The Collar
Methought I heard one calling, ‘Childe’;
And I reply’d, ‘My Lord.’
—George Herbert
And I reply’d, ‘My Lord.’
—George Herbert
Do I lie in bed and listen to the morning dove coo? No, as again the men next door have started without me. Alarm at dawn: chorus of percussions tempoless, directionless. Shingles busted up, their brittle plates dropped in avalanching fizzles —all below my lazy golden curtains. Hammer falls echoing syllables—present, present—a roll call. So quickly I get up and put the kettle on the stove. Late, guilty, a teacup in hand, I add a bag of soil, a glug of primer, a shovel-full of white sand. It’s not the first time; the guys won’t mind. I’ve yet to meet this crew, or even see them, ever, but there’s a friendliness about these messengers flailing crowbars and nail claws to pry loose wrecked feathers of paint-bubbled asbestos. Under moth masks their tongues are on the run in a language my grandpa could speak in a jam, though he never dared be overheard, afraid to be mistaken for a liberal. At the table now, in my steel toes, and rubbing the rust from my knee, I await the late whistle and review the schedule. Today we’ll strip the old fisherman’s house to inoculate the sight for the demolition crew set to arrive, ten strong, within the week. When the teapot groans I lift it to its labor with a grace unfathomable to laypersons. O, but have mercy, for not until my fifth gulp is it rendered unto me that I’m not a carpenter nor plumber, mason nor electrician, and there’s nothing wrong. I’m a guest in a hostel on a hill named Happy—a Chilean vacation in my twenty- fifth year. It’s January, the dead of summer here. I can go back to bed, back to Maria of Valparaiso, who I met in the park yesterday, who called out “Americano” in lieu of my fine Christian name. She’s still asleep undisturbed by my gallop out of bed and the spooking of the sheets. She knows of me as little as she wears—this absolutely nothing she said she prefers, even at the dinner table eating empanadas. From the foot of the bed the sound of her sleeping is the hilltops humming in a glance above the city. But as I lay me down I go forth in penitence, my ear newly attenuated to the real in the next noise heard —There! far off, another host of hammers—but from such a distance it’s impossible to know for sure the story I hear: is it nails pounded in, building up; or glass panes smashed, tearing down? Voiceless but not songless, a cadence floats up on a brightening tide in the day-lit window of her shirtless chest.