Concentrated Salts

Read it in the paper

That husband-wife pharmacy column

Always fascinating stuff

Man had psoriasis, found cure

Went to Israel three years in a row

Dead Sea was the answer

Psoriasis free ever since

“Expensive, but it healed me” he wrote

Combining a lament and a victory

Daddy had it too

Got diagnosed by Dr. Will

Daddy came home and announced “sore-I-is”

Never mastered that final syllable

Didn’t matter too much

Didn’t make it any more comfortable

Sitting out in the back yard

Evening of a hot summer day

We would sit on the painted metal chairs

In the back yard

Under the water oak, the little slip he had pulled from Uncle Oscar’s bottom land

The one he said momma “and her second husband would sit under”

A prescient man he was

He would sit there, his wife and three kids gathered

No shirt, pants legs rolled up above his knees

The shins displayed with their thick yellow crust

He rubbed Vaseline all over them to soften it

In the summer when we would go to the beach for three days

His legs would almost totally clear up

Dead Sea man must have known his business

Too bad people can’t make their own decisions

About ailments

I mean how ‘bout a choice

Like maybe swap off psoriasis for an enlarged prostate

Probably would not have to go to Dead Sea for treatment

Or have a lottery

Oops, got pancreatic cancer

Damn the bad luck

At fifty bet his prostate hadn’t even had a chance to get big

He would sit there and talk

He had a saying

“If I live to be__________” and he would insert an age

At eleven it struck me strange

Then one time in high school

Runnin’ my mouth

I told some friends how he would say this

And how odd it was for him to say it

Then quickly realized how foolish I sounded

And shut up reeeeeaaaalllll fast

He lasted six months after the exploratory

Decades ago there was a product

Supposed to help “the heartbreak of psoriasis” “Heartbreak” maybe a little strong.