The Wizard of Low Moane

Tall, stooped
supported by a crooked staff
of accountants, ranks of filing
clerks, research assistants,
a tenured professor of absolute
ignorance and other bookkeepers
and custodians of the unmentionable,

the Wizard of Low Moane stood lonely vigil
in the high gabled picture window
of his lone tower,
where he was wrongly understood
to be not disturbed,
and gazed down from quite the height
well over the bordering gothic
picket-fence-reinforced briar hedge,
into the neighboring grounds, where he saw

grounds

for disgruntlement. Clear signs, from which
he interpreted with a shrewd indignation,
they were not keeping up their share
of the required landscaping maintenance
commitments, spelled out clearly and insistently

in the deed-restricted community agreements
everyone had to sign! "If I have to, so should all!"

he all but bawled, ignoring conveniently what one
and all politely ignored: his considerable booming,
flashing and smoking unprofitable business,
which he had been running out his residence (often
with his hair on fire!) in antiheroic defiance

of not just community agreements, but zoning codes
ever since his workshop lease had been terminated -
the result of a disgusting wizard-hunt, a campaign
engineered by the JayCees, and in particular,
Barbara.

"I'll give you a disgusting wizard, you witch!"
he shouted, more than usually aloud.

Then straightened, belatedly shaking his fist
at the signed and framed photo of Walter Payton
which he'd won at pot-luck charity auction - a ridiculous
alternate prize! A farce! Not at all what he'd bid on,
which really, was only to be nice in the first place!
He'd been caught by Barbara's eye a time or two many,
was sick of feeling so guilty about a woman who could look
like that - he only attended to placate her, catch her
attentions perhaps, give her an idea of who she'd
ignorantly refused to dicker with, perhaps
over dinner? He was being charitable! It was a
charity potluck auction! But by the ways the rules
were written - Barbara again, no doubt - he'd ended up
with just a picture of sweetness, instead of the
Lovecraftian collectable desk set towards which
He'd done his bidding. His high, lordly, keening
and vainglorious protests, and the grotesque
banality of the whole episode, sealed the rift
between Barbara and he,
but good.
Her loss.
Weird, vindictive, Librarian
-CEO-looking trust fund aquarium docent bitch!

If it wasn't for her inquisitiveness, her open
and cheerfully vicious wit and that time he had let
her share his (enormous) cup of coffee, that time
Corner Joe's was closed for the fire and she
was desperately fighting her caffeine fits with
nicotine patches she didn't even need, but
had borrowed from a fellow docent who had no
longer smoked for ten years, despite a callowness
that put him no further than twenty in anyone's
generous estimation.

She saw that trademark enormous mug

of his, and knew exactly what it contained,

or thought she did. It was why

he had come in to the aquarium all that day.
He knew full and well about the unfortunate blaze
that had deprived precious Barbara of her all-day fix.

He was in there all the time in those days! God,
how he loathed aquariums. If it wasn't for Barbara's
hard-to-describe cerebral and symbolic qualities,
and ok, her mere physical appearance as well

- which as a wizard,
he knew full well, better than most might know
how these could prove merely a trap! A deception
to fool wiser, mightier wizards than he,
more fully and well than he'd ever be,
he vowed. But he was honest enough to admit,
they helped. Those mere, physical appearances
of hers. Unexpected, out of a corridor - bump!
Hey! "Hi, Barbara!" "Hi Zoarander!" Such insolence!

And when paired with her mere, but hardly slight
physical form, so bumptiously asserting rambunctiousness
and rollicking possibility, without so much as an aside
from her in those directions, she'd taught him
a charm or two.

He didn't even like coffee! Well,

With the discipline honed by many a long spell
of personal and professional disappointment,
he recalled his surroundings to mind
and banished the memory of her to a spiked,
blazing pedestal that he carried in a far-off
but always visible hill on a corner in his mind,

where it served

As a torch. To light his way the hell away,
and so he straightened again,

nodded curtly to Walter Payton.
Head high, looking smart (as he thought)
reflected in the picture glass in his recently
-adopted custom wizard fedora (which did him
no good at all with guess fucking who,
apart from being gouged by that hipster toad
of a milliner!), brow lowering under
like a hesitant storm,
with eyes flashing threats of lightning
at themselves from safely behind glass,

He steeled his leaden mind, and slid
out the concealed French doors
onto the widow's walk, whose picturesque view
and melancholy name led him not for the first time

to review all the ways he should have been a widower
himself by now, instead of what he was: proud, powerful,
locally held in disquieted awe, and really, an excellent
manager of people, if clearly not the best at seeing
and planning around the huge detail of business.
Really, morale among the crew was always surprisingly
high! As to his deficiency on the business end, well,
here's where he'd seen Barbara come in.

What a mind!
She'd given him
really such excellent advice,
all those times, in the process of which
absently gathering all the details that would
come in so handy later, screwing
him over. But you know what? 

Somehow, it didn't matter
now.

It really was too bad.

He shook his head, looked out and around and then -
down, high over the hedge at the neighbor's yard,
and scowled, hard

composing his mind

for the call that he knew

he had to make now,
before his resolve
could fall through

this time.