7/12/22
The Derelict - Sharon Olds
He passes me on the street, his hair
matted, skin polished with grime,
muttering, suit stained and stiffened—
and yet he is so young, his blond beard like a
sign of beauty and power. But his hands,
strangely flat, as if nerveless, hang and
flap slightly as he walks, like hands of
someone who has had polio, hands
that cannot be used. I smell the waste of his
piss, I see the ingot of his beard,
and think of my younger brother, his beauty,
coinage and voltage of his beard, his life
he is not using, like a violinist whose
hands have been crushed so he cannot play—
I who was there at the crushing of his hands
and helped to crush them.
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