Science in its tedium reveals that every spiritwe spirit ganks a solid half hour fromour life spans. So says my doctor, a watery,Jesus-eyed man, and hard to sufferwith his well-intended scrips for yogaand neti pots, notably stingy with the betterdrugs, in situ here amid the disinfectedtoys, dreadful in their plastic baskets.Above his head, the flayed men of medicalillustration are nailed for something likedécor. The eyeball scheme is best,with its wondrous canal of Schlemm,first favorite of all weirdly namedeponymous body parts. It’s just a splotchof violet on the diagram, but without itour aqueous humors would bursttheir meshy dams and overflow. Dustthou art, to dust returnest, was not spokenof the soul… is what I quote himas he thumps my back with his tinydoctor’s tomahawk. But he’s used to me.We have an understanding. What hemeans to miser, I’ve come to spendmost lavishly. And I feel fortunate againto be historically shaky in the maths,enough to avoid making an easy sumof my truly happy hours, or nights curledsulfurous on my side, a priced-to-sellshrimp boiling in anxious sleep.If we’re lucky, it’s always a terrible timeto die. Better the privilege of boozethan the whim of one more shambolicbutcher shelling peasants in a wood,our world’s long spree of Caesarsstarting wars to pay their billsin any given era’s Rome. Turns out,Longfellow’s stomach did for him,and he died thirsty, calling for more opium.Free of the exam room now, I spot the samebusted goldfish in his smeary bowlbeside the door where he’s glugged alongfor years, a mostly failed distractionfor poxed or broken children. I raise my finto him, celebrate the poison we’re allswimming in, remembering the wayyou say cheers in Hungarian:Isten, Isten, meaning,in translation, “I’m a god. You’re a god.”