Poetry

for Mick Vranich   Back when I used to be Indian I am sitting in a booth in a late night café, Chicago draped around me like anxious, wasted breath. Across the shiny tabletop Raven leans toward his coffee, wrapping the white cup with long fingers hardened from bending over sawhorses and hammering guitars. Music…

I’m standing amidst the ruins of the Plaza de la Sirena with my parrot, Dr. José Venegas, who I suspect of being tapped into some collective archetypal memory bank with a bizillion other parrots— the way thimble jellyfish are with other thimble jellyfish. He knows colors and can count to ten, nine, eight . ….

What a strange time it is. Princess Diana dies. (Not even sure if she’s a real princess although stupidly she was called the people’s princess.) Then Mother Theresa dies. In honor of Diana. (?) Maybe to appease God, maybe to apologize. Then Ted Turner gives a billion dollars (sort of) to the UN. With strings….

Back when I used to be Indian I am stretched out beneath her, the thin white curtains waving like wings above our bed. The drowsy bird of me unfolds into her hands. She grins, crawls over me, shakes her head. The long, black feathers of her hair fall between my teeth as I rise into…

And up and down the ragged coast gulls draft on the high blue airs, coast the underside of the nimbus drifting past reach, big as a bus on a high and skinny road. Wave goodbye. It is leaving now. Waive any right to see it again. The bright stars, the prickly stars, gain on the…

On the black stage, near the lectern, is a delicate table, and on it, within the spotlight, are a column of cups, a clear pitcher of water, and a vase of flowers, a graceful, domestic bouquet. This will be a long evening of reading and speaking, and the flowers are not ornament. The vase of…

We skim effortlessly over ice-clogged backwater bays past mounds of snow-covered trash and weathered signs that say Ed’s Lobsters or No Diving and I am suddenly struck by how little of everything there is. A woman beside me practices Italian: Has your sister lived in Rome long? Please get me a policeman. Her husband clips…

In that hour of boundless night when dark tugs at me with its bustle and fuss and the grass outside my window, gone a deep blue, chirrs and clicks with crickets and my thoughts flop and twitch like fish in a galvanized bucket and sweat soaks the sheets, collecting in drops down my spine and…

Mid-August. Crippling heat. Torpor. Lungs weighed down by the stubborn air. Sudden, hyperbolic, dog-startling storms each afternoon, uninspired repertoire of kettle- and window-rattling. Who’d settle for an arrangement like this? Who wouldn’t? Too hot to do otherwise. Hard to think twice or overachieve in such weather. One is compelled to be dumb, to slump on…