Cupcake

On the way to work and on the way back, up the major highway
of the slum known as Anacostia, I always passed
the tumbledown house with its crumbling wooden porch
and infirm cars sitting around in the weeds as if conversing,
and saw the old man sitting there with his old black dog, Cupcake—
half Scottie and something more--“just celebrated his 18th birthday,”
he told me—and for all I knew it could well have been so,
for there they were every time, for years I could not even count,
sitting together, greeting passersby, amid the same clutter of boxes
and newspapers and evolving kittens sleeping in a musty rocker
with the screen door opening and closing with the wind, and
around them the same abandoned cars and vacant lots.

Yet one late afternoon no more; just the old man alone
rambling about nothing and rummaging through the trash
in the late afternoon sun, while meticulously dressed
in his better-quality clothes as if going to church, all the buttons buttoned,
yet his bow tie twisted, shoelaces untying and mind unraveling like my mother's.
I knew he was dead but dared not ask it, not even hint at it,
not the least mention of it; instead, I glanced through the screen
into the emptiness of the dilapidated home before
walking down the hill towards my train.

There had been always that sense of impending death, of who would lose first;
the old man greeting me kindly every time I walked by,
or his little friend.