on vulnerability; or blood, wine, sidewalks and the necessary limits of language

If you had told me that I'd be on a street corner in green point kneeling over a man who looked like he just got the life beat out of him, I'd call bullshit.

But there I was a 9 o'clock this Saturday, on my way to mini-beef wellingtons, wine, and cheese at a friend's amazing new apartment, steps from her front door, when I came up this man, badly bleeding from his face, unable to tell me in broken English or unbroken Polish how he had come to be this way.

I had no idea how long he'd been there, and in the time it took for the police to arrive, I stayed with him, trying to learn if he'd been jumped or was hurt more seriously than he looked. The funny thing about language is how it renders us totally unable to communicate sometimes. And anyway, what could I say even if we did understand one another? So in lieu of words it was eye contact, a hand on the shoulder, fumbling with him as he tried to unlock his cell phone. One
neighbor called out from across the street, and I couldn't help but wonder for how long she'd watched before I came. Another person in a van pulled over and asked if he could help. I thought of Kitty Genovese.

The strangeness of this situation is of course compounded by the fact that I got myself jumped a few weeks back, though I clearly fared better than this guy. I'd like to think I'd have stopped anyway, and I probably would have, if only because I know other people wouldn't. There's something about someone bleeding on a dirty sidewalk that has to stop you. Or should, at least. I've carried the word 'vulnerable' in my head since then, and it's the first one I wrote down, sarting this.

When the four officers arrived, three men and a woman, they asked what happened, what I'd learned from him, etc. I said it looked like he'd been mugged, they suggested that maybe he'd had a bit too much to drink and fallen over.

"Would knowing that have made you come faster or slower, do you think?" I asked, with a bit more sarcasm than is wisely directed at a group of people with guns. They didn't really have an answer, and said they would take care of him. "Good."

These days, it seems mandatory here for me to associate things happening with the poems you people seem to like reading [get your own damn book], and thinking of what happened with this man, I was reminded of something by Philip Larkin:

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.