I Find Myself Listed Among the 100 Best Characters in Fiction



Which surprises me no end, as I thought
for sure I was real, but there I am, number
78, just below Frankie Addams, envious
sister In Member of the Wedding (1946)
by Carson McCullers, and several slots
above Joseph K, bank functionary from
The Trial (1925, posthumously published)
by Franz Kafka, who slips in at 83.  My
hands drift to my face, feel for my
new-grown beard.  All mirrors have been
removed from the walls of my cave,
which drip and smell of lime in damp
air.  I am hairy as I remember, and hungry.
My back hurts with a dull ache deep
in the muscles below my left shoulder
as if by way of message in the body,
a formal invitation to examine my life.  
I am a little colder than I’d like
for this late in March.  Outside, the little
sky I see appears as an arch of soiled
cotton framed by my entryway, beyond
a tangle of leafless trees.  Someone
has left open a bag of pretzels
on the coffee table, the small ones
you eat by handfuls, crunchy baked
dough mingling with salt.  Gabriel’s
Palace, a book of Jewish Mystical Tales,
lies open like a praying butterfly.
 I have been reading about the magic
flock that Jacob tried to coax across
the River Jabbok, but all the sheep
kept multiplying hour after hour and no
end in sight.  By nightfall the riverbanks
were flooded with them, as if they were
wooly stars fallen from the sky, lost
and milling everywhere he looked.  
Joseph K, I feel, would understand.  
He would listen to meaningless
sounds of bleating, feel a small stabbing
pain where his organs of hope still
remained in tact, at least until the final
pages of his great, terrible, unfinished book.