the dipsomaniac's self-portrait, dragged home — "how the drunk and the maimed…"

The man sees himself clearly — home, under the Influence, knocking lamps over — and closes on the image his son has already watched enacted: the drunk hauled in at night by cabbies, indistinguishable in that posture from the maimed, both carried out feet-dragging like a boneless Christ. The scene's private grief and its geometry of the failed body are fathers-sons'; the steady drinking that ruins the man is the strand landed here.