The Book of Geoff
Now that my guests are seated at the table,
I lift the faux-leather cover.
I tear out pages and pass them.
My friends read along with me,
and then Claire, circus oboist
fallen from the sky onto Folly Beach,
puts the paper in her mouth. So we
all chew, swallow little wads.
Wads of Monk. MJQ. Hot Club. Trane.
Wads of ballet and biophysics,
trap drums and Martin guitar.
Wads of languages, homemade six-
course meals, pilgrimages to The Modern.
We laugh, trying to chew the page of
the grapefruit cannonade
launched from our Herbulot French
Corsaire against sunburnt tourists
aboard the General No-Regard.
Wads of his family have to be chewed
carefully because of bones.
The dense chapter on shiny paper
in the middie, that’s my scotch-addled
parents, Billy’s cello, my analysis.
My What Is Art. My furious joys.
Here we come to the arcane
chapters nobody likes to read.
Jesse, my homeless junkie-surfer friend,
tears them up tiny and passes the scraps
to the others like sacred host.
We chew slow, the hard dry wads
becoming harder to swallow:
the page of my concussion
cycling Edisto Highway behind him. Geoff
losing me at Penn Station, calling out
some stop-name from the platform
as the doors slam between us.
Oh, and here’s my near-fatal pneumonia,
his occasional calls from Ohio.
Mixed in with funny stories we told,
Blackberry Marauders, my roadside piss
in the stinging nettles of Normandy,
the Grapelli concert missed by an hour
owing to the time-change—
no need to chew, those just dissolve.
Here’s marriage counseling, his sleazy
quack of a California shrink—
a cowardly way to tell me,
says Colette, who paints angel-wings
on walls so people can try them out.
These wads gag us all,
but more wine helps it down:
the seat I decline at Otis/Parsons
only to crawl back to the cruel job
that got him through training,
my pension already reassigned.
On the same page, my sister’s cancer,
her husband’s death by lightning,
Geoff’s plaid-suit lawyer harassing my vigils.
Now, closing the cover, we arrive
at the theme of the Book of Geoff:
Countless pages of he could not.
So stiff and dry they can’t be torn out,
much less chewed. Pages and pages
of sorry outcomes because he could not.
Farewell things, adios people.
Goodbye Porkpie Hat, ’Round Midnight,
Blood Count. His sacred songs now mine.
The book writ, the wine finished.
Body and blood of Geoff at his most beloved
and despised, our tango on water
and our Fake Book alchemy, now as then,
as long as we both shall live.
© 2018 Katherine Williams
An elegiac for a first marriage. “The General No-Regard” refers to the vessel General Beauregard, a tour boat much disliked by local boaters; tomato juice used to come in half-gallon cans, the perfect size for launching grapefruit. Charleston once had an originalColette inside an ice-cream shop that is now a Subway. For a discussion of the “fake book” see[lead sheet].
The author gratefully acknowledges publication of "The Book of Geoff" in South Carolina Review 51.1
