He is telling Raye, the caseworker,

about the death-by-food-poisoning sixty years earlier,

of his first wife, Tilly, when his bulbous thumb

involuntarily jabs the green “go” button on the arm of his scooter. 

He’s rolled over the sash of his robe,

cinched himself around the waist so tightly that,

beneath his stained white t-shirt, his paunch is split

like the two hemispheres of a brain. 

He reverses the scooter,

releases his stomach of its ligature,

and not anticipating the standing hat rack behind him,

knocks it over,

showering

an impressive array of hats

from the past four or five decades of fashion

around both of them.