Listen — read by the author
The man in blue jeans, and clasped hands
and gauze bandaged cheek;
filled the whole of the olive green chair
in the corner of my office;
and he was silent for a moment
and so was I.
And he looked at me,
and I looked at him,
and the walls were white,
and the hallways hummed;
but the lamplight was soft,
and quiet,
and warm.
And outside the door,
in the murmuring,
and linoleum footfalls
and phonecalls
and keystrokes,
there were many lives
being shuffled with urgency,
toward disposition.
And the man in blue jeans
told me his name;
and I told him mine;
and we shook hands,
and he smiled.
And so did I.
And he called me doctor;
And I told him no need.
He just swept the floors he said,
and apologized for the way he spoke.
I shook my head—
I was happy he came in,
I said.
And he told me how he had reached the end;
about the slights, and the debt;
the anger and the grief;
the cigarettes, and the loneliness;
the love he had lost; the world he imagined,
and the world he was in.
And he told me how he had climbed
to a very high place;
how he had looked down
at the pavement;
and the bushes
and his own two hands.
And he told me how he had felt unafraid;
how he had let himself fall,
how his ribs had groaned;
how he had lain on his side;
how his body surprised him.
And he told me he
felt nothing;
but then came the fear;
and he was struck
by the beauty he saw
from down in that place:
the streetlights reflecting
in the red-pooled liquid of his life slowly leaving him;
and the way it seeped into the cracks
and filled the roots of pavement weeds,
and the soil beneath him.
And he told me
about the ink black of the night sky,
and the shining powerlines
and the passing headlights—
but most of all, he told me about the moon.
He told me it was full,
and bright;
and beautiful.
He said it was so much all at once,
that he could not seem to understand it,
as if he’d never seen it before.
He asked if I’d seen the moon like that.
I told him I had.
And he said he had lain there a while,
and that the world grew dimmer,
and his body grew weaker,
but the moon was still there.
And he told me
there couldn’t be something like that
still in the world
and yet he about to leave it.
So he didn’t.
And he called out;
and a stranger came,
and he woke up somewhere else,
in a bed,
with blue sheets, and a bright overhead light;
hanging above him,
round and white.
And he wept.
And he told me how he had asked the nurse
for paper,
and pencil;
how he called his mother;
how he had drawn her a bird;
her favorite kind;
the kind he knew she liked.
And he told me how flimsy it felt;
in the face of it all;
like a child—
a small drawing;
asking forgiveness,
for having almost taken her only son.
And there he was
in my olive green chair.
And he smiled;
and I smiled back.
And then the clock;
and the tears,
and the handshake;
and the billing—
the schedule;
and the door;
and the long drive home.
And then the walk from my car
and the moon in the sky;
the small bird on the powerline;
the buzzing of my phone;
a message from my mother:
“Hi Max! Just calling to say hi.”
Max Levine, Psy.D. is a psychologist and poet, and a friend of the Center. He wrote “The Man in Blue Jeans” while working at a transitional care clinic at UT Health San Antonio; the recording is his own reading.
Shared with the Center by the author. ← Back to Reflections