WAITING FOR GUCKO

I might well have drowned at 17

Had a boy on shore not decided

To impress a girl by saving me.

I came close enough that a spirit

Was already hanging about. Oddly,

I recognized him. It was Gucko

My brother’s imaginary friend.

So powerful was Eugene’s imagination

That he had squads of such friends

Plainly visible when I was two

And he was five. They were mostly

A surly, dour lot. Had they been old enough

They’d have loitered about unshaven,

Unlit cigarettes dangling from bitter lips.

Gucko was better natured than most

But clumsy, constantly walking into things

Or tripping over his feet. I hadn’t seen him

For years. Frankly, I had hoped

For a more impressive psychopomp

If not Hermes himself at least, say,

Culsans, the Etruscan god of doors,

Or the aboriginal Barnumbirr.

Years later, I ran into Gucko in Penn Station.

The trains weren’t running that night

So we went into a Starbucks for lattes.

He said it was probably just as well

That I’d not died in that Israeli lake.

Having little sense of direction he’d been

A poor psychopomp and many of his dead

Were still wandering about the world.

He was living on a pension (I had not thought

Imaginary folk had IRA’s, joined unions

Or paid into social security)

But hoped, though his skills were rusty,

That some strange and lonely child

Might take him on again.