Good of You to Ask
Courtesy is being polite
when you don’t need to be, when there’s
slight consequence this way or that
as when the duchess asks the
gardener if his wife still suffers
from those frightful migraines.
Courtesy needn’t mount as high
as caring, being to concern
as advice is to empathy,
as bad vermouth to good gin.
But you would like to know how I’m
doing, how things stand with me.
You are too polite, too courteous.
I’m point one percent lighter,
three-quarters of a percent older,
zero percent wiser, maybe less.
The spring, which takes up less than
sixteen percent of the year, has
kicked in on time and yet seems
twelve percent more ephemeral,
twenty percent less aromatic
than when I was, say, ninety percent
younger. I reckon my life to
be at least eighty percent over,
perhaps a bit more, probably
not less given the percentage
of cholesterol in my diet
and the dizzy percent of my
solitary hours spent with a pipe
in my mouth. I still drive at one
hundred percent of the speed limit
and a substantial percentage
of my CDs are of Bach’s music.
I sleep about thirty percent
of the time, chiefly in the dark
after reading a negligible
percent of my current bed book.
I think my pension dropped about
ten percent last year.
What else?
I’m maybe two percent more lonely.
Hard to tell, but thanks for asking.
Robert Wexelblatt is professor of humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies. He has published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals, two story collections, Life in the Temperate Zone and The Decline of Our Neighborhood, a book of essays, Professors at Play; his recent novel, Zublinka Among Women, won the Indie Book Awards First Prize for Fiction.
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