Haircut

You are where?  London?

Yes.
The last time I called it was Buenos Aires.

I know.

And the time before that, Majorca and Marseille.

I get around, don't I?

Well, wherever, I thought you might like to know that Jack has died.

. . . . Yes . . . . Thanks.

It has been some time ago and I meant to tell you sooner, but it has just kept slipping my mind.

   My hair tumbles down the barber's gray-striped cape. It has been six months since I was here last. And six months before that. And the old barber reminds me . . . again . . . that he used to cut my father's hair a long, long time ago. And . . . again . . . "Have you never met him?" And I will remind him, again, that Jack has been gone for some time now. He looks at me as if not understanding and then, "Oh, yes, I remember. You look so much like him," he says, and excuses himself a moment to take money from a customer.

   The hair on the cape appears coarse and colorless, like hair from an old dog dying. I have sometimes joked about it with the barber. What! This hair is not mine, I protest. But today, when I roll it between my fingers, it feels soft . . . soft and fine as baby's hair . . .  and strands of it float effortlessly across the room through shafts of morning light.

   Was this your hair, Father . . . ??

Before I was born?

Before Mother barred the door forever to your drunken forays?

Before voices told you, wrongly, that you could fly?

Before that fatal flight, eyes wild open, from the fourth floor of the Evergreen    Hotel?

Before I knew that I would never know you?

--glwarren, 2014