There’s a guy with a funny gray soul patch on a melon that may not be so big, really, except that his body is so short—at least from the riser behind the counter—and so stick-built that his head bobbles like one of those baseball players people have on their dashboards. He comes in with big, wheeling eyes in the middle of the night to buy cigarettes and cartons of awful store brand vanilla ice cream. He asks me what I’m reading sometimes.
One night I’m reading a book of poems by James Tate, something I bought off the “Local Authors” shelf at the store, and when I turn it over there’s a picture of him and his soul patch on the back of the book and I say, “Holy shit!” right out loud. That one poem of his, about ships passing islands in fog, I read a whole bunch of times in a row. I try to memorize it, but all that sticks in my head is, “Fogged in all day, the long, low horns of another ghostship,” and, “Let go of your island,” and I’m not even sure I’ve got those lines right.
He doesn’t come in on the night I spend reading his book.