The Madness of King George

It was time for me to go. I drank
a beer and a whiskey and should have been sipping
Italian sodas, should have been home
watching an old movie
or reading Twain but I decided to feed my limitations
instead. Get a little drunk. Get a little sad.
The woman sitting next to me calls herself Summer
and keeps touching her lips
and scratching her thigh
and ordering a martini
and talking about history. George Washington
and the madness of King George. “He would walk around
the palace garden wearing nothing
but his crown, crying, holding his gaudy scepter in his hands
like an infant.” I am like him, I thought,
and ask for my bill
while this other person, this other
life puts her hand on my knee. “Do you ever think
about what would have happened if Germany won the war?”
she says. Street signs in two languages.
The Jews really gone. And the Mormons too. Oktoberfest
everywhere. I can see the line
her underwear is making beneath the gray silk. I can see
the wash of freckles on her shoulders.
This is what loneliness is all about. A table
full of bread and wine and you starving but unable to eat or drink,
just staring at it like you were staring
at a television set. “I think Amelia Earhart is alive and living
in Florida… there are pictures of her
walking on the beach.” Her and Elvis and the Kennedy Brothers.
History getting undead
and moving to warmer climates. I am peering out
from my own grave,
I think, and pay my tab. I put my coat on
and Summer is sliding her long index finger around the rim
of her glass and then licking it. “This economy,”
she says,“the price of gas!… It’s almost like we’re living
in wartime” I am closing my wallet.
I am stepping away from the bar,
looking at her, stranger now than when we met an hour ago,
when I first noticed her neck, her breasts. “But we are,” I say,
“We are living in wartime”
And then her finger stops and she looks up at me and says “Oh, I know,
but I mean really, really at war, you know like here, where you and I are.