street.
We'd talk and flirt with that buzzing knot of girls
Who hung around in front of the grocery store.
Maybe we'd bait a barking dog, or talk with a vagrant
To hear where he had been. The woman died. I don't know
What happened to the dealer. My friend is dead now too,
Ten years later shot in the chest in an alley
By a teenage boy he was blackmailing for being queer,
And if anyone got what he deserved
My friend did, if ever you can say such a thing.

And what about me, you might ask. I didn't run
To the telephone, if there even was one, and dial 911,
Which they didn't have back then, and yell, Hey,
There's a woman here dying of an overdose!
I didn't do any more than shake my head
And purse my lips like a schoolteacher
At a naughty boy.
Let's go get in trouble,
He used to say, afterwards, after the dope
And the walking, and the little bouts of talk,
And we'd move on. Moving on. That was it. That was
The cruel thing I did in those days.

First published in The Kenyon Review, Volume 22 #1 (Winter 2000).
www.kenyonreview.org/roth




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