September 14, 2015 | Occasus | Issue 5 | Fiction

on the difficulty of describing bill bissett (for Frank Beltrano)

if i sed - 5’11”, 2-25, 75 years, 56
            books uv poems -

if i sed - the latest of which
            is titled ‘ths is erth, thees ar peopul’
            that the painting on the cover was his -

if i sed - 2 hours at 754 dundas st. -

if i sed - shoulder length grey hair,
            twiggy, a cocked ball cap, green with yellow mesh, spectacles deep under the brim,
            the bulbous nose,
            black t-shirt and a paunch,
            blue jeans with their belt tight and shaggy loafers -

if i sed - the kind of man you’d hate to see your daughter with, you thought,
            bad knees, back an overlap of knots,
            a lilting voice in speaking
            a baritone in song -

if i sed - he sed “‘i was told
            the salmon talks have been moved
            to early next week.’ and i sed
            ‘at least the salmon are talking!’” -

if i sed - he concluded his set
            with a single, short phrase
            which he repeated like a chant or an omen -

if i sed - the phrase was
            “is it time to leave the hotel, yet?” -

if i sed - to give you a sense
            that between two particular songs
            the audience
            or some of the people in it
            were talking about what he was
            and what he wasn’t
            and somebody had said, decisively, in that way that tightens the walls of a café,
            that he was a “performer”
            and that from the stage
            he said, “You think?” and chuckled -

if i sed - as the front door of the café swiveled inches open, inches closed, in the brusque wind
            as the music with its exotic percussion instruments and piano
            and bill reading and singing, alternately,
            that the chime of the bell over the door seemed to want to join in
            or that maybe the wind and he were joined, then,
            somewhere over the door -

if i sed - see the stage, dark floorboards, reds and yellows in a painting on the wall,
            the bright january blear in the window pane behind,
            the musicians huddled into their instruments of tapered steel or wood -

if i sed - gnarled elegance -

if i sed - he was holding two white sheets of printer paper
            stapled together and very white and he holding them,
            that shaggy big man who, if your adult daughter pointed him out down the aisle
            at the supermarket as hers when you ran into her incidentally might elicit from
            you, without having spoken with him, the phrase “i’m ordering chinese for
            dinner; come over tonight; it’ll be just us two; i feel like i haven’t seen you in ages.”
            he, reading a poem about a past lover,
            a poem about a past perhaps written with his knuckles and throat,
            holding them with one hand, the two sheets with the poems -

if i sed - a bird sensing gentleness had settled there and he was reading from both of its wings
                                                                                                                                                                    until -
            like that - the music rolling home
            like a tide, that washy rolling sound,
            and the music-makers becoming musicians again
            and the poet becoming a man again
            and the wings of the bird, now flapping gently around the café,
            returned to the music stand
            and became pages stapled with words and stiff -

if i sed - some know that we love
            and some love that we know
            and that he would identify with the former
            and love the latter, the same -

            we were there when we were there, then,
            and now we are when we were there
            or trying to be
            and this is memory -

if i sed - to give you a sense
            it was an animal in motion
            without the vicious
                        it was a sense of motion
                        an animal with the giving

                        and like any honest mortal performing
                        it was full of the past tense already,
                        even without the stopping

                        it was long in the brevity
                        and brief in the long

                        a meaning motion, then,
                        without the vicious, an animal

                        in the brevity, in the long

                        to give you a sense
                        it was.

KEVIN HESLOP is a student at Western University.