The Invalid I kneel down to find a Bach fugue, and catch sight of objects in my room I haven’t moved in so long they appear fossilized; but it is I and not they, the stacks of CD’s, files and notebooks, that am fossilized. It’s a crick in the neck to be gone tomorrow, nothing degenerative, interminable. It’s dumb disbelief at my arthritic crawl and the effort it now takes to do all that I most loved to do and did without a thought. The small moments are the hardest, the pain is like a harpsichord playing Scarlatti in the fog on Deer Isle, Maine, a sound, sharp, desolate, that penetrates the thickness and rises over the tops of the obscure white frame houses and church spires, over the quiet coves where the lobster boats are moored now that it is night, and the man at the keyboard is businesslike, perfunctory, as befits his savory, unsweetened instrument, and the reposeful bodies of the faithful who attend, and lose, for as long as the concert goes, track of the body’s inertial pull. I was young, or at the turn, thirty three, a novice to words like inflammation or disks with nothing cartilaginous left to cushion the shock. It’s not range of motion, migraine, or epilepsy, where the ordinary invalid is trapped. I’m practically crawling to reach behind a stack of unshelved CD’s to retrieve my Scott Ross rendition of the sonatas, though nowhere as wonderful as Louis Bagger, the burly, bearded harpsichordist in the church in Deer Isle who played Scarlatti with clarity, passion and abandon. I would have thought he was quite old then. Around my own age, fifty four. He lived for the sounds he could elicit. Cantata into another time. The marginal vanquishing of earthly cares. That’s what the music brought me then, and that’s what I was after now. That night, the fog was so thick you could drive only because so few cautious vehicles crawled the road; I loved how my night vision could anticipate the curves, the way Scarlatti’s curt sonatas give you leave; suspense, not surprises. I have just posted a nervous letter to a friend in England, some twenty years older, hoping his bout with esophageal cancer has not done him in. I’m comfortable when upside down. The pressure off my spine: supine, not prone. Besides, it gives me access to the only heaven I know, other than your heart. Being an invalid doesn’t mean I feel less, or that once I’ve set off, walking, and get my stride with my arms flapping at my sides, that I don’t build up a mighty motion, a velocity that makes passersby stand aside and let me pass. Published in the Raritan