Soliloquy of the Happy Hour

Bartender! One more shot,
just to keep me warm on the way home.
There's a puddle frozen over
the oil stains in the parking lot.
Half-clear and black with iridescence between.
I read somewhere that iridescence
only occurs naturally in bubbles and feathers.
All of them trapping rainbows, as my wife said.
Rainbow! Rainbow! Rainbow!
And I let the fish go...
She loved that poem.
We went fishing once;
she got pulled from the boat
by a seven-pound bass.
I told her not to stand up, but...
Sploosh! into the pond, and she got to her feet,
with bottom-weed tangled in her water-streaming hair
and mudstains on her favorite school sweatshirt,
laughing - laughing! and holding the bass by the gills.
The pond's iced over now; you can see bubbles frozen inside.
It reminds me of the patterns in the frost
on the windows of our house;
I noticed them just last Wednesday.
All Saint's Eve - Ah, bitter chill it was!
The streetlights were just a hazy glow through the windows.
What was I reading that night?
Macbeth, or Hamlet, when the phone rang.
She should have died hereafter.
That phrase kept repeating in my head,
just before I shattered the window
with the phone... that's when I really noticed the frost,
on the shards of glass in the front yard.
Not that my wife was like Lady Macbeth...
She used to say Out, out, damn spot!
when she put the dog out, though.
We came here once;
she ordered a virgin screwdriver.
They sang Ave Maria at the funeral;
I just sat there remembering her sing
"Moon River" while stirring Tuna Helper
or ripping out coupons at the kitchen table.
A trustee came up to me after the eulogy,
That which does not kill us makes us stronger,
he said, and patted me on the shoulder with his pasty hand
before he strolled back off to his Lexus.
Sometimes that which does not kill us
only makes us wish it had.
Bartender - one more shot.